Revisiting The Language of Bones

I've written many versions of a piece I call, "Listening to the Language of Bones." The newest version has just been published in the on-line journal Survivor's Review (http://www.survivorsreview.org/features.php?vol=14&art=200). My essay is posted here for you to read, but I urge you to visit Survivor's Review and check out some of the very inspired writing there.


     When I took the oath as a physician on graduation day from Osteopathic medical school in 1986, I promised to listen deeply, to feel the messages conveyed by my patients' bodies, especially their bones, not knowing what that promise would eventually entail. After years of caring for people and devoting my studies and perceptual training to receiving the stories of other people's bones, my own bones call out more loudly than anything I've ever heard. My bones have become passageways for breast cancer to spread its cryptic message. I promised to listen, and now I hear an unexpected language spoken in a strange tempo that sounds like the static blur of a shortwave radio transmitting a distress signal from a faraway place in the night.

     I yearn to understand the language of bones, of the dialect spoken by the cancer in my bones. What is the grammar of cancer? With what does its rhythm and cadence synchronize? A tumor bulges from within my sternum, hovering over my beating heart. Is there communication between my heart and the tumor, or is cancer like a sociopath, wreaking havoc and causing harm without having any empathy for the suffering it causes? The paradox is that this cancer in my bones is essentially made from my own cells. Do I have cancer, or does it have me? Is it mine? Can it be had? Is it an "it," or is it me? Have I been inflicted or gifted by this growing presence within me?

     When I can't understand something, I turn towards the sensation of my moving breath, and look for resemblances and resonances with water. I lie in bed late at night when I cannot sleep and ride the fluid breath inside my bones.

     When I take this ride, I clearly see that the common feeling many of us have, that our bones are solid, is an illusion. The average bone is about 20% water. What an interesting way for the body to store and utilize water! Water is somewhat useless without a functional container. If you carried water in a plastic bag, it would not be handy when you got thirsty. If you stored your drinking water inside your car's tires, you would have no access to it when you needed a drink. The human body is an incredibly functional container for its 70% water content; its spaces, cells, and tissues form the vessel for its fluid-based form. Some mysterious set of codes and signals organizes our amorphous sac-of-water bodies into a highly functional form, and in my case, these signals have been distorted allowing cancer to overgrow inside my bones.

     I oscillate from sensation to science, from memoir to philosophy every time I hit a cancerous bump in the road. I try to breathe and just let it be, but I become distracted by the dissonance between what I think about the body and what mine is actually doing.

     Listening to the distress signals emanating from my bones, I am reminded of my promise. Bones carry promises from one point in time to another. The mineral and fluid matrix resonates and receives signals simultaneously from the past and future. Life unfolds from all directions, not necessarily in a linear progression, into all directions through our bones. My bones will bridge the past and future assimilating food and water, the wake of desire and longing, the residues of repetition and impact, and the hardened reactions to shock and trauma. The messages of my bones will persist whether buried or burned. The call of the shadow arises from deep in the marrow. A light cannot shine in such an enclosed space, but a river can flow in the darkness. A message arises from the darkness and I hear it emerge as a ripple in the stream of my consciousness. As I adapt to the dark, I hear a distant Voice, whispering, calling out an as yet unimagined message about allowing the next moment of my life to flow into the present. The response to this call, to such profound loss, is nothing short of radical reimagination. I promised to listen.

If you want to read about some of the things I love about bones that I edited out of this piece, go to my blog entry of June 18, 2011 entitled, "Secret Sculptures of Bones" or read Chapter 6 of my book, "The Mutability of Mesoderm."

The Joint Previously Known As Sterno-Clavicular

When Prince took on "The Love Symbol"

in 1992, in lieu of a name that was copyrighted by his record company (Prince) or given by his parents (Prince Rogers Nelson), he called himself, "The Artist Previously Known As Prince" because the symbol was not pronounceable. He embraced his existence, but the identifying label of his given name no longer adequately described who he felt he was. And so it is with my sterno-clavicular joint.

I went to yoga class yesterday morning, and while on my knees and forearms (the rest of the class was on their hands and knees doing a variation of Half Moon Pose), I rotated my upper body to lift my left arm up towards the ceiling and my right clavicle dislocated. It made some awful, dreaded, grinding sounds, followed by a thunderous pop, and I fell over in slow motion like Artie Johnson on a tricycle from an episode of Laugh-In circa 1967. Luckily the floor is nearby when in this position, so the fall didn't worsen my situation. In fetal position, I breathed deeply and did some subtle wave motions with my broken wing (arm folded at the elbow) and popped it back into something you might call "place." 

It actually wasn't too painful. It was more nauseating - that feeling that something is terribly wrong. I remember learning to cope with this feeling during the winter of 1987 while an intern at Coney Island Hospital in Brooklyn. The ER saw a record number of fractures that icy winter and I was on what seemed like an endless Orthopedics rotation. (U2's song "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" seemed to always be playing on the radio in the ER while I was ransacking the supply closets for the right casting materials, which were chronically in short supply.) When someone is wheeled in with their broken fibula pointing in the wrong direction the doctor can't respond effectively while nauseated. I learned to breathe and reduce fractures. I knew how to cope with this relatively minor emergency.

I sat for a few minutes and finished the class with a lot of modifications. I don't even think the people on either side of me knew what happened. It's a class of mostly "older" women. People lose their balance and stumble frequently in this class, so I didn't stick out. (Oh crap, I just realized that I'm 56 and that's closer to 60 than 50. Even without cancer as an excuse for why I'm slowed down and creaky, I'm one of the "older women"!) Growing older, especially with disability is a lesson in adapting. When healing is not a possibility, the only way Health can express itself is to adapt. Here's an inspiring example: 

The teacher looked over to see if I was ok, but by then I was sitting and gathering my breath and my composure. Class proceeded uninterrupted. I cried a little while in Shivasana (Corpse Pose) and went on with my day. Today, surprisingly, I feel not too bad, like someone punched me in the upper chest. I think I just challenged the wad of scar tissue and bits of tumor that are "The Joint Previously Known As Sterno-Clavicular." Back in 2009, when bone metastases spread from my sternum into my clavicle they destroyed the joint along the way. Up until yesterday the area was sore and full of novel noises, but as long as I avoid things like volleyball and boxing (ha ha), it stayed together pretty well. I guess I have to be more careful when I bear weight on my shoulder girdle and move in novel directions. One more thing to let go of... 

As long as I can get back to Tango I'll be able to handle the loss. Yes, Steve and I are taking Tango classes. Please don't try to picture us; we're not that good. We are, however, having a fabulous time with our brilliant teacher and the sensuous music. 

The longer I go without blogging, the harder it gets to know where to begin. So when I had the humorous thought about my debacle in yoga class, I jumped on the opportunity to jump-start this long over-due entry. Here are the first lines of several recent failed attempts:

1. September 1st was our 1-year anniversary of moving to Vermont, 3 days after it was declared a disaster area from Hurricane Irene, and now we anticipate Sandy's arrival. (We ended up getting nothing at all from Sandy.)

2. I'll just cut to the chase; in the realm of cancer news, it's all good. My August and December CT and bone scans look "stable." No new cancer; nothing has spread or grown. It's all still there (sternum, ribs, clavicle, pelvis) but doesn't seem to be doing anything. I can live with this! 

3. How many blog entries can I get away with that start with an apology for why I haven't blogged?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I've never ended with an apology, so here's #1. I'm sorry I haven't blogged, but it was important for me to be in my life and not be reporting about it. I can't promise anything, but I will be blogging randomly in the future. Stay tuned and please drop me a line if you haven't heard from me and you're wondering.

In the meantime, I've grown fond of Prince's Love Symbol. It looks like a sternum and a clavicle with a spiral of healing vortex. If it weren't copyrighted (it's officially "Love Symbol #2; I have no idea what happened to #1) I'd use it as the new name for my "Joint Previously Known As Sterno-Clavicular." 

I'm (relatively) fine - blogging will resume soon

I have a frightening number of emails in my inbox from those of you concerned about my lack of blog entries. I keep thinking I'm going to answer you all individually and get some inspiration to start blogging again, but writing just isn't happening easily these days and I have an aversion to pushing against resistance. It's good medicine for me to notice when I feel like I have to brace myself and push, and then choose another path.

I'm doing (relatively) fine. On the cancer front, there's nothing new. My bony lesions are still there, slowly shrinking and remodeling. I've had issues with my kidneys that have effected my blood pressure, but that seems to be manageable right now. The side effects from the anti-estrogen drug are worse than the disease, but I'd rather have joint pain than cancer. You must know I'm doing everything possible to care for myself on every other level to cope with my situation.

I'm doing well enough to bond with my new home and indulge in the simple pleasures of mundane life. We're making friends and totally loving our massively simplified life. Summer in Vermont is amazing.

We're off to Montreal (an hour and a half drive) for a 15th anniversary celebration. When we get back we have my step-son Ben and his girlfriend visiting for a week, on their way home from their European adventure. August comes with my next set of scans. You can look forward to a real blog entry mid-August.

I'm grateful to have you all in my life. I watched a video of Fritjof Capra in conversation with Brother David Steindl-Rast yesterday and he said, "Community is the antidote for consumerism." Ponder the possibilities of how that might influence your life. You'll be hearing more from me in the next month.

I'm In The Mood For Love And Spontaneous Remission

In the early 1990s researchers at the Institute for Noetic Sciences catalogued cases of "spontaneous remission" of cancer and other diseases that generally don't tend to disappear without treatment. They hoped to create a database from which researchers could draw in order to study these mysterious cases of health and healing. They created the database, but no one has actually studied these people.

I liken their work to a program that the British Royal Air Force had during World War II. Aircraft that performed far better than expected were studied, rather than attempting to learn from the ones that malfunctioned. Fighter planes were thought to require maintenance and repair after a certain number of hours of flying. The demands of the war required some aircraft to fly extended missions. Some planes malfunctioned and did not perform well, and some exceeded expectations. Rather than study the planes that broke down, they investigated the planes that performed well.

When I heard about this program, I wondered why we don't do the same with people? Most of medicine is based on studies of what's wrong; why not study what's right with us and extrapolate how we can use that to guide our health care? Why don't we study people who seemingly spontaneously recover from diseases that normally lead quickly to decline and death? Recently, Kelly Ann Turner, a PhD candidate at University of California at Berkeley studied spontaneous remissions of cancer. Here's a link to her thesis:
http://www.shuniyahealing.com/offer/documents/KATFinalDissertation.pdf
But if you don't want to read the whole thing, here are the 6 things she found in common with the people who thrived:

1. Deepening one's spirituality.
2. Trusting in intuition regarding health decisions.
3. Releasing negative and/or repressed emotions.
4. Feeling love/joy/happiness.
5. Changing one's diet.
6. Taking herbal/vitamin supplements.

What's interesting about this list is that the specifics don't seem to matter:

1. There is no spiritual path that is best. It just seems important to feel connected to something, anything greater than one's individual self. This is not about religion. It could be as simple as a daily walk outside appreciating nature.
2. Which health care decisions these people made was not as important as how they made them. Trusting that they each made the best choice, made that choice work better. This has also been the overwhelming theme amongst people who have been a part of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program.
3. What the repressed emotions are, and which approach to use to address these emotions, is not as important as becoming aware and not dwelling on the negative effects of dwelling on them. I would say "facing" or "accepting" rather than "releasing," but it's not my thesis. I believe that things we don't deal with keep coming up, and that once we face them, they can lose their charge and their detrimental grip on us.
4. No one would argue about the beneficial effects of feeling love, joy, happiness, (and I would add pleasure.) I strongly believe in feeling all emotions and not excluding the "negative" ones. Negative thinking is clearly toxic, but so is positive thinking if you don't really feel it. With my aversion to feeling drugged with pain medication I have found that experiencing love/joy/happiness/pleasure is the best pain relief around. While I'm feeling pain in one part of my body I can always find another part that feels pleasure. Then I can choose which sensation to bring into the forefront of my awareness. I can feel sad and angry about living with cancer, but profoundly enjoy a good kiss or a massage. I am convinced this is good for my health.
5. The specifics of what diet to eat are not as important as developing a consciousness that guides you to eat with more sensitivity once you've been given a diagnosis.
6. Which supplements to take is not as important as the awareness that comes with taking them.

It looks like I'm with the program in all 6 categories. Perhaps that is part of why my bone scan (of 2/15) is looking good! There is no spread of cancer, and what's there looks like it's shrinking. Bone scans are not generally used to quantify whether a tumor is getting better, CT scans are better at that, but require a huge amount of radiation to create that picture. We opted to save the CT scan for later, since there's no bad omen to follow. All of us who looked at the bone scan together couldn't help but notice that the places with metastatic tumors look smaller. Even though it's not scientifically "official" I'm happy to look at a picture in which my tumors look smaller.

Unfortunately, the only thing that does look worse is the arthritis induced my my aromatase inhibitor (estrogen blocking medication). My hands, wrists, feet, ankles, knees, spine, elbows, and shoulders look more acutely arthritic. For some mysterious reason, my hips still are totally untouched by arthritis! It's somewhat validating to have the things that hurt light up on the scan. It assures me that I'm not just imagining it. I wonder what things are common to people who don't have side-effects from medication?

While I can't claim spontaneous remission - I still have metastatic cancer roaming through my body, I can claim to have beat the sadistics, oops I mean statistics. 90% of women with my diagnosis don't make it through the second year, but here I am getting better, not worse in the 2 years and 4 months post-diagnosis. I also can't claim remission, because I am treating the cancer with a medication. My improvement is not technically "spontaneous", but I can claim to be moving in the direction of remission because it is statistically unlikely for me to be improving as much as I am. You can see the mental gymnastics I can get caught doing around this subject. The mind is a bad neighborhood; if I stay there too long I get mugged.

Regardless of statistics and theses, I am doing fairly well. I now get another chance to live my life and attempt to not dwell on the results of the next bone scan. I see my oncologist every 3 months and do simple blood tests. If I'm still doing well with no new symptoms in 6 months, we might postpone the next set of scans for a whole year. Next year, however, regardless of how well I'm doing, we need to do the big overview and get the full-tilt-boogie of work-ups: bone scan and CT scan, along with the usual blood and urine tests.

I'm away this weekend with my old Osteopathic study group in Massachusetts. Although the intellectual stimulation is great, for me, it's the love fest and schmooze factor that called me to return to the group. I've known a few of the members for 30 years, and most of the rest for at least 20. There's something about being with old friends that I am sure stimulates my immune system. Osteopathy and Love is good medicine.

The "Sitting With Uncertainty" Blog Is Available For Viewing

The "Sitting with Uncertainty" discussion is available now for everyone to benefit from the collective wisdom of the people who have been a part of the Commonweal Cancer Help  Program. You've only ready my contribution. There are about 10 other people's responses in this blog. It is rich. Please check it out.

The link is:
http://cchpalumni.wordpress.com/

Happy Belated Ground Hog Day

After Thanksgiving, Ground Hog Day is my favorite holiday. Few, if any of us have emotional baggage around this holiday. Those of us who celebrate it don't seem to be burdened or stressed by the rituals surrounding the day. Perhaps the people in Punxsutawny, Pennsylvania are under pressure to put on a good show, but I'm not. Aside from re-watching the Bill Murray film which made the holiday famous amongst us quasi-Buddhist English-speaking philosophers, I utilize the day as a catch-up for what many people do during the other winter holidays. I take time to call people and reconnect, send people cards, notes of gratitude, or bake cookies. And like the character in the film, I remind myself that "I'll do it 'til I get it right" and that "right" involves accepting the present moment and being open to love.

I'm in the middle of my 6-month follow-up battery of tests. I should have all my results back by the end of next week. I promise to post a report soon thereafter and not make you wait with uncertainty and wonder. So far things look good. The bone scan is next Wednesday and that's the test I struggle most with in terms of waiting and wondering. Several months ago, my friend Terri Mason from Commonweal posed the question about how to sit with uncertainty to the alumni group of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program. She is compiling all the answers into a blog to share the wisdom and coping skills of this extraordinary community of people committed to living with cancer with a refined state of awareness. I'll post a link to the full text of responses when she's done preparing the blog. The following was my answer, which appeared in a longer form in a previous blog entry, but it's worth repeating:

My challenge in all of this is to remember I’m the same person I was before the CAT scan. This result doesn’t change my actual life; it just changes what I think about my life. I had an old Indian teacher who used to say, “Your mind is a bad neighborhood. Don’t go there. You’ll get mugged.”

This is the reality of this disease. It is chronic. It will most likely come, and hopefully go, for the rest of my life, regardless of how long that ends up being. I can’t help but want to be special, be a miracle, be an overachiever, be an outlier, and I don’t want to feel like a failure or that I am to blame if things don’t go as I prefer.

This is as close as I get to positive thinking. I acknowledge my desire to live a long life and to have a chance to re-invent my life if I ever go back to doing something other than caring for myself full-time. I want to have more adventures. I want to be with my loved ones and be a part of their lives unfolding. I want to be of service to people again someday. The intensity of these desires and my longing for life feels like my life force expressing itself. How do I maintain this passion for life and yet let go of what I can’t control?

I don’t believe in positive thinking because I don’t believe that thinking is the way to guide our lives. Positive or negative thinking is still thinking, and thinking is not the most powerful force in us. The harm that’s done is obvious when people get caught in repetitive negative thinking, but positive thinking can also make a person blind to that which they really need to be responding. There’s a fine line between positive thinking and denial. And regardless of what we think, our unconscious still exerts more influence than our conscious thoughts. I believe that people who say one thing and unconsciously harbor the opposite are ultimately at much more risk of serious consequences, because they are in internal conflict and discord and not in touch with the necessity of the moment.

So I let myself feel the disappointment, the sadness, the grief, but I don’t dwell on it. It’s like bad weather; it will pass. I try not to let fearful scenarios take up space in my thinking because they are clearly only one possible future. I also try not to dwell on my desire to have my life be mended, because my desires are not reliable either. If I get too attached it makes it harder to cope with not getting what I want when that eventually happens. Inhale. . . exhale. . . It’s good to be alive and breathing as I sit here typing on this Saturday morning knowing that you all will be reading this and joining me in being alive together right now.

Loving The Dark Days

The sun sets in Vermont around 4:20 these days. That means it's getting dark at 3:30. Many people seem to be upset by this natural occurrence. I find it the ultimate invitation to be cozy with a cup of tea, a fuzzy blanket, and a good book. The dark days of late Fall/early Winter make it even more evident that most of the world is on the wrong speed. I yearn to slow down even more and be as internally-oriented as I can be during this time that the earth and the sun are in cahoots to impress us with the need to rest.

This year I say, "Heck with the cards and presents and candles!" I'm sitting at a window or lying down by a window and watching the river flow. It keeps me present and aware of something other than my own internal drama and suffering.

Cancer is my proving ground for how serious I am about living. It's become my life's work to learn how to be with this disease and all that it brings and find a way to make peace with it. I'm in less pain when I am in a state of internal acceptance (not to be confused with "giving up"). It is in this state that I make wise choices about my life. Every little move - how I lift a pan, how I reach for a roll of toilet paper on a high shelf (a challenge living with 6 foot 4 inch Steve who puts things away in places I don't know exist) what I commit to do when invited to a party, how I exercise, how many errands I run in a day, and what I plan to do with my future effects my daily pain level. Consciousness is potent medicine! I'm continuously learning how to cultivate the consciousness that allows me to live and thrive. My most challenging struggle is giving up being an overachiever.

I have just not been motivated to write for other people for a while. I'm trying to respond to everything that comes up inside me that feels like a "should."  I'm sorry if you've been waiting to hear from me. My tempo is unbelievably slowed down and I haven't been able to crank out blog entries that meet my literary standards, or even just report on current events, but I will try...

Our apartment is feeling a lot more like home. Having a couch (we love our new couch) and proper lighting helps. 15 foot ceilings with no ceiling light fixtures makes lighting a serious challenge. We've had to be creative in figuring out ways to light up the house effectively. The people in this building, especially the poor college students, joke about what happens to the vision of Woolen Mill tenants from living in dim light. Those of us who face the river get some pretty bright light in the daytime when the sun rises over the river, but by 2 pm it's fairly dim inside. We're still in search of a few lighting fixtures for some dark corners.

We did our first little dance of apartment living celebration when it snowed and someone else shoveled. Apartment life is the best!

I found a wonderful Tai Chi teacher (http://greenleaftaichi.com/about/), who does Tai Chi as if it were standing and walking Continuum. He teaches the form or sequence of movements along with some principles that describe the movement of chi. Then he has us make up movements of our own, feeling the chi and using the imaginal mind to apply principles like, "walking under water," "pushing clouds," or "pushing a beachball under water." Sometimes we play the childhood game, "Red Light Green Light" in which he has us move on our own and stop randomly with a call of "red light," and we see if we can sense the energy and suspend right where we are in a balanced way. We pause, feel what's moving and what's not, make a little adjustment if we need to fine-tune our balance, and then after calling "green light" we start moving again. In 8 weeks we will learn the "Wu" style or "art of the water school" short form. He hopes we integrate the principles into how we move in our daily mundane life. He's quite young, but he totally "gets it," unlike many young people who seem to primarily be in search of "Buns of Steel" or some other useless bodily transformation. He's got a great future as a teacher, and I'm happy to have discovered him now.

I love the movement studio across the bridge. If you look at the photo taken from my living room on my Facebook page, it's the building across the bridge in the distance in the center of the photo. It takes 3 minutes to walk there. There's a walkway under the bridge that feels like a magic gateway to get to the other side. I go there once or twice a week for some class. My current favorite is this one: 

Total Body Connectivity: The best way for students seeking to integrate and enhance body-mind connectivity. This class combines Bartenieff Fundamentals, Delsarte System of Expression, and Laban Movement Analysis for essential Awareness, Balance, and Coordination practices.

It may sound more "structured" than you Continuum folks might think I would enjoy, but it isn't. It's very spacious and inner-directed. That's how Lucille approaches all her teaching, acknowledging that everything, hence all movement arises from "nothing." There's no better place to be!

I also found more than one great massage therapist, a wonderful Hakomi practitioner/therapist, and an acupuncturist who has a special interest in treating people with cancer. I've assembled quite a team, all within 15 minutes from home!

We have seen/heard some great live music: one-woman solo marimba, Gogol Bordello (gypsy punk rock), Cuban jazz, and Regina Carter, a fabulous jazz violinist at the UVM recital hall, a room with some of the best acoustics I've ever heard, and only 300 seats. UVM actually stands for Universitas Virdis Montis, latin for University of the Green Mountains, not University of Vermont, although that's what it actually is. Regina Carter is a MacArthur Fellow this year and has done an amazing job researching African folk music and synthesizing it into her jazz.  Check out her new album: http://www.reginacarter.com/

Burlington has so much for such a small place. The indoor winter farmer's market is in full swing and our little Winooski downtown has some new "pop up" stores and a gallery that will probably just be here for the holiday season. The downtown landlords rent out empty store fronts very inexpensively to artists and artisans in attempt to stir up interest in the growing groovy neighborhood. I am sure this place will make it, and although I wish it "were there" already, at least there is the excitement of watching it turn into an interesting place. The food coop has plans to open a branch here in a building that's starting construction in the spring. Yay! Great food just around the traffic circle, about a 90 second walk from home.

It's been dipping into the single digits at night and I'm loving getting bundled up. I go into one of my favorite stores downtown, Outdoor Gear Exchange at least once a week asking advice about some winter weather garment that didn't exist 15 years ago. It's amazing how the technology of keeping warm has improved. Remember my Norwegian friend's advice, "There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing."

No big snow yet, just a few inches one day and a few dustings that melted quickly. We had a mallard couple (they are known to pair for life) who moved in to a calm spot on our river for almost 2 months. They swam in circles all day together, seemingly unfazed by the treaturous waterfalls on one side and a dam on the other. They were my heroes and the subject of many staring-out-the-window-at-the-river meditations until they flew south a few weeks ago. We have a fair number of non-migrating seagulls here that huddle on the rocks in the half-frozen river and some small dark birds that fly in swarms and swoop over the river. I could watch them all day, and sometimes I do! 

My 17-yr-old step-son Luke is arriving tonight from Santa Cruz. Won't he be surprised when he feels single digit weather for the first time?! We have extra layers ready for him. His 19-yr-old brother arrives next week from Berkeley. Luke goes back first, so that we'll have time alone with each of them on either end of our time together. We'll be off to listen to more music, see some movies, play Settlers of Catan, snowboard (I'll read and drink tea in the ski lodge), go to Montreal for the day (90 miles north across the border), splash and scream at Vermont's new indoor water park (http://www.jaypeakresort.com/#/water_park/), and eat lots of great food. I'll rest a lot while they run around, and enjoy being with them, even if I can't keep up with their pace.

After they are gone, I enter a whole new phase of life. Steve goes back to work on January 17th. Check out his new website, even though it's still under construction you'll get an idea of the face of his new practice: http://stevepaulus.com/Office_Website/Home.html. I begin a mini-retreat/training at the Burlington Shambhala Center (http://burlington.shambhala.org/

and I go for my 6-month oncology work-up. I'll keep you posted as the results of my scans come in late January. By then, I'll be immersed in my favorite paradox of the year; as the days are getting lighter, the temperature and snow are still falling. I will be rising to the occasion to discover and honor the rhythm of this next phase of life.

November: The End Of Survivor Guilt & The Beginning Of Metamorphosis

November is quite unpopular in the northeast. A friend of mine calls it "stick season," but I find it magnificent and I feel truly welcomed Home by this time of year. The last of the leaves are falling, and the palette of the earth is simplified to shades of brown, blue, gray, and white. If you recall the artwork in my old offices, there wasn't any green. I like having a break from green, yellow, pink, and red for several months. It's exhilarating to be "back east," as they say in California, to have the contrast of changing temperatures, and the sensual shift of the colors of nature, and to shift gears in concert with the earth's cycles. I finally start to cool off in November. I've been overheated for 14 years in California.

I became weary of the October Breast Cancer Awareness Month pink ribbon epidemic - another good reason to celebrate the arrival of November. My friend Julia, a fellow adventurer in Stage IV living says,

"Thanks Safeway/Yoplait/fill in the blank (multinational bizzillionaire company) that’s helping me be aware of breast cancer. I’m quite aware. I’m so happy my disease is helping to sell your products."

I am happy that someone is raising money for the cause, although I wonder about who gets that money and how they spend it. I reach my limit when every wine list in town has pink ribbon specials, the local recycling and garbage pick-up company has a pink truck that drives around town, you can buy pink ribbon snow tires, the local Zumba fanatics throw a Pink Party Zumba class, and the local students can be seen wearing, "Protect My Assets" t-shirts.

What's the point? Are companies making money and getting tax deductions on the backs of  women with breast cancer? Do people alleviate their survivor guilt by spending money on products with pink ribbons?

I don't think that our culture has a deficiency of focus on and awareness of breasts. Breasts don't exist as separate from the body of a woman. Breasts are not "assets" and if a woman with breast cancer is told that they are then she can't help feeling like damaged goods. I actually went to the Pink Party Zumba class (kind of like an anthropological expedition) and I cringed as the sweaty young scantily-clad participants drank out of plastic water bottles. I think they missed the cancer part of breast cancer awareness. I commend them for attempting to promote exercise as a way to prevent breast cancer and increase the quality of life in women living with the disease, but they missed a few other important points.

In this realm, Vermont is no different than California, they just wear more clothes here for most of the year. Objectifying the body is a rampant distortion that disrupts our experience of being embodied. The body is not an object; it is a process. (This is what my book is about - please buy it and read it if you want to dive deeper into exploring this. In fact, please buy 10 copies; they make great stocking stuffers!) I am moved by the way David Abram describes this sense of things in Spell Of The Sensuous,

To acknowledge that “I am this body” is not to reduce the mystery of my yearnings and fluid thoughts to a set of mechanisms, or my “self” to a determinate robot. Rather it is to affirm the uncanniness of this physical form. It is not to lock up awareness within the density of a closed and bounded object, for as we shall see, the boundaries of a living body are open and indeterminate; more like membranes than barriers, they define a surface of metamorphosis and exchange.

I am on the fast track of "metamorphosis and change." I hardly recognize myself, which is a good thing, just occasionally disconcerting. I'm looking forward to winter, when everything slows down (except the diehard skiers) and hibernates or looks like it has died, only to be reborn in the spring. Ice may form on top of the water, but it is "more like a membrane than a barrier." Ice insulates and protects the deep dark waters beneath, so that the fluid intelligence continues to unfold and express its creative potency. The bare trees of "stick season" may look barren, but they are cooking up a new expression of creativity that will burst forth from the deep live roots in the spring.

Coffee and "The Hidden Discipline Of Familiarity"

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

  -- David Whyte, from Everything is Waiting for You
     ©2003 Many Rivers Press

This poem by David Whyte inspired me last year when I was struggling with coffee withdrawal. I love coffee, and now that I've admitted this publicly I can show you how I work with this embarrassing urge. I theoretically feel like I'd be better off without it, but like anyone with a charged relationship to a psychoactive substance, I struggle. It was actually my mother who introduced me to this sacred elixir when I was 10 years old. My mother and I would share a cup of instant coffee (yuck!) and eat cookies together after lunch when no one else was at home. That rush of energy and alertness, combined with the secret we shared that we were a little naughty drinking something that we shouldn't be, imbued it with even more appeal. 

I've always felt that it is a dietary transgression, and I wish I didn't like it so much. I've always had rules about drinking coffee, and felt that if I could stick to them, I wasn't a "coffeeholic."

• I wouldn't drink it on work days. 
• I wouldn't drink it past noon, or maybe 3 pm if I had to stay up late.
• I wouldn't drink too much at once. 
• I wouldn't drink little bits all day. 
• I wouldn't drink it if it tasted bad.
• I wouldn't drink it to override my natural bedtime, except if I were driving a long distance and my safety depended on it.

I'd give it up at least once a year for a few weeks or months, just to prove that I was in control. Once I worked with a homeopath and went 6 years without any, and when I was diagnosed with cancer I felt like it was time to give my system another rest from it. I had none for almost a year, and then like any addict, I began making deals with myself to convince myself it was okay.

• I could have a little, but only in the morning, and not every day. 
• It would have to be organic. 
• I'd learn to love it black, to avoid the additional evils of half-and-half or soy milk. 
• It would have to be freshly ground to preserve the valuable antioxidants.
• I'd have to roast it myself. 

I found a source of organic green coffee beans and bought a home roaster. I figured that if I had to go to this extreme, I wouldn't drink that much, and I'd seriously enjoy how precious a cup could be. I thought I would adapt Michael Pollan's Food Rule #39 to the roasting and consumption of coffee, "Eat all the junk food you want, as long as you cook it yourself." I'm definitely not drinking as much as I want, but I am limiting myself to my own home-roasted, organic brew, which caps the amount I consume.

I drank a cup one day last year before I went off to my Santa Cruz writing group, where Carolyn Flynn read the David Whyte poem that introduced this entry. I was inspired to write the following scenario about my beloved beans to sanctify our personal relationship and pay homage to their origin. I'm filled with gratitude for their journey across the world, and for their ordeal of transformation which results in giving up their life for my alertness and euphoria. Perhaps it's just another excuse to make me feel better about my tiny transgression, but I want to believe that cultivating a conscious relationship to what I eat and drink somehow augments its potential benefits and dampens the deleterious effects.

“Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity,” was the only line of the poem they could hear from inside the burlap bag. Many a poem was uttered by heart, by the clerk who worked at the Berkeley coffee supplier while she filled green coffee bean orders over the internet. Most people who work here have at least a master’s degree. Many have PhDs in subjects that make them virtually unemployable, like vertebrate paleontology, seventeenth century Dutch painters, or Aramaic, but this makes for profound small talk over the coffee, which the beans deeply appreciate.

They arrived last Tuesday from Guatemala, then on to Oakland, and finally Aptos, before preparing themselves for the ritual roasting. As their small pale green bodies began to tumble and dance in the roaster, under my careful eye, they rose like the Phoenix. As they began to heat up and darken I inhaled their toasty aromatic essence wafting from the top vent of the roaster. Our joining was ecstatic.

Their small round bodies plumped and darkened, sizzled and popped telling me they were ready to rest and cool. Later they would surrender their individuality to the burr grinder who would bless each of them as their fragments blended into a dark pile of coarse grounds.

They met a sacred stream of hot water as it poured into the cool glass container of the French press pot, and dissolved into their final realization of their destiny. I poured this potion into my blue cup with the Celtic knot etched into the glaze covering its rounded sides, and felt the familiar mingling of spirits from across the world feed me this elixir of alertness. No longer a tiny hidden transgression, this state invited me through the doors of alertness and filled me with anticipation of the everything that is waiting for me. 

We're All Just Passing Through

I picked up Jack Kornfield's newest book, A Lamp in the Darkness: Illuminating the Path Through Difficult Times, looking for some grounding guidance and inspiration during this challenging phase of moving and unpacking. He opens the book with the description of a cartoon he saw in the San Francisco Chronicle which shows a nomadic family crossing the desert on camel-back. The daughter must have just asked her father the classic childhood question and he replies, "Stop asking if we're almost there yet - we're nomads for crying out loud!"

This made me laugh and lighten up. It is an illusion to think that any of us are anywhere permanently. Even if we live in the town where we were born, we're all just passing through. Life in essence is temporary.

I've made some big moves in my life: Philadelphia to Miami, Miami to Sarasota, then on to Gainesville, New York City, Brooklyn, 10 days in Jamaica, Queens (that was a terrible mistake), then back to Brooklyn, Woodstock (NY), Santa Cruz, and now Vermont. Perhaps moving gets harder as I get older, or maybe it's that pesky cancer-thing that slows me down. This move has been the hardest thing I've ever done in terms of sheer endurance. With my impaired and painful hands, my sore chest, and limited energy level, I have to rely on Steve and others to do all the lifting and gripping, as well as many other things. It's challenging for me to be so much more dependent than before. 

It took 6 weeks to sort and pack to come to Vermont, but the task really began when we decided to close the office last February. It's actually been 7 months of shuffling "stuff" around. Feeling the simplicity and lightness of having rid ourselves of a great volume of stuff is the reward for all the grueling effort. It is beyond a profound relief to be here and be almost settled.

Arriving here was somewhat wonderful, but moving to a state that's been declared a disaster area put a damper on the excitement about being some place new. Although Hurricane Irene did no damage in our part of the state, we could see the frightening height of the water marks on the bridge footings, and everywhere we went the first week or 2 people talked about the floods. The water was still high when we got here. The river was so raging that we could hardly sleep with the roar. In the 4 weeks that we have been here the waters have receded and quieted a bit. The sound of the river is always there in the background. I'm hoping it never gets so low that it can't be heard.

It is so beautiful here - lush and green and full of life and rushing water. There are the first signs of fall: a few orange-tipped trees here and there, that rustling sound of dry leaves in the wind, and flocks of birds en masse flying south. Yesterday was the first day I wore a scarf - very exciting for a woman with a scarf and boot fetish! In 1985, I was given the "Jane Jetson Little Black Boot Award" by my medical school class in honor of having the most pairs of black boots anyone had ever seen (they must not have known Imelda Marcos). I look forward to regaining my title.

Everyone drives much more slowly here. Even on the highway (I-89) the speed limit is only 55 mph, and it's not uncommon for cars on the entrance ramp to merge while driving 40mph.

There are so many great radio stations, we've run out of preset buttons on the car radio. Our refuge and rest from the chaos at home has been the movie theater. There are 2 fabulous theaters here that show a mix of independent films with some mainstream movies. They show all sorts of interesting things, like live HD simulcasts from the Metropolitan Opera (my mother's old stomping ground), a live lecture by Jane Goodall, The Rolling Stones in a concert from Texas, and Phantom Of The Opera live from Royal Albert Hall in London. Every time we see a film the theater is packed with a wide array of ages ranging from teens to elderly - definitely a wider demographic than in Santa Cruz where young people are often mysteriously absent from the audience. And for some strange reason, the people here are like me; they don't get up and leave while the credits are still playing. I feel like the music and the credits are part of the complete experience of a film and I always stay until the end. In my 14 years in Santa Cruz, the only film I saw after which the people sat through the credits was The Lives Of Others. What's that about?!

We may have missed Hurricane Irene, but we do have a flood story. However, the only water involved came from our hot water heater. We sent our stuff cross-country on a 28 foot truck. They delivered it to a terminal about 20 minutes away and we had to shuttle it on a smaller truck to our apartment building. The movers who were supposed to unload us had to cancel to go south and help with the flood relief effort. So instead of having 3 men for a full day, we could only find 2 men for a half-day. Steve rented a U-haul and did the rest himself. It took 3 days (in the rain) to get all the stuff off the 28 foot moving van and into our apt.

At about 11pm on the night we did the majority of the move, a strange sound emanated from somewhere in the house. I thought I had left an alarm clock set and packed it inside of a box or my dresser, which was still wrapped in moving blankets. We searched for the beeping and discovered that it was the water alarm on the floor at the foot of our hot water heater, which had sprung a leak. I crumpled in a big chair in the living room, cried, and passed out as Steve dealt with it. Thank goodness for apartment living! The night property manager came and drained it, and by 8 am the maintenance crew were in here installing a new one.

And now, almost a month later, it's still not over; we have to finish unpacking and make a nest. I actually enjoy unpacking, organizing, and setting things up, but I'm exhausted. There's an important distinction between wanting to have things set up so that I can relax, and being patient and relaxing in the moment, regardless of the mess in the external environment. Isn't this always a struggle? I get concerned that I'll spend too much of my life trying to complete my illusory list so that I can "relax" and that I'll never be done. I don't want to live like that!

"Dysrhythmic" is the word Steve uses to describe this strange feeling of being out of synch with time and place. After a month, we're starting to feel like maybe we're not on some strange vacation, and we don't have to pack up and go back to Santa Cruz. We can't believe that we bought a one-way ticket. We're still in shock that we live in such a new and different place.

Each day brings more feelings of being at Home. We are slowly replacing the furniture we left in California. It's amazing how much a couch makes a living room feel like home. We bought a new one and it's not here yet, so we're managing with some comfy chairs. We know where to go for most things we need. We don't need a map to get everywhere anymore. We are starting to know the people in the building and the neighborhood people, like the mail carriers and some Farmer's Market vendors. We went to our first city council meeting and were welcomed.  I am checking out the movement scene and I went to a class taught by someone who went to UCSC in the late 70s and took dance classes with Beth at Cabrillo. Small world!

We have no lack of entertainment possibilities. We saw a fabulous Cuban jazz trio (Alfredo Rodriguez) and we're going to see David Sedaris, Richard Thompson (solo guitar), and Gogol Bordello in the next few weeks. We're in week 2 of a conversational French class. Steve is signed up for a bread-making class so he can get some new sourdough starter. I'm off to my old Osteopathic study group, which meets in November, after my 14 year absence. We went to the monthly open-house at the Burlington Shambhala Center and found it a very sweet place to meditate with a group. They have open meditation sessions 6 times a week. They are quite laid back and flexible - they even serve coffee!

Today I had my appointment with my new oncologist. She's wonderful and in total agreement with the treatment plan and how I've been caring for myself. Today I attended a wonderful retreat for women with metastatic breast cancer, followed by the yearly Breast Cancer Conference sponsored by the Vermont Cancer Center. This year's topic is, "Being Well Throughout The Cancer Journey". http://vtbreastcancerconference.org/

I am hoping to start feeling settled and have more regular writing time. Sorry about the long wait and then this rambling post. I'll aim to make them shorter and more frequent. I have a few pieces of more "literary" entries almost ready, so be on the lookout for them. Subscribe, if you haven't already, so that you get emailed automatically when I post an entry.

I think back to that crazy week that began with my comment about not wanting to die staring at the back of that damn bush and I am so profoundly grateful that I made it here. I have the  Health, hope, creativity, and curiosity to make it through this transition gracefully. I have Steve, who is wonderful beyond belief in his sense of presence, love, and commitment to making a new life together here. And I have all these old friends and colleagues who have surfaced to welcome me Home, even though we're all just passing through.