Andrea Gibson

You can't shut yourself off to grief without also shutting yourself off to joy.

You have to think of it like a kink in the hose.

You stop the flow of sadness.

You stop the flow of happiness at the same time.

So I'm crying about twice an hour and then I'm bursting into laughter.

So it's feeling it all to be open to this moment and to the aliveness of this moment.

I try to think about God, but that never works.

Wow.

I try to think about God.

I try to sit down and write about God, and it just never happens.

I used to think God or the divine or source or whatever you want to call it, the consciousness within us all.

I don't even have a name, but I guess they use God easily these days.

which I didn't before, but is the most vital thing in my life.

And when I was having the experience right after I got diagnosed, I had thought what the biggest things were, were, you know, human love and all of that, human connection.

And that's enormous and that's part of it.

But it is the most important thing.

thing in my life.

It is the most eternal.

It is also the relationship in my life that makes me show up to the people in my life in a way that I respect.

And I wasn't having that consistently before this experience.