Satsang with Elvis—

I used to hate books like this–books that mercilessly pull the reader along on a narrative meander through the terrain of heartbreak. I’d avoid sad stories, probably for fear they would unleash a backlog of shock-grief from my own life story, where people I loved died suddenly, leaving me adrift in the sea of post traumatic loss.

But lately, ever since wholeness arrived in an overnight episode of self-realization, I love a good cry as much as a belly laugh. Good news is that Life With A Hole in It is the kind of book that serves up comic relief and penetrating wisdom, right alongside full Kleenex box heart-wrenchers. With chapter heads like Satsang with Elvis, Enlightenment in a Can and The Sky-is It Falling, of Course it Is, give you the flavor of Vicki Woodyard’s cleverly skewed and eccentric view on life.

The story? After losing her daughter to cancer at age 7, Woodyard is faced with her husband’s terminal cancer diagnosis and the bleak landscape of five years of chemotherapy, surgeries and blood transfusions to prolong the inevitable loss. In short but potent vignettes, this author brings us into close contact with what she calls the “limbo of letting go.”

As she explains, “If I told you that losing a child to cancer brought me so low that I found God, you would have no trouble believing me. If I told you that it made me no happier, would you believe that too? God is not about making you happy, He is about making you whole…wholeness means you must reconcile your abject cowardice with your most magnificent courage. You must balance your weak points with your God given talents, limboing under the broom of the opposites.”

Although the author freely uses the God word, at heart her perspective is a fresh and gritty kind of non-dualism–not one steeped in sophistry and satsang, but rather a spiritual view informed by the most ordinary of moments seen in the extraordinary light of surrender.

This type of narrative is always tricky, in that it’s too easy to slip into the maudlin or by-pass painful details with “love and light” prescriptions. Yet Woodyard’s unflinching honesty as she reports from the frontlines of grief, her willingness to reveal her own dark side in her journey to wholeness, is simply captivating. At one point she confesses, “I used to study books about enlightenment until the sky fell on my house and how there is no house at all. The sky gave me enlightenment by taking away my house and the security it afforded. Big mistake sky, big mistake. Because today I am wearing a crash helmet and you can’t touch me anymore.”

A delightful side story is her inclusion of letters from her online friend, Peter, who had “become bigger than the sky” in his own awakening through a catastrophic health crisis. In the wake of his illness and loss of self, Peter becomes a “cat juggler,” a fellow with just enough energy to sit in the sun with his feline companion and write occasional emails to friends like Vicki. Like a virtual guru, Peter’s words penetrate Vicki’s story with just the right dose of truth, and his words hit the reader with just as much power.

As she notes about Peter, “How does he transmit such wisdom with so few words? I know what he is up to. He is involving me in the paradox of peace. Shame on him. He is showing me surrender. How dare he? He is chiding me for clinging to the body. I might have known. Peter is loving me by letting me go.”

If you are ready to laugh, cry and yes, be uplifted, then Life with a Hole in It is a book that can be nibbled slowly or devoured in one gulp (I read the whole thing in 90 minutes on a plane ride to Honolulu). And more than a sweet page-turner, this book delivers a deeper gift, the glimpse of the wholeness that awaits us all on the other side of that limbo broomstick of opposites. As Vicki points out, “Letting go is easy when you realize that God is holding the broom.”

Lori Lothian

ORDER HERE.