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.

   

A Poem to End the Day

Another poem, this one by Libyan-American poet Khaled Mattawa, a poem to end the day, a day when I ran at dusk along the coast with the dog, through grass taller than my head, ran with a stick for cutting through crab spider webs, ran on an old sugar cane railroad bed blasted through rock, then out in the open, through cow pastures, under ironwoods, along dead electric fences, the dog slinking beneath the wires, leaping above the grass chasing mongoose, the dog joyous to be running at last at day's end, running in circles around me, leaping at me in happiness and gratitude, running with him under gray scudding clouds into wind, inhuman, alive wind, running along cliffs below which gray waves bashed themselves, wind like a storm coming, just ordinary trade wind, but this evening, no every evening, when I run that way, alone, no human habitation in sight, with the dog running on ahead, the wind not ordinary, but like expectation, like portent, like something coming, something big, and good, and urgent, and out-of-control, and unknowable, salt-wind urging us along, Kohala mountain wrapped in cloud.  A poem to end a day that drew to its close with running through a herd of cows, who jogged upslope, turned to look at us and bellow, scaring the dog just a little.  A poem to read after dropping down into a gulch, running down a steep slope, dusk now, at the bottom the sea crash-landing against the boulders, wind sending up seafoam in clots, spattering on the headland rocks, white salt-splats in my hair, and suddenly I was talking aloud in Latvian to no one, saying putekli, putu crejums, migla, dusmiga jura (dust bunnies, whipped cream, fog, angry sea), a run ending on top of a headland, running straight into chaos, gorgeous wild chaos, waves crashing below, and wind shoving me around, wind trying to push me down, bullying, shoving, and me breathing loud in response, raising my arms, bending, throwing them down, breathing it out, whatever it is that's lodged inside, old fury or pain, fear, loneliness, the wind carrying away the sound, drowning it out, the wind howling its own anguish, taking mine, the dog, hot and panting, clambering down from the headland to jump into the crashing water, letting it douse him, wash him clean of whatever it is dogs hold onto, then we were running home, to dinner, salmon and breadfruit and eggplant and then this, a poem to end a day, a day when I ran ran alone with the dog, out of hiding, a salt-tang on my tongue, in my hair, maybe it was expectation, maybe it was hope.

Now That We Have Tasted Hope

by Khaled Mattawa

Now that we have come out of hiding,
Why would we live again in the tombs we'd made of our souls?
And the sundered bodies that we've reassembled
With prayers and consolations,
What would their torn parts be, other than flesh?
Now that we have tasted hope
And dressed each other's wounds with the legends of our oneness,
Would we not prefer to close our mouths forever
On the wine that swilled inside them?
Having dreamed the same dream,
Having found the water behind a thousand mirages,
Why would we hide from the sun again
Or fear the night sky after we've reached the ends of darkness,
Live in death again after all the life our dead have given us?
Listen to me Zow'ya, Beida, Ajdabya, Tobruk, Nalut,
Listen to me Derna, Musrata, Trables, Benghazi, Zintan,
Listen to me houses, alleys, courtyards, and streets that throng my veins,
Some day soon, in your freed light, in the shade of your proud trees,
Your excavated heroes will retum to their thrones in your martyrs' squares,
Lovers will hold each other's hands.
I need not look far to imagine the nerves dying,
Rejecting the life that blood sends them.
I need not look deep into my past to seek a thousand hopeless vistas,
But now that I have tasted hope
I have fallen into the embrace of my own rugged innocence.
How long were my ancient days?
I no longer care to count.
I no longer care to measure.
How bitter was the bread of bitterness?
I no longer care to recall.
Now that we have tasted the hope, this hard-earned crust,
We would sooner die than seek any other taste to life,
Any other way of being human.

(FROM THE POETRY DAILY WEBSITE)

Church on Time: A Dispatch

The poem on yesterday’s Poetry Daily website was “The Mass Has Ended Go in Peace,” by K.A. Hays.  Yesterday, a Sunday.  The poem’s title sent a jolt of recognition through me, sent me back to Sundays growing up.  How many times did Sunday morning include those words, but with a tag end:  “The mass has ended.  Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”  The mass has ended, releasing a tide of relief inside my teenaged heart, followed close on the heels by major chords.  Standing.  Looking up and over my shoulder to see Lucille Neveu, my piano teacher, face lit by the lamp illuminating her sheet music, leaning forward into the hymn.  Leaning forward into the rest of Sunday, brunch, homework, scumbling around in my father’s potato patch, 60 Minutes, Masterpiece Theatre. 

Yesterday didn’t seem like Sunday, really, until I woke last night at 12:30 am, wrapped myself in a blanket, and wandered to my writing room in the dark.  To be honest, the only time Sunday feels anything like the Sundays of childhood is when I’m on Cape Cod, scrambling with my sister and her kids to get to the Unitarian church on time.  But reading the poem, my laptop glowing in the dark, I sensed a Sunday taking shape behind me.

I can tell now, waking up as I do almost every night, when trying to fall back asleep is a fruitless enterprise, when lying in bed kicking the sheets off, yanking them back on, turning on my side, my front, my back, results, inevitably, in hooking onto wherever my mind’s freight train’s headed, unknown destination, unchosen, like a grass seed latched onto a runner’s leg.  Then all the day’s replayed, rewound, respun, stitched with worry, litanies of discontent, confession of sins, analysis of data.  In my mind’s church, I’m trapped on a hard pew listening to a rambling homily that never ends well.  It never ends with the words "go in peace."  It just hitch-hikes to another train, my hobo brain.

So I found myself on the futon couch in my writing room, reading “The Mass Has Ended Go in Peace.”  By then, it was 1:30 am (it actually took an hour for me to accept that those weary hobo mind thoughts would not bore me back into sleep, they were no lullaby). 

And then the train pulls into its inevitable stop.  The middle of the night is Cancerland.  You’ve crossed into another time zone.  In Cancerland Pacific Time, it’s always the middle of the night.  You’re always the only one awake.  And it aches, the flat place on your chest, where you can feel the contour of each muscle, rib, hollow, divet.  And you remember images you saw recently, black-and-white photographs of young women with breast cancer,  women under 40, nudes, on a website called “The Scar Project.”  The images haunt you and at the same time keep you company.  They stand beside you, faces lit by the fuel drum fire hoboes kindle along the tracks.  Those women defy the dogmas of the weird other world you inhabit day to day, where you walk around and act like an inhabitant of an ordinary time zone.  After a day like yesterday, the throb, the tightness across the landscape of your scar is particularly intense.  Like a physical manifestation of a psychic state, loneliness.  Loneliness also haunts you and keeps you company in the middle of the night.  It draws your hand to your chest.  In case you’re confused about which place is real, which place is home, it calls your hand to feel the dips between ribs, the bony escarpments and rift zones.  It calls you back.  The images of the Scar Project women bare so much more than their physical selves, their scars, amputations, reconstructions.  The bare expressions on their faces haunt you and keep you company in the dark.  Their eyes more naked than their chests.  In their looks of loss, fear, defiance there’s also WTF.  WTF is what your mind says whenever you look in the mirror, still after nearly two years.

It’s beginning to feel strange, time, and the memory of that summer of surgery and waiting and testing and chemotherapy.  Not like a bad memory receding, a town receding as a train pulls away and rounds a bend.  Sometimes it feels like she’s still there, that version of me.  Last night, listening to the trade wind muscle around the house, I thought of the attic room of my sister’s house, wind buffeting the roofline, the dormers.  I put myself back there.  No door, maybe a light leaking up from the living room, where at 1:30 am my sister might still be transcribing her medical charts into her computer, watching Rachel Maddow, or asleep curled over her laptop, the dog asleep at her feet.  The ping of emails arriving on my brother-in-laws office computer.  Feeling as though I am on a boat, being carried.  Feeling the house below me, my sister’s family, like an enormous rescue ship.  And at the same time feeling that I’m up in the rigging, alone.  Feeling safe and trapped and alone at the same time.  I don’t want to leave her there, that wide-awake-me, I can’t, I won’t.  As though time is a series of parallels, and I can reach across to her, still there on in the attic room, cell phone alarm set to 5:00 am for the trip to Boston for a chemo infusion.  The mass has not ended.  Like the Bible with its parables read again and again, the same stories, as though Lazarus is continuously dying and arising, as though the loaves and fishes are eternally multiplying.

This is a dispatch from Cancerland, from the a post-midnight time zone, a place probably unrelatable, untranslatable.  Populated by voices from the last few weeks, conversations, images, things I’ve read and seen and heard about, deaths, diagnoses.  A friend talking to me of the mind-body connection, of Louise Hay’s theory of breast cancer resulting from an imbalance in the way one nurtures, and my hackles arising.  This friend feels she’s finally brought herself into balance, healing years of digestive problems, constipation, and when I told her how angry those theories made me (and it’s irrational, I know, but I feel the roil of it arising in my throat as I write, what I might describe as bile, or reflux, or a scream concentrated in the hollow between my collar bones), she persisted.  “It’s not that you’re doing something wrong; it’s about imbalance."  I said, but what about Michelle, a thirty-something yoga teacher she knew, mother of two little girls, who’d died the week before of cancer of the appendix.  What was her imbalance?  And the friend said, "Oh, I could see she had imbalances."  And now the women in the Scar Project photos seem to walk forward, one by one, toward me.  Only their WTF looks can respond adequately.  They call me back from the time zone where, two-and-a-half years ago, I too believed I could keep myself safe.  Enough counseling, enough organic produce, enough exercise, enough fresh air, enough healing.  (And all along, I know now, maybe ten years, maybe more, I had cancer; it was growing).  I step back across into this time zone, where I live now, and stand among those Scar Project women.  The land where we live the whys and uncertainties is largely unexplored country, still, and we have only flashlights.  Mine is right here beside me, and when I hear something bang or scuttle, I turn it on and cast the beam around until my heart stops pounding.

This is a dispatch from another time zone.  In the company of my fears and unknowns, with nothing between my hand and my flat chest, alone, it’s where I feel most real.  It’s the place from where I bow my head and whisper, “The mass has ended go in peace.”

Here is the link to the Scar Project sight, if you’re brave enough to look into these eyes, the inhabitants of this place: http://www.thescarproject.org/gallery/

And here is the poem: 

The Mass Has Ended Go in Peace

—not in knowledge, but in calm; not in indifference,

but nearly. Under bullying fog the white houses

stand with effort on the coast, the tides teasing

the scrub blue, the land beneath hassled by waves,

drowning in salt-wine. The lichen, as scalloped and ridged

as the cliffs, breathes red and gold; its smell, like the waft

of earth to heaven, is nearly imperceptible, a touch of fish-rot

and smoke. (I asked, Lord, for stillness and lack of concern.)

The town here could be wiped clean from the land—

no streak or smear of roofs, no smudge of walls.

But the people go on painting the village white.

The weathered wood chokes on its dust; the new whiteness

laughs through fog. I asked for acceptance and got the reek

of paint and a bright house. I can see inside the house: a woman,

sweating and bent, putting away the rollers and the cans.

--K.A. Hays

Revised by Moonlight

A writer I met last summer, Brenda Miller, keeps a blog called "Spa of the Mind," and this morning’s entry was about revision.  First, the physical, renovation version, then the writerly version.  She describes revising/renovating her small house, then likens it to revising a piece of writing.  This morning I’ve been thinking about how you can revise a whole day, moment to moment.  I don’t mean revisionism, literally rewriting the past, gussying it up, prettying it up, or making it sound worse than it was.  Emily Dickinson famously said, “Tell the truth but tell it slant.”  Not even that.  But looking at the truth, perhaps, from a slightly different vantage point.  The way this morning, Craig and I climbed up and down and across a headland to get different perspectives on incoming waves. 

I woke this morning to the waning, but still big, moon illuminating the sheep pasture.  The sheep stood or lay facing that moon.  In the silvery grass, they were very still, very quiet.  The roosters crowed, and the waves boomed below the cliffs.  In my pajamas and a jacket, I whistled for the dog, then walked along the edge of the gulch to the point, where I can look out across a wide embayment toward the lighthouse.  The sky to the east was barely blushing with sunrise, but the moon lit up the land enough to see my way down the path.  On the moonlit water’s surface I could make out the dark lines of swells arcing into Lighthouse Bay.  My friend Ralph, a surfer, would say “Lighthouse is going off.”  The beam swept across the water, catching salt spray, so it looked like smoke was drifting past the lighthouse.  By the time I got back to the house, the sun was up, Craig was brewing tea, and we decided to hike down into the gulch to watch the waves before holing up in our offices for the morning, to work.  Skidding in sandals down the dry duff under the ironwood trees, holding onto branches, we found ourselves in shadow at the bottom, so we climbed up the rocky headland, where the first sunlight already balmed the lava rocks with warmth.  Besides, it’s the best place to watch big swells.  The headland is cantilevered out just enough over the water so you can look down upon the tops of waves curling in, see that extraordinary Coke bottle green color, the building, then the pour of it into a maelstrom of white chaos.  We crept close to the edge to look down upon the waves, then climbed higher to get a better view of the whitewater churning and backwashing and whirlpooling in the cove.  Beat sea until stiff peaks form, the recipe said, obviously.  From each vantage the waves and their aftermath took on a different aspect.  Depending on what I stared at, I could feel frightened, dizzy, ecstatic, or overwhelmed, or all at once, or nothing, indifferent.  Maybe those waves weren’t as big as I’d hoped.  But I felt all those things, and then, after a few good sets, we turned to go, time to get to work.

Back at home, a friend called to tell me about what sounded like an incredible gathering of women I hadn’t been invited to.  It had happened the night before.  And the morning was revised in an instant.  I submerged into a new version of the day.  I sat on my meditation cushion, and it was very much like standing on the headland, with every option of emotion available to me.  I felt eight years old, then 48 years old, then no age at all.  As the yoga teacher said last night, in the wash of emotions there was nothing to do, nowhere to go.  Just breathe.

Last night in yoga, as I stood in mountain pose at the beginning of class, after a particularly busy day, a day in which I was pulled in all directions at once, a day in which I moved in all those directions in turn, I melted with relief at last into quiet, standing there, my arms at my sides, listening to the yoga teacher’s deep voice.  Stand completely still.  And out of nowhere, a question arose in my mind.  What is cancer, anyway?  And it wasn’t a question of biology the unbidden voice in my mind was asking.  It wasn’t a question of genetics or physical reason.  If there’s any purpose to this blog, it’s to discover the answer to that question.  It’s to discover it day by day, as the nature of cancer and its echoes and reverberations in my life are constantly revised.  Cancer is today about seeing things from unexpected angles.

In my morning meditation reading, from the Book of Awakening, Mark Nepo writes of finding new points of entry for the mind.  Over and over again I stand in the same spot, looking down at the waves rolling in.  When that old way is barred, when a particular way is barred to me, a gathering of women to which I wasn’t invited, let’s say, leading to the same old emotional reactions as I experienced in childhood, the reading suggests I continue walking along the edge of that barrier, looking for an opening that’s not in view.  To see the waves from another angle.  Cancer can be looked at as a thief.  Old points of entry, physically, psychologically, spiritually, are certainly barricaded after a cancer diagnosis, as though an avalanche has closed the opening to a cave you once safely hid inside.  Where to go now?  Dig through the rubble to get back in?

What is cancer?  It’s also thoughts run wild, fears run wild, emotions run wild, roughshod and rampant.  The friend who told me about the party also told me that many of those who attended were friends with a woman who was diagnosed with metastatic cancer last year, about the time I was going through radiation.  She is a young woman with two little girls, and she is dying.  Before her illness, this young woman was a yogi, athletic, healthy, doing everything “right.”  And the young women at the party felt shaken and afraid.  How could it happen to someone like that?  If it could happen to her, why not them?  It flies in the face of “alternative” notions, those destructive cancerous ideas that if we’re healed enough, evolved enough, organic enough, we won’t get cancer.  That there is a kind of cancer personality.  That attitude is everything.  That we have control.  But I believe that’s all horse shit.  Cancer doesn’t care.  To me, those ideas are as false and harmful as the belief in a punishing, vengeful god, that cancer or other calamity is punishment for bad behavior.  What kind of spiritual belief system would encourage a young dying woman to think somehow she didn’t adequately heal herself, do enough, to prevent her cancer from coming back?  I reject that particular version of god/goddess/great spirit/oneness/om; I’m an atheist to his/her/its belief system.  But I hear it all of the time.  That certain “bad” behaviors or lifestyles or thought patterns will lead inevitably to cancer, or that certain righteous people will certainly beat it.  Cancer doesn’t give a shit.  It’s amoral, atheistic, and a-compassionate. 

That kind of thinking is just a wall.  And I've walked into that wall as much as anyone else, despite my proclamations.  I’m like someone who claims to be purely logical, but crosses the street to avoid a black cat.  I have to creep along that wall, feeling my way, and it’s dark; there is no moon to light up the path, no lighthouse beam.  My fingers work along the stones in the wall, looking for a chink, a crack, a tiny opening, light or a breeze coming through.  What is cancer?  The wall is cancer.  The mind can collide with cancer, take on the characteristics of the disease, obsessive, its range of vision narrowed.  And no matter the prognosis or course of someone's disease, no matter its cure or remission or progression, if it "wins" or "loses" the "battle," it’s that opening the mind slips through, followed by the heart, the spirit, that’s beyond any idea or definition of cancer, any belief, any physical reality of cancer.  It’s where cancer cannot go.  It’s a cancer-free zone.  It’s the opening, the new point of entry, the new vantage and perspective: that’s what survival is all about:  a pilgrimage to that place.  It’s not about survival of the body.  That’s ultimately a static notion.  No body survives in the end. 

"That's how the light gets in," says Leonard Cohen, about the fact that there's a "crack in everything."  There's a fault-line in any story the mind invents, any belief system, any definition of cancer or healing or survival.  At least in my world.  So it's constantly reworked, revised, this enterprise of finding the meaning of things.  It's a constant walk in moonlight searching for another perspective from which to regard and respond to incoming waves, continually changing shape and direction.  A chance to see again.  To see another way.

On the Spiritual Life of Chickens

The clear sky has sit itself on a slant against the wall.

It’s like a prayer to emptiness.

And the emptiness turns its face to us

And whispers,

“I am not empty.  I am open.

                  —Tomas Transtromer, from “Vermeer”

It’s the last day of my four-day fast, and like others I’ve read about who’ve fasted, I’ve experienced little enlightenment.   The opposite, actually.  A gnawing emptiness, food-envy, frustration, restlessness.  A stark reminder of what all too many people live with day to day (and they don’t have a protein powder supplement).  A reminder of chemo days, eating applesauce and rice water with a baby spoon.  A reminder of how much craving is a part of daily living.  Wishing I were more enlightened, had these things in perspective in the face of my hunger, but I hardly do. 

Maybe that’s why this morning, at 5:30 am, I woke with a nagging feeling of not-enough-ness.  Since I started this cleanse, a voice in my head’s been saying, “You could be doing a whole lot more.”  More for the planet, for community, for strangers, for friends, more.  A more spiritual life.  Ever since I can remember, I’ve felt this inadequacy.  It’s a dark place, a cardboard box folded over myself.  Ever since I remember, I’ve been asking myself, what’s my purpose here on earth?  Some days, we live our lives along an electric current, a sense of meaning, knowing:  This is what I’m supposed to do here on earth.  Most often I feel that when I’m writing. 

When we had news of the stage of my breast cancer, that it was caught early, my sister liked to say, “It’s a save!”  And I felt at times I’d been given, as my friend Asia says, a second chance, a second birthday, a new resurrection.  In the hunger state, the question natters in my brain, “Am I blowing it?  Am I worthy of this health, this renewed health, having my body broken down, stripped down, rebuilt, am I worthy of this incredible gift?”  Swirling, drowning in this feeling, I sat down on my meditation pillow and picked up my journal and wrote.  Isn’t life risk, striking out, the adventure of the unknown?  Isn’t life service to others?  Isn’t life spiritual practice?  What is it I hold myself back from?  What is it I avoid?  Please don’t let me blow it!

And then a hen, out in the coop, began to caterwaul.  In the dark, the sky just tinged along the extinct volcano with morning, a hen laid an egg and announced it to the world, as though it were the big news of the day, the top story.  And just at that moment I was writing in my journal, Is it something about bearing witness, my purpose?  Singing?  Poetry?  As simple as that?  Words for things no one else pays attention to?  Is that was I neglect, searching for something bigger, out there, beyond sight?  My friend David calls our testifying to experience “making an accurate scouting report.”  That’s what’s required of us, bearing witness to what only we can perceive.  Because otherwise no one would hear that hen caterwauling at dawn, laying the dawn’s first egg, announcing this small thing she’s created at the top of her voice, as though hers were the only voice on earth.  She doesn’t ask if she’s significant, if she’s done enough.  This is her creation.  This egg.  Halleluiah.  

And then the morning birds began, each voice announcing itself, its insignificant little life, marking out its territory.  And then, out in the cove, a humpback whale blew, as if to say, “No, it’s me!  It’s me being reborn here!” Is that it?  I wrote.

My friend Asia is a painter, uses paint in such a way that it appears forever wet, dripping.  She wrote to me the other day, that in this way, her paintings remain new to her as the day they were born.  My friend Peggy is a poet.  She wrote a book called Wings Moist from the Other World.  They too, remain newly born, long after they’ve been written.

I wrote a letter to Asia this morning.  Do you think the art we make is fulfilling the purpose of being one aspect of God’s witnessing eye?  I asked her.  And that maybe, if we do our part, collectively, the true earth is made visible, audible, complete?  And it’s a collective effort – your painting joined to my poem joined to someone’s music, another’s dance?  Like these birds repeating themselves all morning long, adding up to the voice of this place?  All of it a prayer out of a greater emptiness?  Is adding our voice, our unique piece, the hardest work of all?

Sometimes it’s like I have to force myself through an aperture, like an egg being laid, tunnel through the narrowness of my own mind and its crippling doubts.  Writing through the tunnel is giving birth to myself, again, out of a terrible claustrophobia, the limitations of all of my judgments.  Those birds repeat the same refrain as yesterday, as the day before.  We can’t even tell the difference between one bird and another.  But that doesn’t stop them singing.  Is that what it’s all about, this being here on earth?