I haven’t posted much of late as I’m busy writing other things. But I came across this by accident and it moved me. So, I thought I’d pass it on, in case you haven’t seen it.

Sometimes we find the best things in really strange places. Like on American TV. I’m late to the party on this one, I guess. I don’t have a television, ‘least not one that’s plugged into a socket or in the house. I heard the statement below online in an interview where I also came across the video. I so appreciate and give a shout out and an amen when I happen upon humanity as it appears with no artifice, no pretense.

Among the plethora of stories that are dropped on the earth like daily strafings exposing the ground forces of ugliness and human duplicity and political hypocrisy and unspeakable violence and ethical failure and greed and the insatiable grab for power despite forfeiting one’s dignity and losing one’s integrity, a gift-feather falls out of the same sky as the bombs carrying more weight, and we are graced with a short story that evokes admiration and awe and deep sympathy, and we catch not a Talent Show but a brief glimpse of what makes imperfect humans so beautiful and noble and at times magnanimous. Jane Marczewski, a thirty-year-old cancer patient who not that many months ago was given a 2% chance to live said, “But 2% is not 0%. 2% is something.” She also said this:

Everybody’s—everybody’s afraid to be happy sometimes, ya’know? Because life is really, really hard. And there’s a lot of reasons um—there’s a lot of reasons to be afraid. Um—but there’s also a lot of reasons to be thankful. And my journey has taught me that we don’t have to pick one. We don’t have to pick—you know—life is hard or life is beautiful. Life is beautiful and hard at the same time. And that’s when we’re fully alive—when we can hold both. . . Oh, you know what? I’m not—I’m not special. I’m not stronger than anyone else. I just have the audacity to keep going in the face of reasons why I should not. And the key to it is—you don’t deny the pain of today, but you don’t deny the hope of the future. Both are real and you take it minute by minute. Life really doesn’t get easier. It really doesn’t. Um—you just have to believe in impossible things.

~ Jane Marczewski, a.k.a. Nightbirde

Ms. Marczewski recently appeared on the popular show “America’s Got Talent” and blew the live and viewing audience away not only with the beauty and poignancy of the song she wrote and sang, but with her radiance, authenticity, and attitude toward life in the face of difficult circumstances.

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