THE HEDGEHOG AND THE CAT
Swaddled within a childlike spirit is the healing of the whole world.
____________________
This time the waiting room and buzzed-in security
doors had nothing to do with me.
At least not something going on in my body.
The treasure I was seeking was healing of a different kind.
Four ounces short of nine pounds.
It turns out that this is exactly the weight of the remedy that my body needs.
The convergence of two separate but equally
miraculous paths—
One spirit eager to enter.
Another determined to remain.
Ten fingers.
Ten toes.
Cheeks made for kisses.
While we coo, a secret world is multiplying beyond site.
Cells dividing.
Signals firing.
Messages crossing.
Instructions received with a speed and precision almost comically disproportionate to the small bundle in our arms.
We see a baby.
Meanwhile, a universe is at work within.
And right in the middle of all this life, I met a Hedgehog and a Cat.
The Hedgehog was actually a hedgehog. Sort of.
The Cat was not.
It was short for beta-catenin,
which is considerably less charming and nearly impossible to imagine curled up on your lap.
Both are involved in something called signaling pathways.
Pathways. Soul Maps. Something I am very fond of.
This caught my attention in a profoundly connected way.
I knew I had pathways. Arteries and veins.
A digestive tract currently making its existence particularly difficult to ignore.
Miles of nerves transmitting messages throughout a body I have spent six years becoming intimately acquainted with.
But this is different.
A signaling pathway is less like a road and more like a conversation.
Something happens.
Something notices.
A message is sent.
Something receives.
Something responds.
[Hedgehog earned its peculiar name from a gene discovered in fruit flies. When scientists disrupted the gene, the embryos developed tiny projections resembling hedgehogs.]
There is something wonderfully irreverent about this.
Inside laboratories where people use words like morphogenesis and transcription factors, someone was apparently still allowed to say,
Looks like a hedgehog.
And the name stuck.
Of course it did.
Play is just so important even—and maybe particularly—when we are dealing with serious things.
The Cat has a less adorable biography.
[Beta-CATenin is a protein involved in cellular communication. Both Hedgehog and beta-catenin belong to the astonishing choreography of signals that help tell developing cells where to go, what to become, how tissues take shape.]
A Hedgehog here. A Cat there.
Both apparently quite busy making life.
These same signaling systems are supposed to be restrained.
Sometimes they aren't.
Cancer, it turns out, can be extraordinarily resourceful.
Pathways can become abnormally active.
One body multiplying cells with breathtaking permission.
Another trying desperately to persuade certain cells to stop.
Grow.
Please grow.
Keep growing.
And—
Stop.
Please stop.
Don't grow anymore.
Two completely opposing prayers. Both prayers for life.
There was a time I might have found the biology of all this frightening.
But six years have made me more curious.
Curiosity comes in close.
It asks another question.
It looks under the rock.
It follows the strange symptom.
The number.
The scan.
The treatment that stopped working.
The doctor who said no.
The one who said yes.
The swollen ankles, for Heaven's sake.
Cancer is persistent.
So am I.
It adapts.
So have I.
It looks for another pathway.
So will I.
The more closely I look, the less interested I am in making the pathway behave.
Bodies don't.
Neither does God.
He seems entirely comfortable placing things beside one another that I would have kept in separate rooms.
Joy and sorrow.
Science and faith.
Beginning and continuation.
A baby.
Cancer.
Not because they are the same.
Because sometimes the presence of one changes the way we can see the other.
God has always been rather good at knitting things together that don't appear to belong to one another.
I don't need to know what every signal means.
I don't need to make everything mean something.
There is enough here to simply look at.
To remain curious. To be delighted by the fact that some of the most serious work imaginable is being carried out under names like Hedgehog and Cat.
Creation has never been particularly concerned with sounding important while doing important work.
A mustard seed.
A loaf of bread.
A fish.
A child.
A Hedgehog.
A Cat.
NOTES
SOUL MAP
baby → cells → growth → Hedgehog → Cat → pathways → cross-talk → curiosity → prayer → convergence → life → HERE
Within days of being introduced to the Hedgehog and the Cat in the context of my own cancer, I found myself behind another set of hospital doors, holding nearly nine pounds of brand-new life.
One conversation about cells we desperately want to stop growing.
Another about cells we had been cheering on with every ounce.
And there they were, somehow crossing paths.
Not answers to one another.
Not equivalents.
Just two seemingly unrelated conversations close enough that each allowed me to hear something in the other.
Maybe that is its own kind of Soul Map.
Not a straight line from question to answer.
A place where paths cross.
Where information travels sideways.
Where something we are seeking in one conversation quietly appears in another.
REFLECTION
What if what you are seeking is being spoken about somewhere else?
Not farther down the road you are already traveling.
Somewhere seemingly unrelated.
A conversation you almost dismissed.
A person you almost didn't call.
A book about something entirely different.
The disappointment beside the invitation.
The science beside the prayer.
We tend to search for answers in the same place we asked the question.
But some things become visible only when another conversation crosses the first.
So—
What else is happening in your life right now?
The thing that seems to have nothing to do with the thing you are trying to understand.
Put them beside one another.
Where do they touch?
What does one know about the other?
What can you see at the intersection that you could not see while looking straight ahead?
And the bolder question—
Could what you have been seeking in one place already be speaking to you from another?
The answer may not be waiting farther down the road.
It may be arriving from the side.
DROP YOUR PINS
what I seek → where I've been looking → what else is speaking → where they cross → what I see now → curiosity → HERE
Or perhaps yours begins somewhere else.
_____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → HERE
YOU ARE HERE.
Image: Little booties. Laces crossing. Life. Knitted together. More about baby soon.