Grace, take 2.

The Shimmering Grace thing seems to be still working. I ordered a book quite awhile ago with nothing but the tittle to go on: The Power of Grace: Recognizing Unexpected Gifts on our Path.  (By David Richo)  Just shimmered at me while I was ordering another book on the Shambhala website.  It has been quietly living on our coffee table for months.

Meanwhile, I decided to have cataract surgery as a vote for even having a future in which to see anything, shimmering or not.  And now my next CT scan is on the immediate horizon, this Friday.  We’ll know next Tuesday what’s what.  The surgery went well a week ago but was stressful for a number of reasons, none of it too extreme. Nothing miraculous yet, but after my second eye is done, I am told I may be able to read without glasses.  We’ll see.  I haven’t been able to read without glasses since the 4th grade, so that would be fun.

My life is extremely limited now.  I have about 4 hours of energy a day.  Mostly I do laundry, make the bed, clean up the kitchen, water the gardens, comb out more loose fur from Tara’s heavy coat, walk to the village to pick up our mail, and I’m done – down for a 3 hour nap.  Talking on the phone is okay if it’s only one or two people, but in person visits wear me out after about one hour or so.  Usually in the evening I have another 2 hours or so of energy left.  Meeting with any groups over 4 people are a challenge.  Fun, and I love it, but still, a challenge energetically speaking.  So, living in a life the size of a postage stamp!  It’s still all good because it is, well, living.

So many people want to visit me now, it’s both daunting and also amazing to me.  I have no idea how to triage this, and often I actually just forget who wants to see me.  I need a list!  I can only realistically visit with one or two people a week, or less.  For people coming from out of town, we make room somehow.  Some of these journeys are perilous in nature so we honor them as best we can, floored by so much love.

What I’ve noticed is that people who do visit tell me, with some degree of surprise I guess, that I “look so well”.   Even the Tibetan doctor Dr. Nida said that my life force pulse is strong.  Good to hear.  More on that encounter another time.

My new, internally guided map making ground to a halt, though. I stopped the intense efforting I was doing, that was so successful, and then shut down, started eating chocolate chip cookies and reading novels.  And yes, resting deeply.

And that’s where the book, The Power of Grace, comes in.  I picked it up, finally.

Here’s the quote that caught my attention:  “Too much reliance on effort is one danger (a whole section on that, much to my surprise.  This book is exactly addressing where I am right now.)  but another is too little trust in the need for it.  Grace loses its meaning when it does not stir and spur us.  We then believe we lead a charmed life instead of being required to lead a responsible life.  When grace and effort work in an integrated way, we see that grace is a cue to us to exert ourselves.  We can be so pleased with grace, however, that we become overconfident.  We imagine that grace will keep coming our way with no follow-up needed on our part.  This is quietism. ”

Which is the opposite of activism, excess focus on effort.  Some have an idea that their effort will result in merit, which this author discounts pretty easily, both historically and throughout various spiritual paths.  Grace is pure gift, it’s not a reward for effort.  You don’t earn it.

The way out of this is to cultivate universal love, beyond merit or demerit, beyond too much effort or too little effort –  give myself utterly to loving -kindness, and let my heart lead the way, one step at a time.

Well, okay then.  I wish I would remember this, and not keep forgetting.  But I do.

About the upcoming CT scan?  I am completely freaked out.  Last time, in February, I went from a Stage IV to a Stage III.  This time?  Who knows.  I have some reason to believe that it will not be good news.  And also some reason to believe that it might be a fucking miracle.  I don’t think there’s much room for it being both/and but again, who knows.

Sending all of you oodles of love, and deep respect for your journeys, whatever they are.  Stay well.  Follow your heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Burn the maps

No maps for the realm I live in now.  I no longer know if I am living or dying, there is literally no way to tell.  I feel better in the past few days, and even went swimming a day or so ago with a new friend who is fearless, and also has a Stage IV cancer.  We celebrated our day of feeling well!  Two old gals having a great time!

But I remember all too well my recent “episode” as my primary doctor called my collapse a month ago. And the sense of my death there, waiting.  One new possibility to explain it: maybe I had a TIA, or small stroke.  No way to know, but it does kind of fit.  Bizarrely, this actually sounds like good news.  Maybe it’s not the cancer, coming back with a vengeance.  But I really don’t know.

This evening I walked over to the Rose Villa prayer group and while there, not my intention in going, I asked for help in discerning how to proceed in my life.  Showered with prayers!  I’ve never been a good praying out loud type person.  We didn’t pray in my childhood, no one I knew did that.  As an adult, I have all sorts of practices that I use in a skillful and reverent way, but praying out loud isn’t one of them.  It’s a great comfort to hear, and my heart is full of gratitude. An easing up of the feeling that I’m in this all by myself.

Here’s the thing:  how do I proceed in a sustainable way?  Without too much efforting, but with enough that I do get stronger over time.  Without being so careful that I no longer know my actual boundaries, but without stepping into another episode, either.

There are no maps here, no one to look to for advice, no tried and true resource.  No one knows.  What’s interesting is the shimmering, the shimmering grace I named this blog for.  That shimmering is saying “you need to turn inwards and seek your own deepest wisdom.”  That keeps coming up over and over again, in a wide variety of ways.

In Buddhism, guru yoga is a practice I’ve tried off and on for decades.  In it, you imagine the Buddha, or Green Tara, or Jesus or Mary, or whatever form of the Holy that inspires you – in front of you.  From their head a white light flows into your head, filling it with white light.  A ruby red light flows from their throat to your throat, filling your words with their wisdom.  Lapis Lazuli blue flows from their heart to fill your heart with their compassion and loving kindness.  And then you rest in this direct connection.  Not as easy as it sounds, but powerful.

Now I have been introduced to a variation of this practice by Christiana, my Tibetan healer here in Portland.  For this variation, I visualize Green Tara (for me, because I have a devotion to her) inside my heart, inside my own body.  Her white light fills my head, her ruby red throat energy fills my throat, and so on.  It’s a little more complex than this, but you get the idea.  Filled with her green light in my heart, I rest with that and at some point, I will ask for guidance and direction, from within my own soul.  It’s promising. And not easy to do.

One easy answer is to simply live in the Now, without any map into the future at all.  Yes, but that really doesn’t answer my dilemma of how to get stronger in a sustainable way.  One of the loudest voices from my family is to override all pain and all obstacles with a force of will.  Just do it.  That mantra.  I did that, and went from a IV to a III.  It worked, I was successful against all odds. However, I also discovered that in so doing, I was draining the energy pool underneath my whole being, the Jing energy, faster than I was replenishing it, if that is even possible at this point.  Some practitioners of Chinese medicine say that Kidney chi cannot be replaced.  When you run out, you die.  Others say that it can be replenished slowly and with great care.  That is what I want to do, or try to do, now.  But who the fuck really knows if it’s possible.   No one really knows.

So, more alternative docs on the horizon as I check out a few, slowly.  I shall see Dr. Nida who is a master Tibetan doctor coming to Portland in a few weeks.  Restorative yoga seems right to me now.  Laying outside on the grass in the sun, check.  Practicing a little chi gung, check.  Eating with mindfulness, a nourishing diet, check.  Walking around the Rose Villa campus when I can, yes.  Meditation, check.  Adrenal support capsules, okay.

A fragment of a new map is forming, one little piece at a time.  I can do this!

Thank you and blessings to all of you who offer me support in such a tapestry of ways, weaving a blanket of love to catch me when I fall.  May you know a deep and abiding wellness, the joy that lies beyond all suffering,  throughout your days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Realm of Hope

Hope tends to play a role for most of us who live with a terminal diagnosis, whether it is acknowledged or not.  It’s there, either looming large and constant, or laying in pieces on the floor, fragmented and fragile.  Or somewhere in between.  Upfront or out of sight, out of mind, lurking.  Or leading us on into what’s next.  I think of myself as being essentially hopeful.

It wasn’t until I got into the book Die Wise, by Stephen Jenkinson (from the video Griefwalker) that I began to ponder how hope lives in me these days.  His third chapter is titled The Tyrant Hope.  My very first thought was “What the fuck?”

My second thought was “Fuck you!”

After that, I settled down to read what he has to say.  As a worker in what he calls the death industry (hospice and palliative care), he writes “Sometimes you have to wonder aloud whether hope is all it’s cracked up to be, and then wait for the pieces to fall.”  And so, they are.  Falling, that is.

In his world, people with a terminal diagnosis generally hope for more time.  Hope is the “conjuring chant taken up in the name of compassion.” However, “More Life is mostly More Death.”  Hope is “an anesthetic of the spirit.  It ensures that it will be too late to learn how to die, in a death-phobic culture.  Dying in a death phobic culture is traumatic.”  Hence, “Cope, Hope, and Dope” is what the allopathic, Western world has to offer the dying.   In his world, Hope is a vote for a future, a mortgaging of the present.  As long as you are hopeful, you are never in the land you actually hope for.  By that, he means that you are always living down the road, not where you are.

Hope is not life, and hopeless is not death and depression.  It’s a false choice.

“The alternative is to live your life and your dying hope-free: a subversive move towards lucidity.  A revolution.”

Well, okay then.  As a practicing Buddhist, I can practice letting go of hope and moving more strongly into the present, through meditation and yoga and so on.  Got it.

Then along came the next book, Mystical Hope, by Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest who is lucidity personified.  And her book is an entirely different take on the concept of Hope.  The subtitle is Trusting in the Mercy of God.  If I hadn’t already read one of her very fine books, I would have passed this one by.  However, the thing shimmered at me on Powell’s website, so I ordered it, a small gem.

Her whole book leads to this paragraph:  “Hope is not imaginary or illusory.  It is that sonar by which the body of Christ holds together and finds its way.  It takes enormous courage to live the Christian gospel..to move forward in hope. ” But it takes her whole book to get you there.  If you are willing.

Hope, most people feel, can help them live, providing a surge of energy that would make life feel possible again.  Going from a Stage IV to a Stage III cancer has certainly opened up my heart again to hope. Here she agrees with Jenkinson: ordinary hope lives in the future, seeking some kind of good outcome.   However, what Cynthia is addressing is about finding a deep and steady current of life that is the source of hope itself, a theological journey instead.

Mystical Hope has nothing to do with a good outcome, with the future.  It has something to do with presence, the experience of being met, held in communion, by something intimately at hand: a direct encounter with Being itself. It brings strength, joy and satisfaction, producing them from within.  If we rush into the future or stay rigidly focused there, we miss the hand of God who can only touch us in the now.

And that is, I think, what Jenkinson is also teaching, only with vastly different language and context.

Cynthia goes on to make a distinction between Grace and Mystical Hope.  For her, mystical hope is not an extraordinary infusion, (such as we tend to think of with Grace) but an abiding state of being, developing a permanent connection to this inner wellspring, becoming a body of hope itself.  It’s connected deeply to Mercy , “God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love”.

Mystical Hope is for her an electromagnetic field of love.  “It warms, it fills, it connects, it directs.  It is the heart of our own life and the heart of all that lives.  Hope’s home is at the innermost point in us, and in all things.  It’s not a feeling that results from a happy ending, but lies at the very beginning, a  pulse of truth that sends us forth.  When we are attuned to this, hope fills us with the strength to stay present.”

I tend to think of this as radar, my own radar.  Once, having taken too much cannabis oil, I found myself flying through time and space, no up and no down, no right or left, no way to navigate, no vistas, just space.  It seemed that I needed to make micro decisions every few seconds, and had no way to know how to do that.  It was infinitely scary.  My notion at present is that death somehow holds moments like this, and we need to have a way to safely find our way.

If I consider Mystical Hope as the Source of Love itself, then simply attuning myself to this deep place would be enough.

Simply.  Well, maybe not simply.  So glad I have more time to do this necessary attuning.  My pieces are falling, but into place.

 

 

 

 

 

Tibetan Medicine and devotion

Tibetan medicine is hard to come by here in Portland.  After asking around and searching for months while we dealt with my diagnosis and prognosis, gave away 14 pickup trucks full of belongings and moved to Rose Villa, I finally was given two names, and contacted one a month or so ago.

Christiana Polites is the owner of Yangchenma Healing Arts, and brought to me today a collection of Tibetan pills made to order.  They are like little herbal rum balls without the rum, no sugar, and no wheat.  I start tomorrow.  After decades of reading about Tibetan pills and medicine (I once took a class from Yoshi Donden, at that time the personal physician to the Dalai Lama, a one-day class in Washington DC )  I am finally getting to see and touch and will be tasting. Its like a little miracle to me.  It’s not like you can just go to a store and buy these things, or even go online.  For me, it was like asking the universe to provide me with something very rare and special, maybe life saving, and out of the mists of everyday life, here comes this true soul with just what I asked for and much more.  To my door, mind you.  Kindness, such kindness.

Tibetan medicine is old, and comes from the heart.  Much of how it works (but not all; they use herbs, acupuncture, and sound healing, for starters) depends on devotion, both on the part of the medical practitioner, and also the patient.  Buddhist devotion is not what we think of here in the West, when we use those words.  It’s not a giving away of one’s power. Devotion is a way of opening one’s heart and soul in order to receive teachings, wisdom, a transmission of any sort from a guru or teacher to your own being, and to receive medicine as well.  A way of trusting completely.

For example, Christiana embedded a thousand mantras into water for me, sealing her mantra recitation with a long retreat, and offering healing and protection in these liters of drinking water.  As a skeptical Westerner born into a medical family, I might simply push that gift aside, thank her for the water and deny Tibetan medicine in general. I think there might be some racism in such a stand, a false sense of superiority, an education solely grounded in Western thought.   But I am no longer skeptical, I was in the healing profession myself for decades, am a practicing Buddhist, and I know the profound value of devotion.  It isn’t magic, but it can feel like that.  You touch the very membrane of Pure Love, the thin places in human existence where Mystery is close at hand.  It is my belief that ultimately all healing comes from there.

Sometimes I imagine that people will think I am trying Tibetan medicine and IV turmeric and medical marijuana as a desperate person, seeking a way to keep on living.  A clutching at straws, I think the idiom goes.  I’ve investigated that in deep meditation, to see if it’s true or not.  It is not true.  I would and will continue to open my life to healing on every level, whether I live another month or another decade or more.  It’s quite a lovely way to live!  I’ll learn much and pass on as much as I can along the way.  I’m not feeling desperate. I am thrilled to be able to do this my own way, following a dark path without a whole lot of guideposts along the way. Following my heart, my curiosity, the shimmering that catches my attention.   Watching the tides of life begin to ebb back up into my being in their gentle, subtle way.

And tomorrow I get to taste my first Tibetan pill!  The people who make these pills also say mantras (or repetitive prayers) over and over while they are making them, so that not only are the herbal combinations potent and part of human healing for centuries, but they are also blessed actively.  Not like buying aspirin from the store, that’s for sure.

So I am sipping water that has a particular vibration embedded in it, a prayer of sorts from Christiana who has a big heart, and I know that it is part of this journey I am on.  And rejoice.

 

 

 

 

 

Green Tara steps up.

Green Tara and I have been good friends for decades, she more constant than I.  Who is Green Tara?  The masculine Buddha cries a river of compassionate tears, and from that river emerges Green Tara, wisdom personified, one leg set down ready to protect, to intervene, to help.  Green Tara claims that she will continue to be reborn as a feminine figure until all suffering has ended.  She is, for me, a mixture of Mary and Sophia, the Christian image for wisdom, and so much more.

One of my stalwart friends, Renette, traveled to Tibet and Nepal years ago; I was to go with her and another, but I fell and broke my shoulder which then slightly crushed together.  I had to stay home, so asked her to bring me a Green Tara tangka, or picture.  Which she did.  Boy, did she ever! It’s hand painted by the head of a Tibetan tangka painting school in Kathmandu.  She shines and shimmers and keeps me company.

At one time, I chanted over 100,000 mantras to her, counting on my yak bone mala which is like a Christian rosary only with counters, 108 beads.  Devotion is an alien concept for most of us in the West but for Tibetan Buddhists, it’s one channel or doorway into the absolute realms. It’s real. At some point, I participated in a Green Tara Empowerment and brought her along to be blessed.  Somehow or other, I developed devotion to Green Tara, so here I am.

Towards the beginning of July this year, after we moved to Rose Villa, I put my finger on her hand which is open, on my tankga, and prayed: “Help me!”  It’s like plugging into her unique channel or current, and opening mine up to her.  Boom! Electric sizzle ! Help poured into me on every level, completely blessing me through friends, family, resources known and unknown, pouring in to me.  I heard that it was going to take time, and to rest.  Staggering experience.  I’ve only recently decided to speak of it here. Lasted all of about one minute.

So, a month or so later, I decided to see if I could find a doctor of Tibetan medicine here in the Portland area.  Tibetan medicine is similar to Chinese medicine but coming from the Bon tradition in Tibet.  I asked many people. Nothing.  I asked my shaman friend who also put out the word, and was recently connected to a lovely young woman who is a student of Tibetan medicine, as well as Chinese medicine at the Naturopathic College.  She arrived at our cottage carrying water that she infused with a protective healing mantra, and a Medicine Buddha practice that is fairly simple. I need simple these days.

I fell promptly in love with her, of course.

Now, here’s the miraculous.  She is bringing to Portland a teacher of Tibetan medicine, a doctor who graduated from the Tibetan Medical College in Dharamsala, India.  She practiced for many years under Dr. Kunga Gyurme, the personal physician of the Dalai Lama.  She travels all over the world treating patients and teaching.

And I have a private consultation with her this Friday.  I am amazed, completely amazed.

And bow to Green Tara in profound gratitude.

Delusional?  Who cares, if it works.  I am not looking for my cancer to disappear in a cloud of magic dust, but seeking a way through this thicket with trustworthy companions.  It doesn’t really matter to me at this point whether I live or die anytime soon.  I’m just showing up, and sharing as much as I can along the way.  Who knows.

So, if you are one with cancer and are lost like me, don’t follow me but find your own seeds of devotion, your own due north, your own internal compass, what you resonate with, who you trust, and follow that. Send us reports, if you can, along the way.  I’d like to know.  It may be important.

Send smoke signals.

 

 

 

 

A short note from Mary Oliver and Joan Chittister, OSB

While I’m at it, in one of her poems Mary Oliver says (in West Wind):

“To put one’s foot into the door of the grass, which is the mystery, which is death as well as life, and not be afraid!  To set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome with amazement!”

A sturdy and trustworthy companion and guide, Mary Oliver.

And Sr. Joan, a warrior,  reminds me of how the Rule of Benedict speaks over and over again about hospitality and the reception of guests, just in case I have left an incomplete sense of the Benedictine way.   It’s hospitality that teaches us honesty and self control, devotion and love, openness and trust.  The way of hospitality is more difficult – and more meaningful – than any asceticism we could devise for ourselves, she says.  The monastery, throughout all time, was to be a place of comfort and of solace and of safety for everyone.  Refugees included.

My husband does hospitality better than anyone I know.  And he is learning to laugh.

Living Inside of a Koan

“If you want to be my friend in my dying, I want you to forget I am dying.  Second, you must never forget I am dying.”  Well, alright then.  No problem, right?

This quote is from another cancer patient, Karen Speerstra, from The Divine Art of Dying.  I resonate deeply with her impossible request. This book pissed me off, though, because hey, I am not dying anytime soon.  Yeah, we are all dying, at different rates… blah blah blah.  Except that I have these two tumors, maybe lots more, and an oncologist who just looks sad when I see her, because there is nothing she can do for me.  And at the same time, I am very aware that I am not, in fact, going to die anytime soon.  I intend to live and live well for a long time.

So I am living inside of a koan, a Zen Buddhist practice that I have successfully avoided for 30 some years, fearing failure I suppose.  Now my very life depends on finding my way along a tightrope over what feels like an abyss, seeking a way through.  To something.  A road to somewhere.

In other words, I need to embrace two realities at the same time, which seem to be in separate realms, in opposition to each other.  That is, in my limited understanding, precisely the essence of a koan.  And it is not easy to do.  I fall first on one side, and can feel my death coming, and prepare in various ways.  And then I fall on the other side, and feel how much life and love I still have inside of me, and pick up my life again.

What I cannot do often, or easily, is to do both at the same time. To balance.  And it appears that I am now called to do exactly that.  That is the thread that will lead to a way out.  Although what I mean by “out” I don’t know for sure, except that it will hold a kind of joy, and a shimmer.

People send me things now, and I pay attention.  Some friends gave me a book entitled About Blady: A Pattern out of Time.  A Memoir by Laurens Van Der Post.  This is probably the most amazing, most fascinating, most sophisticated book I have ever read.  In part, he deals with cancer and says “Judging by the failure of a century of research to discover what cancer is, this special affliction of our age might even have its cause and origin in the spirit, or in the dimension of the great unknowable where terms of mind and body, spirit and matter express merely different points of observation of a phenomenon which transcends all.”  Zowee.  Nails it.

If it has its cause and origin in this transcendent place, then I presume that healing cancer would also reside in that same place.  From all that I am reading and pursuing, from all that I have gleaned in life up until now, I am betting that it does.  At least for some of us.  Surgery, radiation and chemo work for some, and that’s a blessing.  But sometimes it’s not enough, or treatment is not possible.  Western treatment, at any rate.

Van Der Post again – “I was certain only that the hypothesis on which all the research into the phenomenon of cancer, and all the dedication devoted to discovering a cure was based, was totally inadequate. ” Not wrong, exactly, but inadequate.  For him, it leads to dreams, and what it is that dreams through humans.  And ultimately, to love. To the Source.

For my political friends, he takes it further.  “And whenever I looked at the city I saw – and still see- cancer in concrete: in the sprawl of the city and the way of life that went on like a recurring decimal…”-  the body politic.   It is manifested in the unsustainable ways of human life on the planet, a metaphor for cancer itself, killing the host.  In my case, that’s me – the body personal.

Around the time of WWI and II, TB was the disease that was killing most people in the West.  Chemical warfare in the form of various gases filled the air.  Van Der Post says that shifted with the expansion of US power after the Wars, and cancer began to kill more people.

If we find a way to cure our cancers through resolution of this koan, working in the indescribable and awesome realm of spirit or beyond, could we also then find a way to turn around the “cancer in concrete” that is killing us all?  A cure, metaphorically speaking.  I wonder.  Maybe there are multiple cures and ways to go about this.

And for those of you who have actually struggled with a real zen koan, if I have this concept fucked up here, please do let me know.  I’m a Tibetan Buddhist, not a Zen practitioner. Sort of.

How could I not know I was this sick?!

How could I not know I was this sick?  Looking back, it’s pretty obvious to me.  This image of a person dragging himself through an ice field on his arms and legs, crawling for miles…I picked up this image in 2009 (!) during a collage prayer card day. My subconscious knew something was wrong, that I had burned out somehow.

Docs had told me back then that I had chronic fatigue syndrome.  It got worse and worse, year after year, until I could barely get through my day as a retired woman.  Finally had to hire some help cleaning our house, I couldn’t do it myself.  Mostly I felt embarrassed and tried to hide it, even from myself.  My world got smaller and smaller, as one beloved activity after another got dropped into the “I can’t do this anymore” bin.  My lower legs and feet began to swell and it hurt to walk even down to our mailbox at the end of our driveway.  No more walking our dog, Tara, on a regular basis.  Why didn’t I demand more assistance from Kaiser?  At a certain point, I was too sick. And before that? With chronic fatigue, there is nothing to do.  I accepted that diagnosis as being accurate.

In my journal from June well over a year ago, I reported “I think I am dying.”  By then, dying did not seem like a very long step.  However, I have a tendency to brush aside things like this report from myself, either by not listening or choosing not to respond.  I have learned not to entirely trust my conclusions. I saw all that fatigue as a deficiency in my own character.  This is a very old childhood pattern.  So, that report did not show up on my radar, internally, beyond those few written words.  It’s a little like a Facebook meme that you see one moment on your site and then it’s gone as new ones take it place.  It faded from view.  I kept crawling through life, slower and slower.

Deeper underneath there is a voice that explains, “You were so tired and depleted that you simply could not gather up the strength to try to deal with that other part that warned you might die.”  A deep shattering kept occurring, evaporating my will to live. Dying seemed like a good thing.   A frail voice would pipe up: “Who cares? You’re not worth the effort. Why bother.  I won’t try and then lose.” It’s a voice that sucks me down fast. Very old voice. Depression is one of the key symptoms of kidney cancer.

Sometimes I ask myself: how does this cancer thing work?  There is a place where the will to live connects (lightly, in my case) with the evaporating part.  It reminds me of when the tidal waters come up the Willamette, and meet the waters coming off the Cascades – there is a moment when the waters stop, and the surface is like a mirror. They embrace with a million little silvery arms. Then tiny little wavelets appear, the water turns to mercury, and then the river turns back the other way, back upstream.  The master ebb and flow, twice a day around here – a potent, magical, fleeting moment.

I wonder if within us, we each have a tidal effect of the will to live and the longing to die.  As long as they are in balance, we have health.  Several times I recall my wanting to die, the evaporating part, showing up in my awareness. This cancer has been growing for at least the past six years or more.  The cancer, to some extent, feeds on me feeling despair of ever being well again. It is a lethal feedback loop. I have been out of balance.

Is it possible to simply turn that imbalance back to balance, and let the body slowly readjust?  Would the cancer either slow down or better yet, go away?  Turning the tide of cancer. I like it as a metaphor for healing.  I can’t seem to relate to the more common ones of war… I am seeking a natural key to this process, one that is non-violent, that I can watch with mindfulness, knowing that the mind and the body affect each other intimately, profoundly.

This doesn’t yet solve my underlying question: did my feeling like dying come after living with the cancer for awhile and is therefore a symptom, or did that feeling actually cause the cancer. Or both.

Reading The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee, he reports that Claudius Galan, a Greek doctor from AD 160, wrote about the black bile that is cancer.  Galen links the word Melas (black) with Khole (bile), hence melancholia.   For him, depression and cancer, psychic and physical diseases of black bile, are intertwined.  He proposed “that cancer was trapped black bile, static bile unable to escape, and thus congealed into a matted mass”,  just what I studied in Chinese Medicine: stagnation can cause disease. This feels accurate to me.  And is nothing that my oncologist can affirm or acknowledge or do anything about.

I’ll be watching to see what is stagnate around me and within me.  What needs to be freshened up, turned inside out, removed from my life, embraced differently? How can I let the depression energy escape and/or stop forming?  Selling our house, downsizing and moving to Rose Villa, an unusual retirement community, has started things moving.

Looking for the shimmering, too, and letting in that awareness as often as possible.  I tell friends “I am swimming in a sea of shimmering grace.”  I just have to remember that, dial it in.  Remember the View.

I’ll be asking myself these questions for awhile yet.

Shimmering Grace? WTF is that?

The day after I got my prognosis (“which is an opinion, not a prediction”, says Rachel Naomi Remen, MD!) I was floating high on adrenalin, doing the dishes. Jesus, I may die really soon!  Suddenly a lens shifted in my mind’s eye, like when you get your eyes tested and the doctor slips in the lens that finally clears it all up, and Bam, you can see again?!  Like that.  A new lens.  Literally everything that I could see around me – trees, sky, chairs, table, parsley, the works – was made out of love.  The essential building block for the whole world, from what I saw then.  And that love beamed towards me, and through me, through my heart.  Shimmering.

Didn’t last very long, maybe one second, but it got my attention.  O yeah.

In the Catholic world, there is such a thing as Lectio Divina, which translates as Divine Reading, or Reading the Divine.  People who train in this practice will take from scripture, usually, a small section and read it until some words literally begin to shimmer, either in their sight or in their mind or both.  According to this practice, that is a sign from God that those words are meant for you, in that moment.  So, one then rests in those words for as long as needed, soaking it up.

As a Taoist at heart, I turn to nature as scripture. It’s an ancient practice, a shamanic practice really, listening deeply to signs from God through nature.  When something shimmers in nature, I perk up, don’t you?  Lots of ways to do Lectio Divina.

After six months to reflect on this, I believe that all the prayers being sent my way by quite literally several hundred people were surrounding me and teaching me in that moment, holding me in a love that transforms everything, even cancer, into grace.  Prayers as a felt experience.

The word gratitude doesn’t even touch how I still hold this moment.  It’s part of who I am now, but it’s not always available or present to me at will.  Hence the grace part. It’s gift.

So this blog is in honor of that moment.  Now you know.

 

Two Months to Two Years

What’s it like to be told you have two months to two years to live?  I mean, really.  After two CT scans in February of this year, after kidney stones brought me panting and throwing up to the Providence Milwaukie ER, there we are, Eric my husband of 30 some years and me, facing the surgeon a week or so later who was going to talk about removing my kidney. Except it didn’t go like that.  Instead, he said “You have cancer in both kidneys, in a few lymph nodes between the kidneys, and there are at least 5 nodes total in all four lobes of your lungs.  If we take out your left kidney, the primary, you still have it in the right one.  And in the lungs, too small to biopsy or remove.  We only do chemo after surgery for kidney cancer, we can’t use radiation.  Let’s talk about palliative care…”

Shock.  That’s the first thing that happened to us.  Pure shock, and a hefty dose of adrenalin that lasted in my body for at least a month or two.  Heady stuff, adrenalin.  Fight or flight.  Except I decided not to do the whole “battle with cancer”, “go to war against the tumors” route.  Nor did I flee.  As a practicing Buddhist, I keep my seat, mostly.  As a certified Hakomi therapist, I observe as closely as I can how my mind and body are interacting, and how to dance with this thing in my body that can, maybe will, kill me someday, maybe sooner, maybe later.  Maybe not at all.  No way to know, really and that’s part of my challenge.

How can I love this part of myself, these cells that have lost their way?  What is my new mission in life, as I seek a remission?  Deeply spiritual, mystical, how can I keep the portal open to Mystery, to the shimmering grace that I feel all around me almost daily now?  And what in the world do I mean by Shimmering Grace?  How do I keep ego from stepping in and announcing that I will beat this thing and show the entire medical world how to survive cancer without the western medical model?  O yeah, I feel an upsurge of that bluster from time to time.  And truthfully, there are days when I just read mystery novels, sit in my recliner, and zone out.

Since the diagnosis, we sold our beloved home near the Willamette River in three days (!), downsized by giving away about 14 pickup trucks full of stuff, and moved to Rose Villa, a unique retirement community about a half mile from home.  They called us less than a week after we met with the surgeon, to offer us a cottage: the Holy Spirit was showing off big time! The move was cataclysmic and exhausting beyond endurance, let’s just leave it there.  In the middle of all that, I heard one evening in my heart my Grandmother’s voice, “Do not despair, help is on the way.”  She died in 1976, so hmm…  I tucked that away.

We have a two bedroom cottage with a fenced back yard for our dog, we share a study, and have a great view across the river to the west hills.  I watch the sun set nightly, and after almost 6 months, am gradually emerging into my new life, of facing death intimately.

Perhaps by sharing this journey others may find comfort, companionship, some resources to consider, share the view.  In the Tibetan Buddhism that I follow as best I can, the View (or Rigpa) is that clear mind that transcends all compounded reality, the uncompounded way, the One.  As a Catholic, I watch for the shimmer, for the presence of God.

I hope my blog will be of service to us all.