I made my fourth visit to the health center this morning to try to get on top of my pneumonia, which has given me and many others a hard time this winter. Karen Bruce, the Nurse-Practitioner who has guided me through my holistic medicine phase, diabetes and heart disease, was on the case this time as well. She put me on antibiotics, steroids and had my chest X-rayed yesterday.

I couldn’t shake the cough, but that, it turns out, is pretty typical.

“Your lungs are clear,” she said, “suck it up and drink Ginger tea with honey.” She said it would just take a while for my cough to vanish, maybe even a month. I’m drinking Ginger tea with honey. We talked for a while, Karen is moving to the Adirondacks in May, she will live and practice there, in the new home she and her husband are building on a lake.

I will miss Karen, but I’m very excited about where she is going in life. She has gotten psych  training so she can help people in the Adirondacks who need counseling and have little access to shrinks and psychologists, and also tend to their health issues.

They are lucky to be getting her there.

We talked about my own therapy,  my experience with psycho-therapy, and talking therapy, and Karen said something that touched me.  Karen has a great gift of making me feel healthy, even when I’m sick.

“You know, Jon, she said, “you’re very centered. You have a centeredness.”

I hadn’t heard this term before, certainly not in reference to me. I looked it up. One dictionary defined the term as meaning a specific center. Being self-confident,  stable and well-balanced. I certainly have never felt that way about myself for most of myself, and I appreciated the fact that someone as direct and experienced as Karen would see me in that way.

I have spent most of life wandering in trauma and fear, the idea of me as stable seemed strange. Yet I do feel stable now, and have felt stable – and been stable – for some years. I weathered bankruptcy, divorce, the recession, the collapse of publishing and many other things all at once, and I felt even and strong and clear.

We got through all of them.

I have never thought of myself as well-balanced, yet my life is in balance now. There is work, love, friendship, rest, animals, teaching, friends, photography. When I think about it, my life is in balance. Not one things, but many different things, and all of them good and meaningful things.

I have doubted my self for almost all of myself, but I do not doubt myself much now. I try to face the truth about myself, but not in a doubting way. My life has made me humble, but it has also given me strength. I am clear about what I think, and what I wish to do. I feel strong in my interior, I trust my instincts and follow them, I am sure of my love for Maria and of her love for me.

I handled my health issues – diabetes, heart disease  – without drama or regret. I was  not afraid of open heart surgery, I was grateful for the chance to give my heart more time. I love writing on my blog and taking photos.

I am never at a loss for ideas, and I am not afraid to express myself. As the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt suggested, the person I must please is the face in the mirror, no one else. My goal is self-respect, it is not about what others think, it is about what I think.

I must never hate myself again for anything I do. The more I thought about it, the more I came to understand this idea of centeredness, living in my center, and having a center that is strong and secure. It is the center that has to hold.

To my surprise, I didn’t deflect or dismiss Karen’s kind words, I actually saw that I am more centered than I have ever been, I feel grounded in the center. I do have a centeredness that holds, and this is a spiritual idea of depth far beyond my life.

“At the center of our being,” wrote Thomas Merton, “is a point of nothingness, which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point of spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…”

I am not clear in my mind about God, or the role of God in my life, but I love this idea of centeredness, of looking to the center of our being, of a point of pure truth, of coming together in a blaze of sun that could banish the darkness and cruelty of life…

If I am not the embodiment of centeredness, I am close to the idea.

I do feel centered in my life and strong,  in my life there are now many points of light coming together, we have made some of the darkness and cruelty lighter and softer. I have sensed the little points of nothingness, I dream of the pure diamond, blazing with the light of heaven.