Yes, I’m writing!

Wow!  Summer has just come and gone and here we are now in November!  It’s been a full few months for me, with back to back Lost Borders programs, the Washington Guides Gathering in the Eastern Cascades, and travel to my family in Germany.

My last blog post was back in June!  Writing has had to take the back seat for too long and I’ve been craving to make time for it.  So much so, that I decided to take my laptop along, to the last wilderness program of the year that I just returned from a little while ago.  With nightfall so early this time of year, I hauled up in the passenger seat of the truck at night, to sit and write (and to take a nice break from the relentless cold wind).

What began to form during my time in the Eureka Valley, is an exploration of the stories, the archetypical myths, that cancer evokes in us.  While there are many other threatening and terminal diseases, cancer elicits the confrontation with death in a particularly edgy way.  The mythos of a hostile take over of unwholesome, mutated, out of control cell growth aiming to kill us is unequivocally dark.  But that’s only one story.  An old story, and perhaps one in need of a fresh set of eyes…

But equally fascinating, if not more, are the stories that emerge in response to cancer.  Because regardless of what medical treatments we decide on, we also choose to adapt a story about our cancer: why we got it, how we live with it or through it, and how it integrates into the greater story of our lives.

The piece has given me a run for my money!  I was hoping to return from my time out with an article ready to post on this blog, but far from it.  Instead, it has stirred a deeper inquiry in me and I know it will need some more time to reveal itself.  So this is just a teaser note, to say “Yes, I’m writing (again)!” But it may take a little while before this piece finds its way into the light of day…

In the meantime, I want to share a 40-minute radio interview that I did in September, with Rev.  Kristin Powell on Cancer as a Rite of Passage.  A bit daunting because it made me realize how much I have yet to learn about public speaking 🙂 But in the spirit of beginner’s mind, here it is:

 

And here are a few short clips from it, on the topics listed below:

Diagnosis (3:37 minutes): 

Treatment (5:02 minutes): 

Survivorship (3:04 minutes):

As we are traveling into the oncoming darkness of days growing shorter, may we be able to make space for some quiet time, in the midst of this crazy human holiday business, to restore and resource ourselves.  It is so essential to allow time in the fertile cauldron of this season, where memories are stirred, seasoned and simmered into the rich broth that will feed us anew on the other side, come spring.

May we continue to risk ourselves for what we love.  Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

With all my love,

Petra

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Coming Back

Radiation is a weird animal.  Easier, by far, then chemo.  Mysterious and invisible, the x-rays penetrate my right breast quadrant every day, while I lay very still and with my arm above my head to ensure correct line up as the precision machine is moving around me, carefully avoiding, so we hope, exposure and damage to any of my vital organs.

With the business of Monday through Friday treatment, and tagging on restorative Yoga, Qi Gong and Pilates classes, my life once again has a bit of a regular schedule.  Outwardly, things feel like they are beginning to resemble a somewhat “normal” rhythm.  Even if the majority of my daily appointments and chores are medical, there is once again a distinction between weekdays and weekends.

My hair takes its sweet time to cover my head once again, regardless of how ready I am for it.  Every day my hand goes over my bald head, longing for signs of stubble, or growth.  Will it really come back?  It reminds me of the end of winter,  when you know that spring is in the air,  but the land still looks barren and desolate all the same.  Until that special day, when the seeds finally push through the surface and into the light of day, for all to see.  Plain and clear:  life is coming back.  And so it is with my hair.  One fine morning a hue of gray on the sides of my head is reflected back to me from my bathroom mirror.  So slight, the difference, I wonder if the morning light is just playing tricks on me.  But slowly and surely, over the next few weeks, hair begins indeed to once again populate the various areas of my head, growing in all sorts of different tones and oddly shaped patches, soft like the first grass to cover the gray hillsides after the snow melt.  It takes quite a bit of time until the first half inch length covers most of my head.

And for how long I have waited and hoped for it, it takes me by surprise when I decide to shave it off once more.  I buzz it down to a bare sand paper stubble and love it! There is something magical about feeling the prickliness of my scalp – as supposed to the soft baldness under the chemo.   It feels powerful to choose my own bareness now, instead of being simply subject to it, as I was during the chemo.  It is my decision now, to go without, to carry my nakedness proudly, to stay honest and open at this time of great vulnerability for the many blessings that this surrender has called forth.  To walk from here on out,  into this new life that is just beginning.

Choosing to stay visible as a cancer initiate, many up close and personal encounters  with other human beings and their stories of love, healing and dying find their way to me.  Wherever I go now, in my nakedness I am invited to look under the skirt of our shared humanness, into the heart of the true nature of our interconnectedness.  And I find myself continuously amazed at the willingness of those touched by cancer to share their story, reach out and connect across race, age or class barriers, with an intimacy that is unthinkable in the ’normal’ world.

Everything is personal now.  Before my eyes, a world that has so often felt cold and un-relational has opened up to me now to share its deepest secrets, simply because I belong to this special “cancer club” that none of us wanted to belong to in the first place.  Like the woman rounding the corner in the Safeway aisle, who breaks out in this wide smile when she sees me,  and calls out:  “Good for you!  You wear your head high!  I never wore any of them damn wigs either, God they itch like crazy!”  Survivor of 17 years.  Wow!  Make my day.  May I get to pay it forward one fine day and make someone else laugh, some 17 years down the road…  Or the cashier at Trader Joe’s who tells me his mom just started treatment, and he’s afraid how she’s going to cope because she lives alone and he’s not close.  Or the fine old man who stops me at a department store, between the checkout stand and the special sales counter, putting his hand lightly on my shoulder and gently saying “I wish you well”.  His eyes full of tears, it turns out that his wife of 50 years has passed away only a few weeks earlier after a long battle with breast cancer and now his youngest daughter had just been diagnosed.  Damn!  And there we are, in a long, intimate and tearful hug, two complete strangers, in the middle of Target, in a territory that words just can’t reach, somehow managing to celebrate the blessing of love, even if it opens us up to the worst losses possible.

In my better moments, I feel such lightness, grace and gratitude for this new life.  By truly claiming my belonging in this threshold life, between birth and death, my life has become an offering for all beings.  For now, cropping my hair close to the scalp helps me keep remembering.  It keeps me honest.  I am sure that this too will shift one day.  The only constant is change.  There is nothing to hang on to.  All I know is that for now, it’s too early to go back to looking ‘normal’.  Instead, I am taking the liberty to turn into what is truly true for me, moment by moment, edgy and outrageous as that may be.  Normal is overrated anyway.

Originally written in March, 2012, edited in Nov 2014

Walking the One Year Plank

Waiting for the results of my first mammogram post treatment.  Why are the taking so long?  The longest 20 minutes of my life.  Tears streaming quietly over my face, as I remember the last time I was in that room, when the discovered my cancer, the last time that they squeezed my breast into the imaging machine.  How the impossible had become possible, how life could turn without warning or notice, on it’s head, how the ceremony of being mortally wounded began.

Sitting here, in the space of not knowing how the story will evolve and also not knowing how I will hold the story that will evolve.  Hoping for something bigger than the desperate prayer that I will be “okay”, that the scan may be clean.  Hoping for an opening to say YES to whatever appears on the trail for me next, surrendering my judgment of what it may mean.  Can I entertain the possibility that everything I need to heal forward, to evolve, to live out my destiny, is right here, presented to  me – alive in the good or the bad news that the doctor may bring?  And to exercise what they call “the last of the human freedoms”, the freedom to interact with whatever is on my path, in my unique way, to weave it into the healing that I am more deeply committed to than anything else in my life now.

And yet, here I sit, in agony, facing the terror of possibly more medical intervention and the nightmare of cancer recurrence, feeling the sharp pain of my own ego survival instincts, suffering my humanness.

Then the door opens, and the technician returns, with a “release” paper.  All looked normal, she said, almost taken aback by my catatonic expression.  It takes me a few minutes to let it in, to allow it, to feel it enter my being, my body jumping up and hugging her first, unbeknownst to me, then my mind, reading again and again the two words on the paper in the doctor’s handwriting “Looks great!”.  That’s it?  I say.  That’s it, the technician says.

As I leave the hallway, I see another woman, gown on, moving with distraught body posture, between the bathroom and one of the examination rooms.  Is she okay?  Someone today, will sit in the same chair as I sat in last year and hear their worst fear come true, that there is an area that looks suspicious….  Who am I  to be healthy?

I walk outside into the waiting area where my man sits in the companion version of the land with no name, that I have just left behind, the in between, the waiting, being suspended mid-air.  WE ARE OKAY, I say to him, WE ARE ACTUALLY OKAY!  And we hold each other in our moment of glory, lost now, in the relief of this new territory, not quite knowing where to turn next.  I take a picture with my release paper in front of my chest, much like a prisoner with her number, only that my paper sets me free, to cross the threshold of the building that I entered a year ago, and that like bookends has spanned the journey of this past year through the seasons of my treatment.

Now what?  Only in the weeks to follow, do I realize that there is an aspect of incorporation here, that I was unprepared for.  In many ways I still am in treatment and yes, still on Tamaxofin.  But something is concluded with that first clean scan, and I find myself now in new territory yet again.  Getting a clean bill of health has me question what it means for me to be “normal”.

What is my new normal? Is it still okay to take time for myself, for my healing practices, for qi gong, yoga, medicine walks, writing, voice recordings, support groups and the like?  Even if I am healthy now?   What is health?  In many ways true healing has only just begun.  What is this new life asking of me now?

July 2012