waking up

I keep finding things in Angela's papers and other places that I didn't know about. Recently I came across a small piece of paper I think she must have picked up in the last year, used as a bookmark in one of her books. It was titled "Gratitude" and contained a number of thoughts about this topic. The first, longish, selection struck me, because it corresponded to so much of how she tried to live her life in the last year:

"Waking up is a continuous process. No one wakes up once and for all. There is no limit to wakefulness, just as there is no limit to aliveness. It is risky to be awake to live. It takes courage.

We have to choose between risk and risk. We run the risk of sleeping through life, of never waking up at all. Or else we wakefully rise to the challenge of life. facing the challenge of life, of love.

Waking up is a process....[it happens differently for folks] what counts is that we don't go back to bed again. What counts on your path to fulfillment is that we remember the great truth that moments of surprise want to teach us: everything is gratuitous, everything is gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is the measure of our gratefulness. And gratefulness is the measure of our aliveness. Are we not dead to whatever we take for granted? Surely to be numb is to be dead. For those who awaken to life through surprise, death lies behind, not ahead. To live life open for surprise, in spite of all the dying which living implies, makes us ever more alive.

David Steindl-Rast, OSB"

To whoever placed this in Angela's hands, or made it so that she would find it, thank you. She certainly awakened to life through surprise, and lived life in a spirit of gratitude -- before the seizure, but especially after it. And so death, though it lay in her temporal future, was already behind her. I really believe that and am grateful for it.