It's been five months since I last wrote here. I'm about two months out of the hospital, and I didn't realize it at the time, but chemotherapy and radiation is slow. It keeps working well after the interventions have ended. And consequently, I've been surprised. The news has been good. It was dark for a while. I found myself crying to my own therapist, preparing for the worst. Not angry but confronting a very limited amount of time in this world, with the people I love, and with the limited things I can accomplish with the time and energy I have left. But then the news began to change. It didn't register with me at first. Only now, or recently, but not quite all the way, is it feeling real that time is opening up before me.
This means the lessons from cancer have a chance to manifest in actions and works and expressions. And one must not forget these lessons for they are rare and often hard won!
Recently, I read a poem that, really, just puts down plainly a lesson that I gathered from my recent experiences. It’s Mary Oliver's poem, Wild Geese. I interspersed my comments in the parentheses below:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
(To live a full life, it need not be hard - we do not have to make huge sacrifices, do anything that is agains ourselves, or chastise oursleves for any moral weakness or mistakes.)
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
(Just sinking in to what is right here already - our body - and listening, trusting. It knows. It is such a source of wisdom! But also such a source of quiet pleasure!)
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
(Our despair, our emotions, our daily concerns and worries exist. Yes. We share them. We are not alone in that. And it is not all. Not even close - in this context, in the vastness of nature, time, of which we are. Let us not forget that either!)
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
(If we watch, if we grow quiet and patient enough to notice, nature - the geese, our body, our dreams - they will always {and quickly if we just ask and then listen}, show us the way to our true home.)
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
(All we need, no matter our past, no matter our present, no matter our trauma, no matter our inner critic, or spiraling mind, or hurting body, no matter, all we need is already before us.)
Momo (whom I speak of in the previous posts), with the guidance of a tortoise, found the place were time begins, is created, and can stop - the origin of life, existence, and the very place she needs to find in order to defeat the Men in Grey who steal all of people’s time with a haze of smoke, with the manipulations and misconceptions that we must hurry, accomplish, be productive! In this place she found the lilies that are in the heart of each of us. Unique, and many for each person, growing, blooming wilting, over and over throughout our life. She found this place, not by walking on her knees, or some other god-awful and difficult way, but by following a tortoise, who seemed to go so, so slow and make absolutely no sense! And as she got closer to the center, where the wizard of time, Professor Hora, resided, she even had to walk backwards, of all things, not seeing, but it was the only way forward. Such nonsense, but that’s the truth of it in this life, and why we struggle so hard to find it.
Cancer, a great teacher for me, as well as a recent experience with a vipassana meditation “boot-camp,” strips so much of the smoke away, revealing the gift that has always been right in front of us, announcing itself to us over and over. And then there is our daily practice of re-remembering all this, because we will forget it again, every few minutes!
So my prayer, my wish for all of us, myself included, is that we let the soft animal of our body love what it loves, and learn to trust, and follow, the silent, slow, and dear tortoise.