Here’s a moving and clear-looking memoir on being in love with your life even when life brings illness, from longtime Zen practitioner and renowned writing teacher Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones.

When Natalie learns that she has CLL, a potentially fatal form of blood cancer, she is plunged into the world of hospitals, doctors, and medication. While trying to find a footing in this new and strange world, her partner, Yu-kwan, is also diagnosed with cancer. The cancer twins, as Natalie calls herself and Yu-kwan, must each now navigate their own illness while somehow trying to stay in love and heal.

When you go through extreme sickness, when everything you know and lived is tossed out the window and glass shatters… this too is part of life. Don’t give up. Pay attention. We have to make ourselves larger to include the inconceivable.

As the title expresses, Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home is so much more than a cancer memoir. Through a direct and grounded narrative, Natalie illuminates a path through illness: that we need to be in love with the life we have, to embrace the dark and the light in our life. For Natalie, writing and painting represent the light, and her cancer takes her deeper into her art practices. Balanced with a Zen practice that helps her to face death, this book is a moving meditation on living life in full bloom.

“With alert stillness infused with intention, Natalie Goldberg meets mortality head-on. Beautifully written, this is a book about love, loss, and down-to-the-marrow courage.” —Wendy Johnson, author of Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate

“This riveting and deeply honest book is for all of us. It opens up the road of diagnosis, dying, and life in a way no other book I have read does. It is a powerful narrative of truth and rawness that will touch and teach us.”—Joan Halifax, author of Being with Dying