Tag Archives: wonder

Part Seven: Picking Hope From Your Garden Within

Leave a reply

As you traveled through these six conversations, what question has been quietly growing within you?

Can I still trust my own body?
What is really happening within my body?
How do I live with uncertainty?

An experienced Gardener knows:

Growth happens when nothing is visible.
Every garden has weeds.
It’s important to spend more time cultivating than worrying.

This knowledge is similar in biology.

Gardeners do not expect perfection:

Flowers bloom and fade.
Branches break.
Bugs arrive.
Weeds appear overnight.

Yet every spring, gardeners begin again.

Our bodies are not so different from a garden.

DNA repair is pruning.
Immune cells are gardeners pulling weeds.
Stem cells are new seedlings.
Scars become new pathways.
Sleep becomes nighttime cultivation.
Exercise becomes tending.
Nutrition becomes soil.
Medicine becomes tools.

Our metaphors begin organizing our conversation.

Not explaining. Organizing.

They organize the way we think.

Once we see biology differently, we begin living differently.

Another metaphor might be a lighthouse! Think of the beauty from the light shining in the distance, guiding you to safety, security, perhaps to your home. The lighthouse provides orientation for us. This is a remarkable vision from which we continue our discussion on hope and health.

People facing illness desperately want resolution. It may not always be possible. Orientation is.

This framework offers something more immediately attainable.

Orientation.

Knowing where you are.

Knowing what your body is attempting.

Knowing who the repair crews are, coming to help you.

Knowing that uncertainty does not mean abandonment.

That is a profound distinction.

You are probably reading this now because you are experiencing uncertainty at this time in your life.

So, I ask one favor of you. When you are finished reading, I invite you to come with me into our gardens as you continue your life. Within these six blogs we have discussed possibilities for your reflection:

The biology is important.

The science is important.

The repair crews are important.

But underneath all of these blogs in the series is my quieter message:

You don’t have to face uncertainty alone.

These conversations within will accompany you through one of the hardest experiences of your lives without pretending to have all the answers, if you are willing to walk alongside me.

Choices

There are differences between owning a garden… and loving one.

Many people stand in their garden saying,

Why aren’t you perfect?

Gardeners don’t.

They ask,

What does this plant need today?

That question changes everything.

Similarly, the body is not an enemy. Sometimes we need to ask what does my body need today?

It is entrusted to us. There are many variations but it is really a miracle and functions constantly even though you are not often aware of such. When your body has a misfire, you also may choose what you wish to do next to protect and facilitate your overall health.

Always remember that you typically have choices in life that move you toward healing.

During my years as a rehabilitation professional, I learned that healing is rarely a straight line. Sometimes the greatest victories were measured in inches…

or one more spoken word…

or one spoon lifted independently… To someone else, it was only a spoon.

To us, it was independence returning.

or one smile after months of discouragement.

Gardeners understand this.

Tiny growth matters. Tiny accomplishments matter.

Revisiting Biology in the New Framework

Our discussions have assisted you in considering that biology is doing what you may never have seen before.

Consider that you are now visualizing misfires, and the work by various repair crews healing your body. As a part of something unimaginably larger than yourself,

Wonder begins when we finally see where we are.

Not just geographically.

Biologically.

Emotionally.

Spiritually.

In the universe.

Expanding Your Choices in the Presence of Illness

I hope you are now considering the expansion of choices you might have now that you have learned more about your biology.

You, as the reader decides:

Will I continue living in fear?
Will I become more curious?
Will I ask different questions?
Will I become an active participant?

The responsibility shifts now, very naturally to you.

Humanistic Biology

The vision of biology described within this framework includes – repair crews to fix misfires, accumulation of changes, and partnerships with medicine. Our multi-condition model of lived biology has layers:

Normal repair
Persistent misfires
Long-term adaptation
High-intensity medical intervention

Biological Misfires and Hidden Healing

As I recovered during the past decade, I remember thinking: I had no idea my body was accomplishing so much without my awareness. I purposefully began to focus on what was around me and within me. I thought about the words AWE, NOVEL, and WONDER.

I listed a few relevant statements as I recovered and continued to live:

Most biological misfires are repaired silently.
Our bodies employ remarkable repair crews every day.
Medicine joins and becomes an extension of the body’s own repair crew.
Fear is natural, but it does not have to guide our decisions.
You are encouraged to move away from an initial fear response to one that is more hopeful.
Remember: Living is your end goal.

Discovering Hope in Your Garden Within

When I began this journey through illness, I thought I was learning about disease. Instead, I found myself learning about life.

I discovered repair crews I never knew existed.

I discovered resilience that had been quietly working long before I noticed it.

Most of all, I discovered that wonder can exist in the same place as uncertainty. That is the journey I hoped to share with you.

Listen to the message: Come With Me…

This is an invitation to continue living, your best life!

The garden is a companion image in which you have control over the flowers you plant and tend. The choice to plant wonder is yours, just as it is in your garden,

I hope you find peace and joy in your journey toward healing.

#gratitude ultra

Podcast Episode: Part Six: Living

Living with Uncertainty: When the Body Becomes the Whole System

Mara: The central question in "Part Six: Living" is not whether healing happens, but how you orient yourself when it can't be guaranteed — when repair is probabilistic, not perfect, and you are living inside that gap.

Pip: The post names that gap directly. Here's the framing: "We don't promise to remove uncertainty, rather we are hoping to give people moments of clarity, perspective, and perhaps even wonder while they're living with it."

Mara: That's the anchor of the whole piece. Not resolution — orientation. The goal is not to eliminate fear but to replace enough of it with knowledge that you can participate in what happens next.

Pip: And participation turns out to be load-bearing here. The post argues that understanding your biology changes your emotional experience — that when you're a member of the intervention team, informed consent becomes something you actually inhabit rather than just sign.

Mara: The model the post builds is four concentric circles: biology at the center, then medicine, then human experience, then meaning at the outer ring. Each layer depends on the one inside it, and meaning only becomes available once you understand what the inner layers are doing.

Pip: Which sounds tidy until lived experience breaks the diagram open entirely.

Mara: That's exactly what the post does next. It introduces a fourth response to the existing three — repair, persistence, response — and that fourth is simply experience. The model has to expand because real lives are more complex than any framework drawn in advance.

Pip: The sepsis story in the post is where that complexity stops being theoretical. A Friday text to a physician's assistant becomes a hospital admission, then a sepsis diagnosis, then a surgical team pushing for immediate intervention, then an oncologist arriving on a Sunday morning to stop it.

Mara: And the detail that lands hardest is this: the chemotherapy keeping the cancer in check was the same reason surgery was dangerous. The treatment had become part of the biology every physician now had to consider.

Pip: Two sets of doctors, different hospitals, a weekend, a port in the chest that ruled out standard home IV care — every proposed solution was contraindicated by something else in the system.

Mara: The post walks through those conditions methodically, asking the reader to identify the repair crews, the conflicting interventions, the conditions of significant medical risk. It's structured as a teaching case, but the stakes in it are entirely personal.

Pip: What comes out the other side isn't a cleaner model — it's a more honest one. The post lists the emotional responses that tend to follow serious illness: fear, grief, frustration, uncertainty, and hope coexisting. And then it offers this: "another perspective may become available — one grounded in curiosity, collaboration, gratitude, and wonder at the extraordinary work still taking place within us."

Mara: The post closes by widening the frame beyond cancer — heart disease, autoimmune disease, neurologic disease, serious infection, unexpected diagnosis. The biology differs, the post says, but the uncertainty does not. This framework is for anyone whose confidence in their own body has been shaken.

Pip: And the final note is that the series isn't finished — a closing piece is coming, framed around the invitation to "Come With Me," with the reader choosing an image that helps them continue living.

Mara: The body, the post keeps insisting, is always working for you. Even when the repair is complicated, even when the crews are arguing — it's still working.

Pip: Living inside uncertainty, staying curious about the biology, keeping yourself in the room where decisions are made — that's the thread running through all of this.

Mara: And the next piece in the series promises to take that somewhere new. Worth staying close to what comes next.

Empathy and Gratitude – How?