Navigating Mystery, Part 6

 I intend to write my way into healing.

That sentiment came to me once before, in the depths of a life-threatening illness.   I came to understand that I also need to heal how I think and how I live. I know that healing does not necessarily mean cure.  There may be no cure; there wasn’t and isn’t for my illness, at least not according to the medical authorities, at least if I assume their authority.  Giving them authority is what I was trained to do.  There are doctors and there are patients, those who know and do, and those who do not know and who are done to. To whom and to what I give my authority and why are bound up with my fear.

 

Writing has been my lifeline, ever since I was ten years old and received my first diary, the kind with a tiny lock and key and a fake leather cover embossed with a multi-colored jewel-like pattern and the words “My diary.” 

 

Heal (v): to make whole.  If I need healing, if I am not whole, am I broken?

 

There is an old story, a very, very old story about brokenness and healing.  In the Kabbalistic tradition, it is said that God created ten sacred vessels to hold divine light.  The vessels, however, were not strong enough to contain all that brilliance, and so they broke into pieces that scattered all over the universe.  It is our job as humans to restore order and harmony, to gather the shards by living prayerful lives and acting in ways that are of service to the world. In Hebrew this is known as tikkun olam, the repair of the world.

 

And so, according to the story, the first step of healing is to live a prayerful life.  It is what my illness taught me, as well.  Before I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, I was already old enough, of course, to be thinking about mortality, but only in a vaguely troubling and distant way.  When it got directly in my face, I realized to the core of my being that there was no time to lose.  Whatever work remained to be done, whatever gift I carried had to be delivered to the world without delay.  In the words of the 15th century Indian mystic Kabir:

 

What is found now is found then.

If you find nothing now,

you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.

 

If I stayed trapped, I foresaw being consigned to that apartment in the City of Death.  I have heard there is an old saying: When death finds you, may it find you alive.  That is what I want. I want life!  Mine, others, to see it everywhere.

SoulCollage® card - Dealing With the Medical System

Navigating Mystery, Part 5

 As Mary Oliver says, I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world. 

 

I confess, I have been more of a visitor than a resident.  The land doesn’t know me.  I was never trained in its ways. I grew up without a deep connection to the natural world.  We lived in a city.  The natural world was a place to visit upon occasion.  There were parks.  There were visits to a beach.  There were summer vacations in the Smoky Mountains or the White Mountains of New Hampshire, places of beauty to love and marvel at but that were not central to my daily life.  I did spend much of my childhood playing out of doors, catching lightning bugs on warm summer nights, exploring the tiny woods a few blocks away from the house, sipping honeysuckle flowers growing along the back fence; building snowmen in the front yard on winter days.  I was not without any appreciation of the out-of-doors. I just wasn’t taught to see how everything is interconnected or inspirited.

 

Even so, I was not totally bereft of spiritual experience.  Often, I was afraid of the dark.  But once in a long time, alone in my bedroom, a radiance would wash over and through me.  Radiance is not precisely the correct word; the darkness itself glowed. I thought of it as “the bright of the dark.” It filled the room and me and left me feeling clean and peaceful.  Then, on its heels, I would see in my mind’s eye an image of a child in light blue overalls on a double swing in a garden.  The swing was draped with flowering vines.  This happened every time, and seeing this image made me happy.  That was my connection, if not to the natural world, at least to the world of the imagination, or spirit.

 

I danced the ballet again in my last recital eight years later, but Persephone continued to spark my imagination.  I was born in the spring, and she was a goddess of the spring.  But I worried that, like Persephone, I, too, could be pulled into some dark underworld.

 

Now, so many years later (and as I have said already) I’ve grown heartily weary of living in and with fear, and not truly connected with the earth. I think about the time Demeter occupied her newly built temple at Eleusis, grieving, unwilling to leave or to allow the earth to provide sustenance until her daughter was returned to her.  The first sit-down strike. I am no goddess, and it is fear rather than grief that I am reckoning with.  But I can sit down and dig in.  Here are my tools: an old leather journal and a decent fountain pen.  I intend to write my way into healing.

SoulCollage® card - Demeter and Hades at Eleusis

 

Reframing Those Challenging Days

 Here’s the beauty of SoulCollage® - Often, you don’t really see what you have made until afterwards, and sometimes much later on. 

Yesterday, I was having a challenging day, as so many of us are experiencing in these times of pandemic and political chaos.  The uncertainties are stunning and can easily knock you for a loop. How will we ever get out of this?  Even if we get a vaccine, will it be safe and effective?  Who is walking around infected but without symptoms and may be infecting others?  Why do some people get mild cases and others die?  Am I safe?  Are my loved ones?  Will Trump win another term and doom us all?  You are quite familiar with this sort of thinking, I’m sure.

 

On top of all this mess, I have a life-threatening illness.  I recently had a presumably successful surgery, but sarcoma, my variety of cancer, tends to recur, and my tumor was pretty aggressive.  With this uncertainty piled on top of the rest, it isn’t strange that I’d have some unsettled days.

 

However, right now I’m recovering well, and for the first time in months, without a lot of pain or under the influence of narcotics, I am experiencing the cooped-up boredom others have complained of.  So, I sat myself down and made a new SoulCollage® card.  Here’s what it looks like (my usual bad phone shot):

 

 

 

When I allowed it to speak to me (a process we employ when making cards), it seemed to be telling me that I was just looking for a way out of my predicament.  Notice the word “just.”  I told a friend I wasn’t sure I liked this card.

 

This morning, while working on my morning pages, I sat with the card again.  It dawned on me then that although there was indeed a figure doubled over with grief, depression or pain, there were three others who were looking for a way.  Perhaps a way to relate rather than a way out.  Maybe they were giving me advice on handling my situation, rather than merely trying to escape it.  One is painting or writing.  One is meditating.  the third is looking far off.  Right!  Three ways to apply myself – art, meditation, and far-seeing (which to me means having a greater perspective, a spiritual view).

 

I love the card now.  It's not the most beautiful, but that has no bearing on its relevance. And, of course, the whole SoulCollage® process is a treasure.  It doesn’t matter that I already have several hundred cards; it’s always fresh and new.  

Grateful.

Called to the Page: A New Poem

Every morning,

mug of hot cinnamon tea in hand,

I go down the stairs to the green table

flush with goddess figurines, Tarot decks

and a view of both the lowlands below

and the rise beyond this hill.

Every morning,

I am called to the page.

The old leather journal heavy

with lined paper that will soon be

either put aside or tossed,

in light of my mortality and the desire

to spare my children the chore

of having to choose whether to read

my musings or to feel guilty when

throwing them away unread.

This routine, this daily habit,

is not so rote as to be meaningless,

even when the writing is boring

blah-blah-blah.

Ink flows from the silver fountain pen,

shaping letters that fill the blank space,

running from line to line, all valuable 

because they are called, I am called, 

to the page.

Does it matter if anyone reads my words, 

if they are never published?

Is being published what makes 

a writer? No.

What makes a writer 

is being called to the page.

Understanding that,

I am satisfied.

It Begins With a Call (Part 29): The Glass Half-Full

I recently suffered a long spell of feeling (and living) like a hermit. This is, of course, not inappropriate for winter, but it was not merely a time of turning inward.  I was not only not reaching out very much to friends, I wasn’t making plans that I knew I wanted to make.  Finally, one day I said to Barry, “I think I’m depressed, and I have been for quite a while.”  The words came out my mouth without a lot of forethought, and they surprised me.  I don’t think I had truly realized it until the words spilled out.  I often see my mood as largely dependent on my physical state, and I’ve had plenty of symptoms of various types I could blame in order to justify my mood.  But admitting depression seems to have opened up a space for something else to happen.

One day soon after, I took myself and my journal out for a walk and stopped in at the newest coffee bar in the neighborhood (the plethora of cafes on Piedmont Avenue is truly astounding).  Writing in cafes is an old practice of mine, and one I hadn’t done, hadn’t even thought about doing, in ages.  Out of that little foray, this poem came:

The Shift

Sitting at Blue Bottle Coffee,

journal on the communal

table, latte at hand,

I felt a distinct inner shift

occur, clear and strong,

though I did not quite

trust it.

Brain scientists claim

that it is possible to

carve new neural pathways

by changing the way

that you think.

Some time ago,

I wrote a poem asserting

that I wanted to change

not just my thoughts

but the way I think.

Desire alone could

not accomplish such

a shift, though.

But in that coffee bar,

In the middle of a

gaggle of young hipster

caffeine enthusiasts,

a click happened, and

a new groove opened up

in my brain.

Why then, why there?

A mystery, that.

Perhaps the mostly full cup

sitting by my right hand

provided the necessary image.

I have always been

a glass half-empty

kind of person, suspicious,

fear-based, looking and

waiting for the other shoe

to drop.

What if that shoe stayed

tightly laced onto my foot?

What if I could retrieve 

the already dropped shoe

and walk fully shod

and balanced?

Now that my longed-for

feeling of gratitude shows up at last,

when the needle jumps to the new groove,

the next cut on the album,

I’d be a fool not to sing

the new song.

The next day I called an old friend, and I reserved a house in Yosemite for my whole family to go in celebration of Barry’s and my upcoming 70th birthdays. I’d almost given up on the idea; finding a weekend we could all go was problematic to begin with, and I just couldn’t muster up the energy to try until my son said, “No, we need to do this!  Don’t give up on it.”

A few days after, I screwed up my courage and also signed up for the Writers’ Intensive with the teacher at the end of May.  Movement!  It’s a little terrifying, but I need to go and acknowledge the fact that I am a writer.

I avow that I am willing to work on this glass half-full neural pathway.