Ten years ago, divorce cut me down at the knees financially. In the last year, cancer has threatened to take my feet completely out from under me. I managed to pay off my house using my savings and your cancer benefit donations, so I don’t have a house payment. But now my car is dying. A new car, or car payment, is out of the question. At over 200,000 miles, the transmission and suspension work my car needs will just about wipe me out—leaving me no back-up for the next crisis. I feel like I am hanging by my fingernails at the edge of a dark hole. This is the slippery slope that can push some people into homelessness, and it’s hard to ignore that as a possible outcome for me.

Stress, however, is not a healing agent. When I feel my energy getting sucked into that whirlpool, I try to step back and put things in context. I have stable friends and family around me, a very supportive community. I won’t go down easily. Stepping farther back, I see the anthill that is economics and know that it is a human design, one of the constructs of Ego that anchors us to what looks like fixed reality. I can choose to let it run my life, or not. Then I think about the earth, just a tiny speck in the vast expanse of the universe. My little problems are less than imperceptible on that scale.

True Gratitude is a healing agent. When I am overwhelmed, I benefit from a good walk in the woods, admiring Nature. Birds, flowers, trees, sky, running water, the ground beneath my feet. It’s all amazing Creation in motion, everything doing its best to stay in balance. As a gift of Nature, that’s my job, too—to cultivate faith and be a channel for life force.