Apologies for not posting news in the course of a month.  E-mails, phone calls, cards and notes have all prompted me to send ‘something!’  What a caring support group!
First off, I am doing quite well right now. I played five consecutive games of pickleball last Tuesday! I had been “off” about two months so this was sheer joy. Very little breathlessness. Played again on Saturday. Ah, nirvana!
The new prescription dosages worked within 24 hours to relieve me of the nagging reflexive cough that had worn me out. Some minor annoyances with eyes and nose tend to come and go. The last chemo Feb. 4 left me alternating between nighttime energy and daytime lethargy. Nothing new. I can fall asleep easily anywhere during the day!
Last Thursday I had the tests to determine the state of my body’s resistance to the cancers. I had a CT chest scan and a thoracic MRI. No valium, no claustrophobia, just a long forty minutes. Tomorrow Karen and I will meet with the oncologist to review the results. Hoping for positive news but prepared for ‘whatever’ as I am learning to live with uncertainty and other people’s wisdom.
Last week I gave myself permission to relax (!) into re-reading books “that fell off the shelf” or others I had begun. A pattern began to unfold as one led to another, wrapped in contemplative moments. For those interested, here are a few.
Karen Armstrong’s book The Spiral Staircase, 2004, details her account of leaving the convent and finding herself, discovering illness and failure, and – in the last chapter – exploring what it means to find your own path. (Author – The History of God.)  I got far more out of it ten years later!  And I too am asking the same question she was asked: “How did you come to be the person you are?”
One book I had never finished was Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying by Ram Dass, written after his stroke. He tells of a man who had three bouts with cancer but whose advice was not to dread the future, but to stay open to whatever comes. “So we plan what’s plannable, then work with whatever we get. Or as the Marines say, ‘You change what you can change. And what you can’t change, you paint.'” I resonated with all of that … plus his comments on Time! There it is again.  “Eternity is now,  and by learning to ‘lose track of time’ through present focus, we begin to discover hidden dimensions to everyday experience, which have always been there for us, but have been veiled by our being time-bound. We can practice this moment-to-moment Awareness by learning to do one thing at a time.
And so last week I found myself practicing just that…..immersed in classical music as I relaxed in the lazyboy…or watching the birds at the feeder and on the patio table…or dozing and reflecting on passages from the various books that had ‘fallen into my lap’ or allowing myself to just ‘be.’  This meant giving myself permission NOT to do something … like working on Spirit Windows or this blog.  But it felt oh, so right and delightful. Being bound in Time on the physical level one can still ‘witness’ a sense of timelessness that slips in and out.
As I went to put away Rachel Remen’s classic Kitchen Table Wisdom (one of my very favorite books), I happened to open to p. 261. I had marked the page…and discovered that in the whole book it is the only quotation/permission. It is an opening chapter quote by Mark Nepo, (poet, storyteller, spiritual teacher) and caught my eye because he will be the speaker at Shalem’s Gerald May Seminar on March 21-22.   I share it with you in the hopes that you might find it as intriguing as I do and that you might be interested in attending the seminar (see link).
Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry, an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God.  It is this spot of grace that issues peace. Psychologists call this spot the Psyche, Theologists call it the Soul, Jung calls it The Seat of the Unconscious, Hindu masters call it the Atman, Buddhists call it the Dharma, Rilke call it Inwardness, Sufis call it Qualb, and Jesus calls it The Center of Our Love.
To know this spot of inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. We each live in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished and covered over only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.
Hopefully I will return to the blog tomorrow evening with whatever news is forthcoming. Life doesn’t depend on test reports despite what it seems. As the oncologist says, the most important gauge is how you feel. And right now … I feel closer to that spot of grace.