Monday, June 3, 2013

A Creation Story

This is a hard post to write.

On Friday, I found myself in the hospital with a collapsed lung, a pleural effusion -- the lining around my lungs filled with a beer-colored fluid, which a surgeon drew out with a long needle, filling three liter-sized glass jugs.  So much fluid, my liver, heart, trachea, all were shifted out of place.  This morning, a sample of that fluid was on an airplane, heading for a pathology lab in Anchorage.

And I am here, my feet in sealskin slippers on the ground.  Today I am waiting, once again waiting.  Today I am both afraid and numb.  And open, also, strangely so.  How does one wait?  Out of reflex, one calls it "limbo," this waiting, this not-knowing.  Should I watch movies?  Should I clean the refrigerator?  Should I prepare for the workshop I'm teaching at a conference in a couple weeks, as if, as if?  Should I answer emails?  Should I make phone calls?  Should I think positively or prepare for the worst?

A friend from Cape Cod sent me a note a couple days ago, and I just reread it.  She told me that she was thinking of me as she pulled "pottery from our earth pit this morning and some of it broke as always."  I saw a photograph of this earth pit, of small vessels being raked out of the ashes.  She wrote:


ash and clay
wind and fire
heart and rattle
a dirt womb
a belly bowl
a place for prayers and dreams
a place for offerings

She said she "gave thanks for all that survives this kind of heat, this kind of living down deep in the heart of the matter."

She wrote:
i send an ocean wave
a meandering path
a poppy's bright orange face blessing
And I realized that there was another way to wait.  That the word "limbo" is a short-cut, a cliche.  That whatever comes next in this day, in this week, in this moment, in this life, requires an act of imagination, of re-imagination.  It requires more than medicine, distraction, analysis, pathology, diagnosis, procedure, to-do list, platitude.  When there is nothing I can do, nothing to speed along an answer.  When there is no one who can divine my future or fate.  Then an act of imagination is required.  To imagine what I have never imagined before.  To create what I have never created. 
I want to dig myself a dirt womb.  I want tunnel down to the place of prayers, dreams, and offerings.  I will rake something out of the ashes of whatever comes next.  I will rename whatever this experience is and will be.  Whatever this experience is and will be, whatever this place is where I am waiting, and where I will be no longer waiting, it will not be called "cancerland."  It will be newborn, never before imagined or realized, mine and mine alone.  

2 comments:

  1. Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
    Confucius

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  2. Eva, how long dost we havest to live?
    A few seconds compared to eternity.
    So keep that in mind; think of all Jesus
    is going through (homosexuals, abortion,
    peepow not living for 7th Heaven, living
    for the NOW, hate is off the charts, pride,
    lust, greed...) What you’re going through
    is minuscule compared to what sHe is.
    And trust me. Our pain is a teeny-tiny-nthn
    to the Glory of Eternity forever. I’m a Near
    Death Experiencer after a severe hedNjury.
    I wrote these alt.blogOrammathons to help
    peepow like you, agnostics, atheists, peepow
    who don’t give a $#+ to try to wakeMup:

    🔜 Dudette...
    Q: What am I gonna do in 7th Heaven for
    centillions X centillions of eons of alt.reality
    with UFU wanna, ya stunning wildflower?

    A: The flight of ‘the Raww!kuss’ (my killer
    starship) - 111ish killillion parsecs across
    the universe; loving/serving you; picking-up
    stowaways who think their subtle maneuver
    goes without notice and, finally, touching-
    down on the HUGE home world of KodexxII
    where we can learn-to-play ‘NachoCheese
    Dude’ and ‘O!Wah!Hoo!’ (et al) So the sheer
    exponential on the Other Side is far beyond
    what brains can comprehend on earth.

    Just meet me@RongWay café Upstairs for
    some beers/savvy pretzels in the starry sky.
    We’ll schmooze, cool shoes??
    Cya soon, ya suave dynamite...

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