Perhaps the most difficult thing to reconcile when confronting illness, especially cancer, is the possibility that we have misunderstood not only disease, but ourselves. We have inherited countless ideas about what the body is, what it is capable of, what threatens it, and where its authority ultimately resides. Yet beneath those accumulated narratives is something quieter and considerably older: an intelligence that has accompanied us from the beginning, asking very little except that we stop long enough to remember it.