From Shade to Sun

Africa. 2025

I heard something today that I have been sitting with ever since: that the Divine will sometimes remove us from a place of comfort — not to punish us, but so we can discover what we are capable of.

I have long found a kind of peace in karma. In the understanding that what I do to others will, in some form and in its own time, return to me. This means that whatever suffering finds me is not random, it is consequence. A settling of accounts from this lifetime, or more often, from another. Growing up in a Christian mystical tradition that holds reincarnation as truth, I understood early that karma is not the final reckoning at the end. It is the daily one. The quiet arithmetic of a life being lived.

The fact that our memories cannot follow us between lifetimes — that we cannot construct a clean narrative from cause to effect across centuries — only deepens the mystery of being here. And it deepens the need for faith. Faith that there is a reason. That this particular life, with its particular losses and its particular gifts, is not arbitrary.

I am often aware of the blessings I carry. And I am often humbled by the quiet conviction that I have, somewhere and somehow, earned them. That I must have done something right.

And yet.

The idea that the Universe would deliberately remove the shade that protects us from the sun, not as punishment, but as an invitation, is something I find both unsettling and beautiful. Our deepest qualities are sometimes invisible to us. Patience, kindness, and faith that we may not know we possess until the full heat of the day makes them necessary. The choices we make when we are exposed, when there is no canopy above us and no shelter in sight, are the writing and rewriting of our karma. Lessons not yet learned become lessons learned. What a profound and generous thing that is, if we can hold it that way.

But life is not for beginners.

I write this as someone who has seen her share of heartache, illness, loss, loneliness, the particular sting of being disappointed by others, and, harder still, by myself. When the real weight of life lands on the doorstep, the notion that this pain exists so I can prove I can outlast it is not an easy thing to hold. And yet, drag Spring out of Winter we must. For ourselves. For the people we love.

This week, I learned that a dear friend, a childhood girlfriend, has cancer. A bad one.

This is the full midday sun. No shade, no shelter, no narrative thread to follow back to a reason. No dots to connect into something that makes sense. It is life doing what life sometimes does: arriving without warning, without explanation, and asking everything of us anyway.

I don't know what this journey holds for her. I don't know what the lesson is, or whether "lesson" is even the right word when someone you love is sitting in that kind of heat. What I pray, and I mean this with everything I have, is that as she opens herself to what is happening, what enters is kindness. Patience. Faith. That the grace she brings to this becomes its own act of rewriting. The erasing of what was, as she plants, quietly and bravely, the seeds of what will be.

I feel a profound sadness as I sit here thinking of her, and of her husband, and her daughter, who are also suddenly without shade. Loving someone does that. It opens you. And even I, who have not seen her in too many years, feel the heat from here.

Maybe that is the human lesson underneath all of it: that we are meant to be each other's shade.

Not to solve things. Not to change the cards that have been dealt. But to stand close enough to someone that the sun is a little less brutal, to be active in this bewildering business of being human. Broken, but functioning. Lost, but finding. Small, but somehow great.