There are things I can’t change. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to or have not tried. They are just there, sitting in the center of my life like a puzzle with missing pieces, a puzzle I long to complete but can not.

Where are those pieces?  I search everywhere.

Others try to help:

“You can find them in exercise,” I’m told. “Just be in your body more.”

 I swam three days a week for fifty years.

“Maybe if you changed your diet,” another suggests. “The fuel in your body makes all the difference.”

I’ve become an expert on diet but my food remains undigested.

My sister tells me that the answers live in scripture and the beliefs of the church.

I devoted myself as a child, but left when I recognized my essence in those who’d been burned.

I walk. I look. I seek. I meet others who stand in judgment because their puzzle pieces slipped together quickly and easily a long time ago.

I visit therapists, healers and shaman who tell me the pieces are only found inside myself.

I stay alone, meditate, fast, ask, demand, weep and pray. I come to know myself but the pieces are not found.

Maybe the pieces are found in acceptance, acceptance that this lifetime I’ve been given a puzzle I can not complete.

Or perhaps those empty places are not missing after all.

What if the emptiness ‘is’ the gift, a sweet on-going torment of desire designed to open consciousness, like the allowing of space that permits a piece of music to breathe.

The wound is endless and forever, the price of being human. The Dalai Lama tells us we must stay in the world, not go away from it, so I continually pull myself up and out of longing, remembering the grace I’ve come to share.