California dreaming
All the leaves are brown (all the leaves are brown)
And the sky is grey (and the sky is grey)
I've been for a walk (I've been for a walk)
On a winter's day (on a winter's day)
I'd be safe and warm (I'd be safe and warm)
If I was in L.A. (if I was in L.A.)
California dreamin' (California dreamin')
On such a winter's day.
Okay, I hear you. It's not winter, some golden and orange and red leaves cling defiantly to the trees, and I was in Northern California, not L.A.--two very different beasts.
Still, you hear me.
I need to thank many of you for sending me to California on a week-long cancer retreat. I've been back over a week now, with Halloween right in the middle, and I find myself longing for the people I fell in love and like with during my respite. It was a marvelous time, for many reasons, and I'm so grateful for the break from my usual programming.
Better than expected was the food and the atmosphere and the incredible deep and specific care the staff took with us. The food was marvelous--it was no problem to eat a range of delicious, really delicious fruits and vegetables every day. It was cheering to watch people who clearly needed to eat really tuck in and have another pancake, or one more bowl of soup. The retreat takes place at the very edge of the Pacific, which was another guest at the retreat, with the brambling cliff, and the rocky surf, and the promise of whales and sharks and seals. The country was all hills, with hawks floating above the ocean, and foxes and quails scurrying for cover in the brush, jackrabbits bounding down foggy pathways, the low roar of the ocean outside every open window. The staff taught me to attend to my own needs by showing me what that looked like. It didn't look like coddling, it looked like a kind of attentive love. I needed that lesson badly, me with my quest to be somehow beyond my symptoms, my misplaced guilt over lost productivity, my busyness with worrying about the people I love with whom I live. I learned to pay better attention to my fatigue, or to the ache in my bones, and to do something--to lay down for that nap, to put that pillow behind my back, and to do so without a scolding for being needy, for being a person who has cancer running through her body.
Unexpected was the love and affection for my fellow travelers on the retreat--a small group of strangers who sized each other up almost instantly and bet on intimacy, bet on commitment, bet on love. We shared a great deal with each other from that first minute, and I fell into a quick, easy rhythm with my new friends. I am so glad I went so far for this week, but have serious regrets over the fact that I'm not likely to see these people again, what with the distance and all of the terrible cancer. I stand in awe at the things some of them have already endured in terms of sickness, and pain and loss. We all should be so generous with our time and selves--those gifts were unanticipated and I can't thank the staff at Commonweal and the guests at Commonweal enough for allowing me to journey, for one important week, with them. I am truly grateful to those of you at home who encouraged me, with real support, to go. I am deeply grateful to the specific people who made my time absolutely worth it, it being the loss of a week with my beloved family and the investment of a baring of souls, a reckoning with bodies, an entanglement with the sacred.
Back home, the season relentlessly turns towards winter, and I find myself shoring up for another turn through the darkest nights of the year, the cold and snowy days to come, the days when I will need poetry and movement, friends and beloved family to keep my heart as light as possible. I came home with a renewed interest in yoga therapy--the yoga at Commonweal showed me that perhaps I have not been in the right classes, that any class that has been too hard for me has not been given in the right spirit, because yoga, if anything, is about meeting you just where you are and anything else is an imposter. I have started to explore the offerings around me to try and recreate what seemed possible in California.
I wrote a lot while I was out there--surprising given how much of our time was taken in group sessions, in massage, in walks to the hallowed labyrinth in the trees or to the solemn prayer spot on the edge of the sea, ramshackle and filled with inscribed rocks, tiny scrolls of paper levered into the spaces between the wooden planks, candles for private vigils. I was able to write poetry every night, while I yearned for my family back East and listened to my new friends settle down for sleep in the shared house which served as a dormitory.
The new medicine is working--I am grateful for that, too. My next scan isn't until we are truly in the thick of winter.
I didn't have it in me to write about the mid-term elections, which, I suppose, went about as predicted. We said yes on three with a fairly resounding yes--that this had to be a ballot question at all was painful, but so the democratic process goes, in fits and starts, trying to get things right, and fair. But bookended by the shootings at the temple and then at the country and western bar last night, it feels tremendously dark out there, with the shooters consuming hate in their solitary bedrooms and apartments, plotting against the innocent people out there going to temple, going to line dance, choosing to live out their own days in the ways they know best, intersecting the paths of these angry men through nothing more than the machinations of chance. Who is to say how we will die? From cancer's treacherous march through our bodies, or through guns shot in the morning, in the evening? We don't really know when we wake up in the morning, so we are best advised to hold tightly onto the ones we love, hugging them close when we can, so that as we go out into the world on our daily journeys, as massage therapists, and yoga teachers, and cooks, and lawyers, and writers, and nannies, and school children, and college students, we know that we are loved and that we love.
Sometimes it does seem that simple.
We agree to gather by the sea,
by the enormous, the resplendent sea.
They tell us the oceans contain multitudes
and is where God thought of fish.
You're afraid of what happens when we die:
even the thought that there is absolutely nothing
stirs your fear.
Perhaps we will swim past the minnows and
then
the larger fish,
the ancient deep fish who are blind,
until we reach God, who will appear first as a light,
a dance of light that beckons us to swim,
swim closer to where
God sits,
every fish swimming through his bounteous beard,
his kind eyes behind the passage of whales.
Shall we gather by the sea, the resplendent sea,
and swim with the minnows,
in and out amongst his eyelashes.
And the sky is grey (and the sky is grey)
I've been for a walk (I've been for a walk)
On a winter's day (on a winter's day)
I'd be safe and warm (I'd be safe and warm)
If I was in L.A. (if I was in L.A.)
California dreamin' (California dreamin')
On such a winter's day.
Okay, I hear you. It's not winter, some golden and orange and red leaves cling defiantly to the trees, and I was in Northern California, not L.A.--two very different beasts.
Still, you hear me.
I need to thank many of you for sending me to California on a week-long cancer retreat. I've been back over a week now, with Halloween right in the middle, and I find myself longing for the people I fell in love and like with during my respite. It was a marvelous time, for many reasons, and I'm so grateful for the break from my usual programming.
Better than expected was the food and the atmosphere and the incredible deep and specific care the staff took with us. The food was marvelous--it was no problem to eat a range of delicious, really delicious fruits and vegetables every day. It was cheering to watch people who clearly needed to eat really tuck in and have another pancake, or one more bowl of soup. The retreat takes place at the very edge of the Pacific, which was another guest at the retreat, with the brambling cliff, and the rocky surf, and the promise of whales and sharks and seals. The country was all hills, with hawks floating above the ocean, and foxes and quails scurrying for cover in the brush, jackrabbits bounding down foggy pathways, the low roar of the ocean outside every open window. The staff taught me to attend to my own needs by showing me what that looked like. It didn't look like coddling, it looked like a kind of attentive love. I needed that lesson badly, me with my quest to be somehow beyond my symptoms, my misplaced guilt over lost productivity, my busyness with worrying about the people I love with whom I live. I learned to pay better attention to my fatigue, or to the ache in my bones, and to do something--to lay down for that nap, to put that pillow behind my back, and to do so without a scolding for being needy, for being a person who has cancer running through her body.
Unexpected was the love and affection for my fellow travelers on the retreat--a small group of strangers who sized each other up almost instantly and bet on intimacy, bet on commitment, bet on love. We shared a great deal with each other from that first minute, and I fell into a quick, easy rhythm with my new friends. I am so glad I went so far for this week, but have serious regrets over the fact that I'm not likely to see these people again, what with the distance and all of the terrible cancer. I stand in awe at the things some of them have already endured in terms of sickness, and pain and loss. We all should be so generous with our time and selves--those gifts were unanticipated and I can't thank the staff at Commonweal and the guests at Commonweal enough for allowing me to journey, for one important week, with them. I am truly grateful to those of you at home who encouraged me, with real support, to go. I am deeply grateful to the specific people who made my time absolutely worth it, it being the loss of a week with my beloved family and the investment of a baring of souls, a reckoning with bodies, an entanglement with the sacred.
Back home, the season relentlessly turns towards winter, and I find myself shoring up for another turn through the darkest nights of the year, the cold and snowy days to come, the days when I will need poetry and movement, friends and beloved family to keep my heart as light as possible. I came home with a renewed interest in yoga therapy--the yoga at Commonweal showed me that perhaps I have not been in the right classes, that any class that has been too hard for me has not been given in the right spirit, because yoga, if anything, is about meeting you just where you are and anything else is an imposter. I have started to explore the offerings around me to try and recreate what seemed possible in California.
I wrote a lot while I was out there--surprising given how much of our time was taken in group sessions, in massage, in walks to the hallowed labyrinth in the trees or to the solemn prayer spot on the edge of the sea, ramshackle and filled with inscribed rocks, tiny scrolls of paper levered into the spaces between the wooden planks, candles for private vigils. I was able to write poetry every night, while I yearned for my family back East and listened to my new friends settle down for sleep in the shared house which served as a dormitory.
The new medicine is working--I am grateful for that, too. My next scan isn't until we are truly in the thick of winter.
I didn't have it in me to write about the mid-term elections, which, I suppose, went about as predicted. We said yes on three with a fairly resounding yes--that this had to be a ballot question at all was painful, but so the democratic process goes, in fits and starts, trying to get things right, and fair. But bookended by the shootings at the temple and then at the country and western bar last night, it feels tremendously dark out there, with the shooters consuming hate in their solitary bedrooms and apartments, plotting against the innocent people out there going to temple, going to line dance, choosing to live out their own days in the ways they know best, intersecting the paths of these angry men through nothing more than the machinations of chance. Who is to say how we will die? From cancer's treacherous march through our bodies, or through guns shot in the morning, in the evening? We don't really know when we wake up in the morning, so we are best advised to hold tightly onto the ones we love, hugging them close when we can, so that as we go out into the world on our daily journeys, as massage therapists, and yoga teachers, and cooks, and lawyers, and writers, and nannies, and school children, and college students, we know that we are loved and that we love.
Sometimes it does seem that simple.
We agree to gather by the sea,
by the enormous, the resplendent sea.
They tell us the oceans contain multitudes
and is where God thought of fish.
You're afraid of what happens when we die:
even the thought that there is absolutely nothing
stirs your fear.
Perhaps we will swim past the minnows and
then
the larger fish,
the ancient deep fish who are blind,
until we reach God, who will appear first as a light,
a dance of light that beckons us to swim,
swim closer to where
God sits,
every fish swimming through his bounteous beard,
his kind eyes behind the passage of whales.
Shall we gather by the sea, the resplendent sea,
and swim with the minnows,
in and out amongst his eyelashes.
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