bowl, speckled with blue.
Your wound is probably not your fault, but your healing is your responsibility.
Aphorisms are ancient--a short(ish) and sweet observation meant to contain a general truth. Words to live by, perhaps. The stuff of Facebook. That's where I found the aphorism that starts this post.
I am tempted to take apart the first sentence--it's too stark for me, belies the way we live in community, in families, in the world. We are wounded, yet sometimes we seek woundedness, in ourselves, in others, maybe because of the child who still lives within us, stirring, disappointed, wounded herself. Sometimes we are wounded because we hurt first. Sometimes we are wounded on bright, beautiful days, with unreal blue skies, and sometimes the ocean lulls us to sleep, and we are wounded then, in the darkness, suddenly awake with a gasp, alone.
Healing is my responsibility alone--that too feels like a tremendous responsibility. And yet, we have some power over healing. We can try to make choices that align with our codes for living, our heart's desire, muted as it may be by life's battering rams, with what we know as truth in this deconstructed world, ever aware that we are shaped by our moment in time, here in this young century, this troubled time, where sometimes it feels like my cancer is the natural spiraling out of the disorder that is the disorientation of the world.
Which is a wordy way of ignoring what cancer also is--a disorder of the body, traitorous cells, which takes and is taking the bodies of people I know and love. When you are trying to get pregnant, or you are pregnant, you see pregnancy everywhere, you notice the swell of strangers' bodies, and it is communion, or an affront. Now I see cancer everywhere. My eyes swept the diner this weekend and I saw the thin, older woman, at breakfast with her friends and her husband, her bald head neatly wrapped in an attractive blue scarf. I wouldn't have thought cancer three years ago--my eyes would have just swept.
And of course, there are the dear friends I have made because we share cancer--the people from my California retreat, where a week held a month, or a year; people from my metastatic cancer support group. And these people keep dying. Of course they do. These people--us--we are sick and we won't be cured. I sometimes can hardly bear to watch us all go.
Last week, a woman, who seemed mightily alive when I met her in California, died. She was vaguely my age but seemed much younger--her life was one of music, and for a time, alcohol, and addiction, and she was the kind of essence of a certain vision of Northern California, her jeans were faded, her legs long, her voice had to be attended to, her skin was tanned, she sang like she was sure of everything. We had taken such opposite journeys through life and we spoke, with not envy, but restless curiosity, about our differences. Her childless life, my life filled to the edge of the frame with children. If I had had to guess, I certainly would have guessed she would outlive me. But that's not how cancer works now, is it?
And she's gone now. Everyday her Facebook feed lengthens with posts by her friends and family mourning, crying out in longing for her. And, publicly, that will slowly wind to an end too. I wrote a poem about her--about how our loved ones leave us and don't return, except for when they do, in the look in a stranger's face, the hoot of the owl across the early morning woods, the comfort of my grandmother in my dreams--all of it real. All of it not the embodied person we so desire.
And then there are the tasks of life--I can rail against cancer, or perhaps against the very concept of lifetimes, but waffles must be made, recycling must be taken out, there are calls to be made and cuts to be bandaged and love to be given and received.
So I don't know about healing--I am alone and never alone all at once. I feel held up by the people who truly love me, and also by those who simply like me, and even those who just know me--the kindness of the man who started my IV for me this week at MGH was a balm. I think we might wound each other and heal each other in the day-to-night living with the people who make up our worlds, and, for me, the deep green of the heavily treed roads of Carlisle, the corn growing so quickly it's a wonder you can't hear it rustling, the dark skies and the evening thunderstorm, the stone walls that line the roads out to Boston, before those roads become bigger, then highways, or do we say freeways on the east coast? I only say soda now, but it almost makes me weep to think of the child inside me who said pop.
Rachel Carson said there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity. I don't know if our humanity overlaps completely with the natural universe, or whether humanity has edges which unfurl beyond the edges of nature. I really don't know. And I don't know what I wish for--but I do know that this current iteration of humanity feels like the record skipping, feels like old ground made horribly anew. My chest hurts when I see the signs of protesters which say do you wonder what you would have done in the Holocaust? you're doing it now.
And I reject that and resemble that all at the same time. Is our deeply seated response to the natural universe destructive at its core? Can it instead be communion, by enough of us, to change course?
Is my body the body that birthed six children, that awakens at the mere murmur of a baby, a body that aches to stay with my family as long as I can, to love them enough that they will be granted safe passage? Is my body a collection of cells, wildly dividing and turning upon themselves, in a headlong rush to destruction? Yes. And yes.
Here's another aphorism, this one from Commonweal.
All we are doing is walking each other home.
Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush.
I want to take this as seriously and deeply as I can. All we are doing, in these lifetimes given to us by the grace of, dare I pray, God, is walking each other home. Taking each other by the arm, the hand, the elbow, the waist and walking down a road we have never been down before. And yet, we know where it ends, and I believe all those who have already moved past the end into something else will be there to help us--so Evelyn, and Norman, and Aunt Lou, and Aunt Pat, and all the rest. What a lovely idea, to think of them crowding my vision, welcoming me. An idea that might be a flight of fancy, except I heard the hoot of the owl, I saw the wise eyes of my grandmother in my dream, I have glimpsed my people in the faces of strangers, or better yet, in the faces of the people who I made on this earth, who already contain multitudes, including Evelyn and Norman and Louise and Patricia. And already contain me.
A bowl, when making waffles, holds two cups of flour, two tablespoons of sugar, baking soda, baking powder, sea salt, buttermilk and butter and eggs and vanilla.
A bowl contains a frog, caught under the back stoop, and grass and dirt, and a dish of water, until it doesn't.
A bowl contains the contents of my heart, all the tears I have cried and will cry, the air I have breathed into my disappointing lungs over half a century.
I've had this bowl since I was 24--everyone who has ever lived with me in that time, knows this bowl.
Aphorisms are ancient--a short(ish) and sweet observation meant to contain a general truth. Words to live by, perhaps. The stuff of Facebook. That's where I found the aphorism that starts this post.
I am tempted to take apart the first sentence--it's too stark for me, belies the way we live in community, in families, in the world. We are wounded, yet sometimes we seek woundedness, in ourselves, in others, maybe because of the child who still lives within us, stirring, disappointed, wounded herself. Sometimes we are wounded because we hurt first. Sometimes we are wounded on bright, beautiful days, with unreal blue skies, and sometimes the ocean lulls us to sleep, and we are wounded then, in the darkness, suddenly awake with a gasp, alone.
Healing is my responsibility alone--that too feels like a tremendous responsibility. And yet, we have some power over healing. We can try to make choices that align with our codes for living, our heart's desire, muted as it may be by life's battering rams, with what we know as truth in this deconstructed world, ever aware that we are shaped by our moment in time, here in this young century, this troubled time, where sometimes it feels like my cancer is the natural spiraling out of the disorder that is the disorientation of the world.
Which is a wordy way of ignoring what cancer also is--a disorder of the body, traitorous cells, which takes and is taking the bodies of people I know and love. When you are trying to get pregnant, or you are pregnant, you see pregnancy everywhere, you notice the swell of strangers' bodies, and it is communion, or an affront. Now I see cancer everywhere. My eyes swept the diner this weekend and I saw the thin, older woman, at breakfast with her friends and her husband, her bald head neatly wrapped in an attractive blue scarf. I wouldn't have thought cancer three years ago--my eyes would have just swept.
And of course, there are the dear friends I have made because we share cancer--the people from my California retreat, where a week held a month, or a year; people from my metastatic cancer support group. And these people keep dying. Of course they do. These people--us--we are sick and we won't be cured. I sometimes can hardly bear to watch us all go.
Last week, a woman, who seemed mightily alive when I met her in California, died. She was vaguely my age but seemed much younger--her life was one of music, and for a time, alcohol, and addiction, and she was the kind of essence of a certain vision of Northern California, her jeans were faded, her legs long, her voice had to be attended to, her skin was tanned, she sang like she was sure of everything. We had taken such opposite journeys through life and we spoke, with not envy, but restless curiosity, about our differences. Her childless life, my life filled to the edge of the frame with children. If I had had to guess, I certainly would have guessed she would outlive me. But that's not how cancer works now, is it?
And she's gone now. Everyday her Facebook feed lengthens with posts by her friends and family mourning, crying out in longing for her. And, publicly, that will slowly wind to an end too. I wrote a poem about her--about how our loved ones leave us and don't return, except for when they do, in the look in a stranger's face, the hoot of the owl across the early morning woods, the comfort of my grandmother in my dreams--all of it real. All of it not the embodied person we so desire.
And then there are the tasks of life--I can rail against cancer, or perhaps against the very concept of lifetimes, but waffles must be made, recycling must be taken out, there are calls to be made and cuts to be bandaged and love to be given and received.
So I don't know about healing--I am alone and never alone all at once. I feel held up by the people who truly love me, and also by those who simply like me, and even those who just know me--the kindness of the man who started my IV for me this week at MGH was a balm. I think we might wound each other and heal each other in the day-to-night living with the people who make up our worlds, and, for me, the deep green of the heavily treed roads of Carlisle, the corn growing so quickly it's a wonder you can't hear it rustling, the dark skies and the evening thunderstorm, the stone walls that line the roads out to Boston, before those roads become bigger, then highways, or do we say freeways on the east coast? I only say soda now, but it almost makes me weep to think of the child inside me who said pop.
Rachel Carson said there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity. I don't know if our humanity overlaps completely with the natural universe, or whether humanity has edges which unfurl beyond the edges of nature. I really don't know. And I don't know what I wish for--but I do know that this current iteration of humanity feels like the record skipping, feels like old ground made horribly anew. My chest hurts when I see the signs of protesters which say do you wonder what you would have done in the Holocaust? you're doing it now.
And I reject that and resemble that all at the same time. Is our deeply seated response to the natural universe destructive at its core? Can it instead be communion, by enough of us, to change course?
Is my body the body that birthed six children, that awakens at the mere murmur of a baby, a body that aches to stay with my family as long as I can, to love them enough that they will be granted safe passage? Is my body a collection of cells, wildly dividing and turning upon themselves, in a headlong rush to destruction? Yes. And yes.
Here's another aphorism, this one from Commonweal.
All we are doing is walking each other home.
Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush.
I want to take this as seriously and deeply as I can. All we are doing, in these lifetimes given to us by the grace of, dare I pray, God, is walking each other home. Taking each other by the arm, the hand, the elbow, the waist and walking down a road we have never been down before. And yet, we know where it ends, and I believe all those who have already moved past the end into something else will be there to help us--so Evelyn, and Norman, and Aunt Lou, and Aunt Pat, and all the rest. What a lovely idea, to think of them crowding my vision, welcoming me. An idea that might be a flight of fancy, except I heard the hoot of the owl, I saw the wise eyes of my grandmother in my dream, I have glimpsed my people in the faces of strangers, or better yet, in the faces of the people who I made on this earth, who already contain multitudes, including Evelyn and Norman and Louise and Patricia. And already contain me.
A bowl, when making waffles, holds two cups of flour, two tablespoons of sugar, baking soda, baking powder, sea salt, buttermilk and butter and eggs and vanilla.
A bowl contains a frog, caught under the back stoop, and grass and dirt, and a dish of water, until it doesn't.
A bowl contains the contents of my heart, all the tears I have cried and will cry, the air I have breathed into my disappointing lungs over half a century.
I've had this bowl since I was 24--everyone who has ever lived with me in that time, knows this bowl.
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