The “I am” is an outcast from society; otherwise, it would lose all meaning in the inner world. I recognized the outcast from society when my little girl got cancer. Once, while in a department store restroom, I held her while a stall became unoccupied. A woman said to me, “You can let your little boy go ahead of me.” Her bald head troubled us more times than once.

Some neighborhood kids burst into our house to ask Rob to play. The younger one saw Laurie lying on the couch and taunted Rob, saying “There’s your old bald-headed sister.”

While watching “Hans Christian Andersen” on TV, Danny Kaye sings the ugly duckling song to a few bald-headed children. Laurie was on my lap and I said, “Does that make you sad?” And she nodded. It made me sad, too. I told her about the ugly duckling turning out to be a swan and told her she was a swan.

Jesus was an outcast, spit on and jeered at by people. His disciples were few in number and they all betrayed him. Esotericism says that we are all playing roles. Judas got the richest part in this scenario.

I think some of us are born to be outcasts; we always feel that we know that the play has no free will and it doesn’t.

When Bob died, I became more of an outcast. By this time I had been studying esoteric Christianity for decades. At the point where he was at his lowest, I exploded into rage, yelling at him, “You would never do for me what I have done for you!” It was a sad day for both of us. All the yelling in the world could not remove that burden from me. It had to be borne. I am not telling his side, but he had one. His part was pure and he maintained his silence.

While in the hospital, he recorded the story of how much he loved me. It was that love of his that made him able to transcend the words I said that day. I was a wounded animal, lashing out after four years of chemo and a fatal diagnosis. He understood that. Also, we were both distancing ourselves from each other, a dress rehearsal for the final act.

I did not attend that performance. My sister Laurie drove in to sit with him as he lay in his hospice bed. She sent Rob and I home to rest and she chanted softly to him for hours, while he, barely conscious, felt that higher love of “I am.” He passed into the higher world that night. The story no longer mattered; it had been personally enacted in him.

We are all outcasts; that is what drives advertising. All hoping to become swans, not knowing that we already are.

Vicki Woodyard