Our layers are our complexities. Rings that tell the age of the tree, the images beneath the paint that covers an original masterpiece. In the wreckage that is cancer, we can get trapped in the “litter”, not allowing ourselves to plunge deeper beneath the surface to find what treasures and truths live within us. Diving into devastation, we uncover bits and pieces of  artifacts we may never have dreamt existed within us, we discover the person we have forgotten, the one we aspire to become. Beneath the rubble of diagnosis, treatment and survivorship exists a lucidity that penetrates through old beliefs and habits that have lingered too long in the foggy confusion of our minds.

In pulling off the layers of the familiar clothes that we put on to decorate and disguise ourselves, we stand raw, much like we are stripped bare in the operating rooms and the treatment centers when we are  diagnosed with cancer. Those layers are cut, poisoned and burned from us leaving to face the world in a new skin. We may be called to reflect on the depth of our experience, to search within ourselves to touch meaning and authenticity.