On Basket Caskets and Fish Net Stockings

This morning my brother-in-law send me a link to his friend Julia's blog.  She's a photographer and writer. Recently, another friend, an artist named Coco, asked Julia to photograph her nude right before she was to have a mastectomy.  This woman Coco had had breast cancer several years ago, and was about to reenter Cancerland a second time.  I looked at a black-and-white portrait of this stranger, hard into her eyes.  What was it I saw there? Bravery? Fear? Will? Defiance? The expression of cleaved stone? Joan of Arc? Truth? Beauty? Myself? Other? Of course all of these and more, coming back to the truth of a rocky headland pounded by waves, a taiga forest shaped by fire: this is life. Endurance in the face of the unrelenting, like wind, like spring, like winter, like weather, like erosion, like birthdays, like water.

Last night at a friend's 60th birthday party an acquaintance walked up to me and asked what I thought of our friend Mavis' latest art endeavor. Mavis is a fiber artist who makes impermanent art, who weaves baskets and myths and burns them with community as witness (see my blog posts about her burning baskets in Homer last fall), who believes in transience the way some believe in eternal life. Into the burning basket last September I Joan-of-Arced my beautiful body cast, the one my friend Deer helped me make right before my mastectomy.  (How I hate to say it and claim it, my mastectomy, just as I try not to say "my cancer," how I hate the medical term, the mass, the ect, the omy, the word actually turning ownership over to surgeons, to breastcancerland, not to me. I didn't wield the knife, so their mastectomy helped to save my life, and I don't mean to sound bitter or ungrateful or even disrespectful.  I'm grateful, and I was impossibly relieved when I woke up from anesthesia and knew the tumor was gone.  I cried and cried.

What was mine was loss. In the weeks before I lost my breast, my friend Deer helped me make a body cast.  She's the one who plastered the cloth strips to my naked chest. I stood there in front of her with my eyes closed. Later, I decorated the cast in Deer's basement. Looking at Coco's photograph, at her self-portraits painted during her previous treatment, I remembered the numb-drowned-sleepwalker weeks waiting for surgery, when were it not for my list (schedule bone scan, schedule CAT-scan, call healers, schedule MUGA scan, ask Deer about body cast, buy kale, schedule MRI) and my sister, I would have maybe wandered into the piney, sandy woods, forgetting my name and my way back out, stumbling my way to the ocean, and keeping on going.  So I look back on it now almost as if Deer led me by the hand to her basement studio, put both hands on either side of my head and directed my gaze down to the piles of tissue on the table, the pot of mod podge, the paint brushes, as if she closed my fingers around the paint brush.  Said now begin.  The pure white bandaged cast of my torso lying in front of me like some weird resurrection, the shape already a shadow's after-image, incipient memory, past body, ex-self.

The power of art to heal, writes photographer Julia about Coco's work. Last night at the party, as I started to say before, an acquaintance came up to me and asked, "How do you like Mavis's new work?" She meant Mavis's "casket baskets," woven grave cradles of spruce and birch and grass. And at first I wondered, I admit, why she was asking me. Why me? Did she think I should be shopping for a grave cradle? The question loaded with my own freight. Still too many "how are you doing, are you well now, wow, you look great" loaded questions and comments at a party like that, but at the same time, because of that freight, conversations about coffins, death, burial, and another woman who told me about her sister who'd undergone breast cancer treatment years ago, and was okay, but the friend who wasn't, and her anger years later at her friend's death at 32. And in the background, music, and people wandering around holding cups of beer wearing hippie/hottie/homesteader costumes (lots of knee-high boots) and raucous laughing and lights and fishnets and beads and wigs and death.

And then, a collective of tall-booted, fishnet-stockinged 50-somethings in corsets and short skirts and wigs serenaded the birthday boy before diving with him into a fake cake. And then our 50-something skinny friend Conrad in tight leather pants and a lavender muscle-tee dove in after and legs thrashed and there was screaming. There were a lot of dead people in that party-room too flitting or lurking, who were spoken of, and on the drive home Craig and I talked about some of them, the 32 year-old who died of breast cancer, and the mother of one of my students who died of some out-of-nowhere rare cancer, and the young mother environmentalist who died of ovarian cancer and it just seemed incredibly wrong in spite of that fact that so much cancer to so many incredibly wrong people must actually not be wrong but even weirdly normal, right?  And the sense that sometimes life seems like one big performance art spectacle in which you're a brave, daring actor naked on a tiny wooden stage.

And yet when it happens to you, that wrong thing, that cancer, that bottom dropping out of it all, there's that look on your face.  Even if it's never photographed, there's that look on your face and on the inside, that look on your soul, maybe, of stone, water, sand, glacial till, birch bark, and pure white plaster, the look of endurance and enduring and no and wrong and why and bring it on and fuck this shit too.  And I dare you to look into my eyes. And look at what they are taking away, what I am losing. And when you see that look on another's face, a stranger's face, or in a painting, it says no matter what happens, that bedrock is in you.  That bedrock is you.  Riven and rivered amen.

Thank you Julia, thank you Coco.        

The Bird, the Egg, the Light, the Hand: What Resurrection is To Me

April 12

Resurrection: The act of rising from the dead.

Resurrection: The rising again as from decay, disuse, etc.; revival.

Resurrection:  Resurgence, renascence.

Resurgence:  To rise again, as to new life, vigor.

Nascent:  Emerging.

Renascence:  The process of emerging again.

Resurrection:  The sometimes painful process of remerging in a new form after a cancer diagnosis.

Resurrection:  The name of a bay, a fjord, really, not far from Homer, the body of water we splash our boat into each spring.  Named by Russian settler Alexandr Baranov, who weathered out a bad storm one spring, around Easter-time; on Easter, the storm relented.  As happened to Craig and I, years ago.  A huge storm trapped us in Resurretion Bay for days; I hung Easter candy from everyone’s bunk as they slept on Easter morning.  We woke to snow on the deck. 

Resurrection:  Easter in coastal Alaska:  when winter often lets out one last big howl decrying spring, denouncing its demise.  Don’t worry winter, you will resurrect, too, soon enough.  Now step aside.

Resurrection:  Leaving it, the title of my first book.   Leaving any notion of some easy, instant fix.  A premonition?  Leaving aside the one-time, big-time, come-to-Jesus resurrection dream for the smaller resurrections tooled out of each day’s scuffing around in the woods, half-lost.  The stubborn tulip leaf spearing up through the half-frozen earth in my flower bed against the house wall.  The sticky cottonwood sheath still tight around the leaf.  The migratory snipe landing on top of my neighbor’s still-frozen pond.  His ducks laying eggs again.

Resurrection: The epiphany that changes my mind in the instant and is soon covered over by a fresh dump of old snow sliding off the roof.  And the shovel I use to dig back down to bare ground.  Where was that insight?  Gone.  Begin again.

Resurrection:  Each blessed, bloody morning.

Resurrection:  The Easter of my youth remade for my Alaskan life, the Safeway bags of onion skins stored for years in our basement just for this purpose.  My friend’s old flannel nightgown cut into squares, tinted onion-skin burnt sienna from years and years of egg-dying, fabric squares laid out on the kitchen table for another round, another year.  The onion-skin tinted strings for tying the onion-skin- and cloth-swaddled egg bundles.  The April light, entirely unique, an ice-like quality to it, a flat radiance, the way it bathes the kitchen table in an evenness, like a snow-covered field without shadow, the kind of subtle but huge light that made me tie the drapes back in the breakfast nook.  A light that looks swept and scrubbed repeatedly like white pine farmhouse floor.  White-washed light.  A light like no other.  And in that light, we sat, my friend Asia, my stepdaughters Eve and Elli, Craig, and I, constructed our onion skin nests, laid lace across, or wrapped the eggs in embroidery floss, or pressed cilantro leaves to the shells.  Then the bundles boiling in the pot, the water red-brown bubbling soup of weird dumplings. 

Resurrection:  Untying the hot bundles with fast, burning fingers, too impatient to wait for them to cool, the ooh and ah and Craig claiming every good egg was his creation, and the basket of onion skin eggs we held out for the camera.  And my mother, at my sister’s house, watching other fingers tear open the cloth bundles, extract the surprises, what her own fingers once did for us.  This kind of resurrection hard.  The things that carry on with or without us, no longer attached to us, in their new forms, leaving us behind. 

Resurrection: New life, not the rebirth of what was before.  No going back to square one, no starting up where one left off.  So this ritual I learned from my mother flawed and altered.  The broken, marred, imperfect, ephemeral resurrections that I’m talking about, that I love.

Resurrection: The second anniversary of my cancer diagnosis falling on many different days, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter, because I just couldn’t get the date/day right in my head.  So it landed, like a shadow, on each April-lit day’s stretched-out meadow.  So it lingered long into the night, with the light that tinges the sky past 10 pm already.  So it begins a new year for me, carrying forward both the light and the shadow, walking toward who-knows-what.

Resurrection: New Year’s Day.  But not some given date, celebrated in tandem with hordes of others, but self-chosen. April 8.  My life a messy bundle constructed of saved bits, string, rags, onion skins, a nascent self I can enclose in one hand, like a caught bird  The bird, the egg, and light that bathes it all in a moment’s clarity.  And the hand slowly opening.

Run Toward the Darkness and Shine

April 6

My brain didn’t remember the exact anniversary of my cancer diagnosis; I had to look it up today.  I thought it was today, but it’s actually the 8^th.  My body remembered, though.  Maybe it’s the light, the decaying snow on the ground, or some internal chronometer.  Whatever, it pinned me to the bed last night in an intense flashback as I tried to fall asleep.  What I’m trying to say is that I hadn’t been thinking about it.  And suddenly, there I was.  My heart pounding, reliving the memory of the moments before my breast biopsy, when, in the dark ultrasound room, the radiologist walked in and said, even before he’d inserted the needle into my breast, even before anyone had examined the tumor’s cells under a scope and typed the words “invasive ductal carcinoma” into a file bearing my name, days before the telephone call with its good and bad news (it was cancer; it was treatable; I’d lose my right breast; my left was clear), that white-coated bald little man walked into that room after examining the mammogram films and blurted, “I can tell you right now, breast conserving surgery will not be an option for you.”  It was well before I’d even considered any option at all; I still carried one tattered shred of hope that “the mass” was benign.  Long before I asked my head to wrap itself around the possibility that I might actually lose my breast.  So his words hit me with the force of some crazy-ass rogue wave barreling in and driving me under and holding me there, like one of those crazy-ass big wave surfers.  I can recall, effortlessly, instantaneously, the feeling, though I’ve never surfed in my life.  I’ve never been held under by a wave, rogue or otherwise.  I’ve never been in an earthquake where the ground turned liquid and began to roll.  But yes I have. I was held under.  The ground under my feet turned liquid and pitched and rolled.

Lying there in bed last night, I literally shook my head violently, trying to dislodge myself from that moment, bring myself back to the present, to the second floor of my house in Homer, Alaska, a waning moon leaking its light into the bedroom from between drawn curtains.  And then I had a hot flash. 

Somehow, sometime after, I fell asleep, and towards morning, I dreamed I was in a forest at night, a dense forest of tall trees with a dirt path cutting through, a straight line to a vanishing point of wilderness, a heart primeval.  There was a moon, but it was mighty dark, and the moonlit sky was a narrow river above me.   I knew that in the forest lived brown bears, and that they’d be roving about in the night, and I was alone and had to walk that path through the trees, the forest close on either side of me.  And it was danger.  I’d have to enter that forest and keep walking until I got to the other side, which was where Craig was, where home was.  I had no choice.  So I started walking and screaming, “Hello bears, hello bears” at the top of my lungs and panicking, my heart trying to beat its way out of my mouth.  I was filled with abject terror.  I don’t think, in my real life, I’ve ever experienced terror that immense.  Or I’ve never let myself.  Is that the fear of death?  When I woke from the dream, I felt no relief, nor residual fear.  Only recognition:  This was a big dream.  And I know that place.  That place is real.  It’s a real path I am, on some level, continually walking.  But what’s not real is the nature of those bears; they are not out to terrify and murder me; they form no gauntlet.  The gauntlet is formed by my thoughts, my imaginings, perhaps by deepest darkest worst projections of what death might be.  But is not.  The bears, my waking self knows, are simply bears, going about their nocturnal bruin rambles.  And yes, it’s terrifying to walk through this forest of unknowns, this life of uncertainty and yes, danger.  But the forest is mystery; it’s beautiful for that.  And it can be safe to walk there, at least in the ways that matter.  I believe the most sacred part of myself remained unscathed while being held under by an enormous wave.  In wild forest where I walk, my fiercely pounding heart perhaps warns me not so much of the presence of mortal danger, but reminds me that in its midst, I’m so damn alive.

So this morning, after telling Craig about the dream, and drinking coffee, and firing off emails, and heading to yoga class, during shivasana, my friend Asia, the instructor, read a poem by Hafiz.  And within it was a caption to my dream:

In the overpowering felt splendor

Every sane mind knows

When it realizes – our life dance

Is only for a few magic

Seconds,

From the heart saying,

Shouting,

“I am so damn

alive.”

And to end a day that now, at 9 pm, feels like one continuous dream, here is the inscription visiting writer Steve Almond wrote in a book I had him sign this evening after his talk and reading:  “Run toward the darkness – and shine.”    

The 101st River Crossing

Spring.  Will it always be a season of recall?  A year ago I was writing about radiation recall in this blog.  My body remembering its ordeal.  A red rash on my face, arms and chest.  Now almost two years have passed since I was diagnosed with breast cancer in April of 2010.  And this morning I recalled a couple women – strangers -- I met along that year’s weird, difficult way.  It’s been a whole year since I returned to Alaska after months on Cape Cod, returned a different person, inside and out.  Returned not to reclaim or re-inhabit a life, but to figure out exactly what that life was about, what it looked like, what it meant.  My home, Alaska, was my mirror.  Into its face I gazed every morning through my kitchen window for some glimpse of my own new face.  On my daily walks and runs I breathed its breath, trying to understand the composition of my own breath.  Its birdcalls and branch-clatters and wind-sighs echoed tiny new-formed sounds of a soul reconstructing itself (as I wrote in a poem, out of nothing more than sticks and paper, it seemed), a big empty within gradually being refilled:  bare ground upon which sprouts appear, and prints of animals, and suddenly it’s summer.  It took a year.  A year for a forest to grow up.  It happened so fast, it left a part of me behind.  Now that part is wandering in the new-growth forest, drawing maps, writing field guides to plants, animal tracks, trees, birds, mushrooms.  Testing the waters.  Studying the rocks and ice formations.  Underneath the work I’m doing on the surface of things, the teaching, the writing, is this other work, a natural history investigation.

My hair is a symbol of this, I suddenly realize.  It’s now thick again, curly, a bit wild and unkempt, in need of a trim.  A tangle, like an alder patch, the stuff that grows up when the earth’s damaged, when the ground’s been disturbed.  After glacial scour, avalanche, tsunami, it’s alder:  the colonizer, the scrapper.  That’s how life – the forest around me – feels.  I can’t completely believe it’s mine.  And yet, that woman I was at 46, that woman lying on an examining table, mind racing far, far ahead of the words issuing forth from doctors’ and nurses’ mouths, watching, like clouds, the looks crossing their faces, worry, dismay, that woman is not me either.  Her life is not mine any longer.  I left her back there, it seems.  The language of cancer careering  past her like a gale.  She is lying on the table, and at the same time she is lying on the earth, looking past that wind, above it, so her soul can escape.  Her soul left her body during those day, caught itself in a branch.  It is safe there.  Safe from chemotherapy, needles, radiation beams, IVs.  A poet I know has a book with a title that’s always haunted me:  And Her Soul Out of Nothing.  Sticks, paper.  Wind.  Bird call.  Snow flake, raindrop.  Soul out of melt, out of shadow and leaf-fall and gravel.

Talking to my sister-in-law MiSook this morning, I recalled two strangers from that time of treatment.  Suddenly they appeared, one, then the other, in my memory’s field.  Out of the many faces of my breast cancer year, theirs, vivid, clear. When I close my eyes they are standing in front of me.  One, in the foyer of the Dennis yoga studio where I practiced a sweaty, cleansing form called Bikram in the five weeks leading up to my surgery, and where I practiced gentler forms as I went through chemo.  I was bald, wearing a head scarf that day, and after class, as I was putting on my jacket, this woman said, out of the blue, “I know what you’re going through.”  I looked at her.  She was petite, dark-haired, in her thirties, olive skin, beautiful, that pure no-make-up natural beautiful, and I’d noticed during the class the suppleness of her body.  She radiated health, yoga-glow.  She told me that five years before, she’d been diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer after giving birth to a child; she’d gone through chemo with an infant in arms.  “I’m fine now,” she said, with utter confidence.  “And you will be too.”  At the time, it was like talking to someone across a river.  Do you remember the scene in the movie Into the Wild, when the half-starved, half-crazed main character finally decides to make a break for civilization, hikes to the riverbank, but finds it in full flood, water racing, angry, turbid, concrete-gray, deep?  That kind of river.  And that woman was standing on the other side, in another landscape, a landscape that to me felt utterly inaccessible.  A landscape that looked a lot like the one I inhabited, but was not. Cancerland is where I stood, that other place, the land of illness and treatment.  And while the words of many others, and the experiences of my body, flowed past, beneath my watching but detached soul, that woman and her words brought my soul back into my body for a moment.  Her words didn’t flow past so quickly.  They entered my body.  “I’m fine now.  You will be too.”  What she didn’t say was what fine meant, what place I’d come to inhabit, what it was like, that landscape on the river’s other side. 

Now I stand here and look back across the other way.  The wind is blowing through my crazy post-chemo hair. I scan the opposite shoreline through binoculars.  In case there’s a woman standing there looking lost in her head scarf, in her wig, with her lymphadema sleeve, with her pathology report, with her scars and fears.  And there, I spot her.  She’s just about across the river, actually.  It’s Denice, who commented on my Facebook photo today, how all the hair on my head gave her hope.  “Denice,” I call from across the water.  “Over here.  Denice, it’s me.  I know what you’re going through.  I’m fine now.  And you will be too.”

Getting ready to post this, I saw that it's #101.  And just like all the other river crossings I've made in the last two years, I didn't know until it was already done, that I was on another bank.  In a new century.  All I can say so far:  there are great horned owls on this side of this river.  Calling at dawn in the woods around my house.  In this new century, snow melts off the roof all night.  And the earth under a basement window cracks as a green shoot breaks out.  I like it here.      

Dispatch from 35,000 Feet

From hammock to seat 15B, at 35,000 feet, somewhere over the Pacific, Craig beside me, singing in my ear:  “Don’t worry be happy.”  Saying I should listen to the song continuously while flying.  The sky blue above, an enormous froth of cloud below, stretching to the horizon.  The plane jerking and rumbling on minor turbulence, which doesn’t feel much different than the drive down the dirt road to the land in Hawaii in a pickup.

So what if I attained freedom from fear in corpse pose last night, and then in the hammock watching Jupiter and Venus?  In upright pose in the middle seat on the airplane, it’s the real thing, ground-truth to all of my enlightening thinking.  Here it is, under my breast bone, the familiar fear.  We pass, jiggling, over layers of cloud, openings, patches of blue ocean, like leads in pack ice.   I pinch the fleshy part of my hand, between thumb and index finger bones, the way a friend taught me, to relieve panic.  I tap my fingers on opposite shoulders, another trick.  I practice yogic breathing.  I practice leaving my body, staring at a rift in the clouds until I’m lost in it, mesmerized, hypnotized, but by the jet’s sudden bucking, I’m yanked back into my rabbit-hearted body.  My brain gets so addled, I can’t even read.  So I thought of another idea.  I remembered how scared I was a year ago at my first follow-up mammogram appointment in Boston, sitting in the waiting room in a hospital johnny, called back again and again for more views, for an ultrasound, until finally the thing in my remaining breast was identified as a simple fibroadenoma, benign.  I blogged my way through the waiting, describing every detail, the women waiting with me, even the magazines on the table.  As I kept the words going, a part of my brain was unable to latch onto the undercurrent of fear running there non-stop.

“Pretty good bumps” the flight attendant now says, “keep your children fastened in their seatbelts, stay seated,” while they walk around collecting trash, which I find reassuring.  All must be well if the flight attendants are still allowed to pour wine into glasses held precariously above laps.  The plane now lurching, shaking a bit, tilting slightly side to side, riding the turbulent air like a skiff on top of a wind-chop, tooth-rattling, but not scary on a skiff, nothing on a bumpy road in a truck, but 35,000 feet up, my body says “not okay”.  I breathe, I try to move my body with the movement of the air, try not to resist, watch the cloudscape change, get flatter, more distant, far below, more like lumpy pancake batter.  I love the people who continue to read (like Craig), absorbed in their books, not in the grip of what’s gripping me.  A flight attendant glides by, one hand brushing along the overhead bins, her sleeve fallen back to reveal a big sparkly gaudy crystal bauble bracelet on her right wrist.  As though she’s calmed the air with her sweep, the ride smooths, I take a deep slow breath.

When I finally went to bed last night it was past midnight, but I couldn’t sleep.  A part of me that resisted the day ending stayed turned on.   That anticipation of transition energy jittering through my body.  And the particular fear-of-the-moment that arose in that insomniac netherworld was the fear of cancer coming back, that one.  I awakened the sleeping dragon by writing it out in last night’s post.  Turn it over, I told myself, again and again, out of my hands, and when I finally slept, I dreamed I was back in yoga class, in corpse pose, so relaxed, I fell asleep.  When I awoke (in the dream), the room was dim and silent, and I realized all of us in the class had fallen asleep, Bobby the instructor too, and it was morning.  We’d fallen asleep together, and slept through the night, each of us on our little mat.  It was a dream but at the same time a real thing that happened, more like memory than dream.  I want to believe we met somewhere between worlds last night, in that place beyond worry or fear.

In the morning, the day after Equinox, I sat down one last time at the tiny altar in front of the Japanese screen, lit two candles and a stub of incense, picked up my journal and pen.  Picked scrap paper out of the wastebasket to write my worries, tossed each worry into the wooden bowl holding the spent matches and incense ash.  Then walked with the bowl and a matchbook to the look-out point above the gulch, me and the dog, like any other morning, he brandishing a stick, whacking me in the leg as he ran by, trying to get me to play keep-away.  His big goofy open-mouthed, stick between teeth, cock-eyed smile.  We stopped at the bluff top, where there’s a flat rock I sit on to check out the swells rolling into the little cove.  The air was still, finally, after days of intense trade winds, a little hazy from volcanic ash.  I lit a match and burned the scraps. “Troubles fly away,” I thought to myself.  “Worries, fly.” 

Clearly it’s not magic formula I think, as I look out the window only to be confronted by a big bright ash-colored blank.  We’re flying through cloud.  How did that happen?  But in this vapor-world, it’s a little calmer.  And DING, the fasten seatbelt sign just turned off.  Just a bit of jostling to keep the water in the bottle swaying.  Lots of people springing from their seats to walk around.  Maybe this is my sanga today.  Maybe my sanga just changes face, is now around me on this plane, fellow practitioners, each in our separate seats but being carried along, for four and a half hours, through the same air currents.  Now clouds reappear below us, their folds and bulges and wisps and shadows again apparent.  Bumps again, everyone jigling.  A pregnant woman standing, swaying from one foot to the other, ignoring the DING of the seat belt sign again coming on.  Now bigger bumps, like going airborne for a second, like a fat puffin trying to take off from the water after eating too many sand lance, flapping frantically, belly bouncing, bounce, bounce, bounce, and lift-off.  I write, the plane moves, and suddenly my brain lets go its hold, its fear, following instead the flow of words.  Troubles fly away.  Worries fly.  If only for a moment.  And for that solitary moment of freedom amid turbulence, I’m satisfied.

Remember it's a Practice

It's the Equinox, the earth poised between seasons, the pause between breaths, winter and spring, darkness and light.  I'm paused too, well, pretending to be.  Pretending it's possible.  It's 11 pm on my last night in Hawaii.  Craig's asleep, and I should be too, but I can't bring myself to end the day yet.  Weeks of pining for home in Alaska, and today I found myself digging my heels in against the flow of hours, the track of the sun across the sky, and now, the track of Jupiter and Venus, the bright planets that have been companions this last two weeks.  Back when I used to do orca research from a field camp on an island in Prince William Sound, I'd have a day like this:  the day before leaving the Sound, and I'd be at Whale Camp packing up the wall tent home I'd occupied for four months.  I remember the sensation that the tide had just stopped.  All day, the water would seem to stay at the same level, the sun would barely move.  Only I'd be moving, laying the wall tent out on the beach to dry, packing up kitchen supplies and storing them in the cache, and then, when it did get dark, lying on the beach in my sleeping bag, listening to waves lick the shoreline, and night birds, oystercatchers, gulls, maybe an otter crunching on a clam.  Days like that exist in a kind of eternal present tense; you remember them forever because you slowed the moments down and they imprinted themselves in your brain, in your heart.

That's why I'm lying in the hammock on the deck in the dark writing this, even though little moths are landing all over my bare legs.  I'm trying to eke a few more moments out of this day, stretch it a bit longer.  I'm listening to the churn of waves below the cliffs, the night insects, an occasional gecko clacking in the eaves, and one humpback whale breaching.

Earlier this evening, it was my last yoga class at the little studio in Kapaau, with my yoga sanga, people I barely know outside that time and space, but feel close to nonetheless, sharing a practice, each in our own bodies and breaths, and yet side-by-side.  At the end of each class, after corpse pose meditation, my friend Bobby, the instructor, asks us to find a comfortable seated position, keeping our eyes closed.  Tonight, facing Kohala Mountain, we did what we do each class ending.  Bobby said, "Now let's take three more even breaths together."  And then the sound of the inhale, the pause, and the sound of the exhale, the pause.  I love that moment.  I inhabit every increment.  But it comes to a close, no matter how present I am.  "Move with your own breath; don't follow your neighbor; we're not a dance troupe," Bobby often says during class, but in those three breaths we finally come together, and then it's "thank you for coming, namaste," and we're separate again, rolling up our mats.  Another thing he says a lot:  "Remember it's a practice."  And "You're stronger than you think you are."  We walk out into the night, into the continuous yoga of living.

I wrote in the last post about worry, and it's still on my mind.  Because it's a practice; one moment of insight's followed by another moment of bafflement.  Lying in corpse pose tonight, I practiced letting go of worry in the manner my counselor suggested.  Turning it over to spirit, whatever it is, those worries about things largely out of my control.  I'm a nervous flyer, and tomorrow, Craig and I are doing a lot of flying, and so lying there, I imagined turning it over, my fear; no matter how anxious I am when I walk on the airplane, once I'm aboard, it's out of my hands, and for just a moment, I experienced the most intense release,  the sensation of what it means to totally let go, put it in the hands of god, fate, spirit, whatever -- and to simply exist.  Like being one of Craig's kids, when they were little.  How they'd fall asleep anywhere, sitting up in cars, lying on airport floors, with a kind of faith I can't fathom.  Trusting utterly that they'd be carried along, taken care of.  It doesn't come naturally to me, the way it does to some of my friends who say when they get on an airplane, they realize they've relinquished all control over what will happen; they're in fate's hands, so they just relax into it.  And cancer is an even bigger challenge.  After all the vitamins, and Arimidex, and exercise, and anti-cancer diet, and yoga, and meditation, and no alcohol, and no scented cleaning products, and no sugar, and no dairy or meat, and now, fewer sunflower seeds (they have cadmium), it's out of my hands.  I don't have control, whether cancer will return.  For a moment, in corpse pose, I experienced what it would feel like to live that way.

It reminded me of something -- a momentary feeling from earlier in the day.  Sitting in front of my altar, doing my daily mediation, which now includes writing my worries on little scraps of paper, putting the papers in a bowl, and later burning the scraps, I decided to pick an Osho Zen card at random, wanting some sense of this next phase of my life.  "Inner Voice" was the card I picked.  The last paragraph of the text about this card said this:  "When you are cured, you throw away the meditation, you throw away the medicine.  Then you live as truth -- alive, radiant, contented, blissful, a song unto yourself."  For a split second, when I read those words "When you are cured," I fully believed them.  Breast cancer people say you must live "as if."  

As if the Equinox will go on and on, if I take one even breath after another.  If I don't let a single wave or breath go unheard, uncounted.  Radiant, contented, blissful, a song unto itself, played out over a day stretched to its breaking point, and yet, it is now 11:25, and in 35 minutes, it will be tomorrow.  And another day to practice.

And now, let's take three more even breaths together.

From the Pupil of Worry's Blue Eye

   

At a friend’s the other night, I said, “Hey, have you seen ____ lately?  I’m worried about him.”

“You worry about people a lot, don’t you?” my friend asked.  “You know the energy of worry doesn’t help anything.”

You know how you can hear the same thing again and again and not HEAR it, and then, one day, you finally do.  It gets past all the walls and goes inside.  Like that proverbial one snowflake that finally breaks the branch.  Like that gust that gets past all the layers of windbreak trees to reach a sleeper’s ears.

Running through the cow pastures the next day, in my head, a litany of recent worries went like this:

For the other night outside the kava bar, our friends’ son looked awfully strung out.

For after those new yoga shoulder stretches, my scar tissue sure was tight.

For that boogie boarder paddling out alone into big waves at 5 pm.

For our friend Ralph not bouncing back from his hernia repair.

For the baby chicks eating the hen’s food; aren’t those grains of cracked corn too big?

For my step-daughter rafting down the Grand Canyon with a group of college friends.  For Granite, Horn, Hance, House Rock, Lava Falls, the big rapids.

For 894 emails in my inbox, how many overlooked.

For my incommunicado grad student.

For what if there’s a crab spider trapped in my hair?

(Worry doesn’t follow linear time, goes forward and back, asks equally of future and past, “what if,” and wonders “if only.”)

Today is windy, a sunny afternoon after a spate of unsettled weather here in Hawaii, days of gray scudding clouds, wind, big swells, nights of continuous lightning, rain deluges.  When a low-pressure front passes, high pressure builds behind it, and air moves, “filling in after a low,” people say.  Big trade winds clear out the cobwebs of the old storm.  If only they could do the same for me. 

Weather penetrates my skin’s thin hide.  I experience weather inside and out.  So the trade winds sweeping out the heavy skies feel almost violent to me today.  When they blow hard, I often wake in the night, filled with a fritzy energy, as though I’ve been hung out to dry inside-out on an ironwood limb – those ironwoods that grow along the edge of the gulch, planted by the sugar cane companies as wind breaks. The wind hisses through their long needles, rustles and bends low the bamboos, thrashes the milo and ko leaves, then, finally arrives at the house, whistling in the windows, entering my ears, my brain, registering as anxiety.  Translating as worry.  I get up, wander the house, find the quietest corner, read myself back to sleep.  I read to avoid confronting the worry, asking it:  “What are you trying to say?”  I read because worry sometimes is just too powerful a force for my limited meditation skills. 

I’m asking myself these days “What is worry, actually, what does it serve?”  And why am I, it seems, its willing servant?  When I think about it, I see that if I’m not worrying about this or that ache or wave of tiredness or sore muscle being recurrent breast cancer, I’m worrying about someone else.  Take Ralph, our dear friend here, who shares this piece of land with us.  He’s having a hell of a time recovering from his hernia operation.  He’s been laid up for days; very unlike Ralph.  It seems the anesthesia didn’t agree with him.  One evening, after visiting Ralph, I got sick to my stomach, had to quit washing dishes and lie down.  When Craig told Ralph about it, Ralph said, “She doesn’t have the flu; knowing Eva, she’s got sympathy pains.”

I’ve thought of myself as a sympathetic person, but my friend pointed out that worry is not sympathy, not compassion.  Worry is kind of selfish actually; it’s faithlessness, and also a twisted belief that somehow you might have some control.  Worrying about my breast lump two years ago did nothing to make it go away.  Five days a week of Bikram yoga for five weeks and tumeric and the surgeon’s scalpel – that reduced and then removed the lump.  Action.  Worry is usually when you can’t do a god damn thing.  Maybe that’s why it’s nocturnal.  It slips in the door when it’s too early or late to call anyone.  When everyone else in the hood is asleep. 

It’s no good to be a worrier here on earth.  Earth upon which nothing stays still – come to think of it, earth upon which nothing stays – and upon which life changes in the ordinary instant, as Joan Didion writes in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, about her husband’s sudden death.  This morning I read something about change, how it’s incessant; it’s the only thing we know for sure:  everything will change.  Still, sometimes change bowls us over.  The writer said that change is constant, a big wheel spinning, well-being giving way to angst giving way to joy giving way to sorrow giving way to elation giving way to disappointment on and on, and the best place to go is the center, the hub, where the turning is slowest.  Where you won’t get as nauseous.  If you cling to the wheel’s rim, worrying about what the next spin will bring, you’ll just get dizzy, then crushed.  And don’t ships head for the hurricane’s eye? 

Sometimes the wind – change – blows screaming by, and sometimes it tears a limb from the tree, uproots a whole tree from the ground.  That happened last night.  We found a big ironwood fallen across the path I walk on every morning.  Yesterday Craig, describing Hawaii’s weather, and why he loves it, said it’s constantly in flux; it changes fast. That’s what he likes about coastal Alaska too.  Weather is always arriving or departing.  How is it that something we love in nature we fear in our own lives? 

The other night, my friend Nancy and I hiked down into the gulch, despite a wind so strong, it reminded us of the Aleutians, the ocean torn ragged, long streaks of white on gray, fifteen foot waves, an almost cold wind, the sea bashing into the cove below us.  Slip-sliding the slope of dirt and ironwood needles, the dog running on ahead, we went, emerging from the trees onto the naupaka-covered flat above the shoreline, we were hit by salt spray.  Waves dashed themselves against the boulders, and the wind grabbed fistfuls of water, turned it into foam, and flung it at the headland.  A writhing pool of foam a few feet deep had formed under a rock wall.  It jiggled and swayed, fascinating, but it made me seasick to watch.  Foam flew at our faces like big splats like wet snow.  We climbed the spattered rock face up to the lookout on the headland, about twenty feet above the sea, watched truly bitchy-looking waves stalking in, twisting on themselves, pummeling the rocks, which turned them into huge sprays.  They reared up before us well above our heads.  When I left there, my face was gritty with salt.  My hair was caked with that sea-spit.

What’s my worry in the force of that?  That’s why mornings, my meditation, my prayers, pleadings that feel sometimes like so much salt spray splattered on a rock, dripping down, one fistful of foam  against a huge ocean, everything life can dish out.  We never see it coming, that wave.  Prayer is running for cover at the wheel’s hub.  Maybe it’s even worry transformed.  Prayer is what becomes of worry after its toxic energy is removed.  And I’m talking prayer of the faithless, prayer of the scared.  Or prayer of the unprepared.  Last night in the corpse pose, I thought of Ralph, saw him, skinny, weak, and was overcome.  Love.  I thought, suddenly.  Love is at the root of worry, not fear.  It gets back to love.

Sometimes I don’t duck or hide.  Sometimes I run into the wind, or climb the headland to let the wind try to knock me down.  A force that big tears the worry from my throat.  A force that big cuts me down to size.  I’d like to stop living the litany of worry.  I’m not sure how, yet.  There’s got to be a way to get into the center, to crouch there, watch change swirl around my head, around the heads of my loved ones.  Or to run toward it, into it, through.  Maybe prayer is pointless, doesn’t altar any outcome.  But right now, I spend a hell of a lot more time worrying than I do praying or running.  And if praying is possibly pointless, worry is certainly.  Utterly, certainly pointless.  Or is it?  Is it better to crawl back up a spoke to the wheel’s rim, to the brunt of the world, to feel change whipping by? To turn my ship back into the wind, against all intuition, the root of worry being fear?  Turn back into the waves and spray, having faith that there is a calm center to it all?  How to get there?  Watch the storm while crouched inside its blue eye.