GO WITH THE WILDNESS OF DREAMS IN YOUR HANDS
IN THE STILLEST, CLEAR LIGHT OF THE DAY
FAR, THROUGH THE SHADOWS OF DARK, DISTANT LANDS
GO IN LOVE, GO IN LOVE, ON YOUR WAY

RACE THROUGH THE RUSHES OF TIME'S THICKEST THINGS
WITH A BLESSING OF WIND IN YOUR HAIR
KNOW ALL THE LIGHTNESS OF LOVE IN YOUR WINGS
SHOW THE WORLD, SHOW THE WORLD THAT YOU'RE THERE

GO, GO, WITH THE COMPASS OF YOUR DREAMS
AND THE TRUST IN YOUR HEART AS YOU GROW
YOU CARRY THE LOVE OF YOUR FAMILY OF FRIENDS
IN YOUR LIFE, ALWAYS THERE, WHERE YOU GO

LIVE WITH THE COURAGE TO SHARE WHAT IS REAL
DARE TO LAUGH, DARE TO FEAR, DARE TO CRY
LIVE WITH THE WONDER THAT SHINES IN YOUR EYES
PRECIOUS ONE, ALWAYS CARE, ALWAYS TRY

-Eric Aronson


My friend, Eric Aronson, and I worked together this past year to help develop a trauma recovery program in Sri Lanka with Sensei Joan Hoeberichts, the Heart Circle Sangha and Sarvodaya, both Buddhist organizations. It was an honor for me to be participate in the project. To support my healing, Eric lovingly sent me this song he wrote for his nephew when he was born.

The words are so relevant for anyone who is facing a new world where everything will be given and all will be called. Birth , death, and illness are powerful times of transition in which we pause with exquisite vulnerablity, like the new born who has just entered a world completely foreign. Cancer is like that. What it opens is immense. It requires courage, determination and daring.

The photograph is one I took in the meditation garden in Sri Lanka of our friends, local counselors we helped to train in group, grief and trauma. I think of their genuineness and openess in working with us, but more often what they taught me of courage and the capacity to heal. Sometimes the student is the teacher...

Today, Like Every Other Day

Today, like every other day,
we wake up empty
and frightened.
Dont open the door
to the study
and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love
be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel
and kiss the ground.

- Rumi
Transalted by Coleman Barks


It was early that morning when the thunder cracked, the walls shook and the lightening danced atop my house like an ominous Tibetan deity who's pleasure might be to crush sculls underfoot. Texas hill country thuderstorms have a certain appeal. I ran down the hall and jumped into into bed with Eliot, my twenty three year old son. He opened his eyes, smiled and rolled over to go back to sleep. I laid there remembering many mornings when he was little and scared, how he would climb into my big bed, throw his arms around me and fall back to sleep, his hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden tangle. That was in the old house, the one he grew up in, the one with the crazy neighbor we called "Ninja Pete", a self styled vigilante who believed that we were international drug dealers who lowered the property value in the neighborhood. With his surveillance cameras pointed at my bedroom, nija outfits, a sawed off shotgun, multiple lawsuits and Clint Eastwood type threats, this man could definitely be scarey. I would say that Ninja Pete trumped most thunderstorms.

I find a strange comfort in thunderstorms. I spent every summer of my childhood waiting for the inevitable thunderstorm. I would diligently take the pulse of the storm by counting the moments between thunder and lightening, secretly wishing for the deafening moment when flash and the crack occur simultaneously. There is something about the nearness of a storm, something alive and intensely primitive that makes you want to huddle and share that nearness with another, not so much out of fear but rather delight. It is something to take pleasure it, as my friend Roger Housden would say. That morning as I grabbed the down pillow off my bed and ran down the hall to promised land of my sons bedroom, I know it wasnt the fear of the storm that was driving me. It was the fear of the storm ahead in my life, the battle with breast cancer.
Cancer trumps Ninja Pete and thunderstorms.

The storm brought the Texas heat down a few notches that day. By the afternoon, Eliot suggested that we go for a drive out into the hill country with Jim, Eliot's dad, to a place the Native Americans considers sacred, Enchanted Rock. It is a unique geological formation, a pink granite mountain range broken by the techtonic shifting of the Pan-Gaia, and a beautiful place to watch the sunset. We drove and drove through the hill country, through little towns and open fields, peach orchards and vineyards, grazing cattle, goats, horses and the rich greeness of the wetted soil. Finally we descended into the valley where the granite rises out of the ground like a great mound, or a large breast. We walked to the base of the rock and looked up the sheer incline. It was the hottest time of the day. There was no breeze. I was drenched in sweat and we hadnt even begun the ascent. I looked up, still recovering from the surgery, weak and exhausted, unable to imagine the stamina needed to climb to the top. Several years ago I could have briskly ascended without a second thought. I felt old and sick. I felt like giving up before I even started. But it was part of our thinking about honoring Fathers Day and part of Eliot's thinking about what heals.

Jim was very gentle. "Don't push yourself, dontt feel you have to do this. But see if you can make it to that rock." The rock was only about 250 feet away but about a 35 degree incline. I didnt think I could do it. I looked up. The summit was still far off. I eyed another rock, a lesser destination. I made my way to that rock. I thought to myself, I can make it to the top by just taking it one step at a time. I said to Jim and Eliot,"This is the lesson: to be with each step, to be present and not overwhelmed by what seems to be daunting. And above all not to give up." As the sweat poured down my face, a strong breeze that picked up and cooled me. The hawks overhead, their wings lifted by the thermals, were gliding gracefully on the air currents. My wings had been lifted also. I reached the summit. It was beautiful . The morning rains had gathered into silver reflecting pools in the granite. The horizon spread out below us. Eliot rediscovered the joy of a Nikon D 70 and clicked away like the papparazi.

Finally it was time to return. The sheerness of the descent gives many people vertigo. It is like walking down from the nipple of a giant breast, or walking about on the tiny planet of the Little Prince. I felt as if I might fall off the edge. But then I reminded myself, the lesson from the ascent, "to be with each step, to be present and not overwlemed by what seems to be daunting. And above all not to give up"

The alchemy of mindfulness trumps cancer.

Beannacht (Blessings)

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the curach of thought
and a strain of ocean
blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

-John O Donohue
Echoes Of Memory

Life before the meteorite was good. My days were filled with seeing patients, writing, teaching, traveling to far away places, reading poetry, loving friends and family, hating the war, working passionately for causes I believed in. I was working on two books, one on the Viet Nam war and the other a series of interviews with ordinary men and woman who have demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of great obstacles. Certain things relentlessly captured my curiosity like the question of mirror neurons in the cultivation of compassion, the elegance of Asian art, a well placed word, the colour of persimmons, the smile of the Buddha, or the dome of heaven on a starry night.

I was a hopeful romantic who checked her horoscope daily and on occasion consulted with psychics and Vedic astrologers to inspire my imagination about what the day might bring. My biggest worry was the question of how my sister Bellina and I were going to sneak our fierce, fabulous and wildly eccentric mother into a dementia wing in an assisted living center after kit napping 5 of her 7 cats and selling her Manhattan brownstone. Then the meteorite hit. One day I was normal ( or at least as close as I've ever been) and the next day I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of invasive ductal breast cancer and scheduled for surgery. My friend John O Donohue would say, it was " the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble". That was two weeks and a thousand years ago.

Love is fierce medicine, a tough contender willing to fight hard against cancer. My ex-husband, Jim, step daughter, Gina and a wonderful circle of friends rallied to care for me in ways I could never have imagined. Beautiful Gina, with her brown soulful eyes cooked every day, took notes at the oncology appointments and claimed me as hers to protect.

The night before surgery a special meditation was held at the Shambala Center in Austin. There were chants in Hebrew, Arabic, Pali, poetry, song and sweet outgrageous humor. Christine Albert, a wonderful singer songwriter and dear friend of many years, Naomi Baran, my best friend of thirty years and Tory Sikes sang and played guitar, while her sister Charlotte led the Sufi blessing. Jake Lorfing led a traditional Tong Len Buddhist meditation. Radhia Gleis , my life long friend since fifth grade sang a poem of Rumi's. Patricia Tolison wove the evening together with gentle grace. Emails, cards, flowers, prayers and poetry came from as far away as Africa and Sri Lanka. Tribal dancers and chiefs from the Lakota prayed for me as they prepared for the Sundance Festival, the most powerful healing ceremony in their tradition. The outpouring of love filled my spirit. I understood the meaning of the expression, "it takes a village". I cannot imagine anything that could have prepared me for surgery more completely. There was no room for fear. And I knew also that when I came out of surgery, my son Eliot would be there, home from Costa Rica with his big blue kind eyes and his cheshire cat grin. The healing circle was complete.

The surgery went well. Our surgeon, Tim Faulkenberry, MD, was very skillful and was able to completely remove the tumor leaving me with clean margins which is very good news. Additionally he removed the sentinel and auxillary nodes and they found no cancer there. Given the size of the tumor and its aggressiveness, this could be in the mini miracle catagory. Connie Ryan, my wonderful nurse praticioner and dear friend says that this is a sign of my body's remarkable strength in walling the tumor off.

Since the surgery I have mostly rested. I have had alot of pain around the area where the port was installed and numbness and tingling down the arm where the nodes were removed. In the mornings I have gone on long walks with Eliot, or meditated alone or with a few friends who have come to the house. I have recently been able to swim again which brings me joy. Many generous friends have stppoed by to offer bodywork which has been very energizing. I have also been listening to a beautiful CD of the Dalai Lama singing Tibetan chants. His voive is so beautiful and deeply soothing. Listening to it, I find my ancient timeless being, beyond suffering.

Finding ways to sooth is important medicine in this journey. The reality of the journey and its difficulty comes in waves but is lived one step at a time. Last thursday we learned that while I have been lucky on many fronts with this, there is one very scary piece. On the Bloom-Richardson Scale from 0-9 on cell differentiation, I have a 9. This means I have the most aggressive form of cancer. We will have to fight very agressively in response. It was tough news. I cried that night, feeling scared and tender. Jim suggeted we go home and watch a comedy on Movies on Demand. I wanted to watch a quirky holocaust movie with Elija Wood. He convinced me that the comedy was the better choice. I surrendered. We laughed throughout most of the "Family Stone" until Diane Keaton, the mother, died of breast cancer. Who knew? Since when is a holocaust movie the easier choice?

Later that evening there was a knock at the door. Our friends Lexi and Mark Perlmutter were stopping by with a surprize. Lexi, a breast cancer survivor herself, had secretly gathered through beautiful yarns from friends from all across the country. Each ball of yarn had been blessed with love and healing from the sender. Lexi worked them all into the most beautiful blanket "to mind my life". The many colours remind me of the words in Johns' poem:

may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

The blanket is awesome! As is the kindness of each of you, putting your arms around me in this way. With all your support, I know I can do this!

I will be posting at least a few times a week with poems and quotes, connecting to what touches and teaches. Feel free to pass this blog on to anyone who is struggling and could use the support.

In gratefullness,

gaea