beannacht

For those who are feeling heartbroken...

beannacht

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 currach of thought
and a stain 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

A magnificent poem for a grey and rainy Saturday

 Setting Out by Wendell Berry

 Even love must pass through loneliness,
the husbandman become again
the Long Hunter, and set out
not to the familiar woods of home
but to the forest of the night,
the true wilderness, where renewal
is found, the lay of the ground
a premonition of the unknown.
Blowing leaf and flying wren
lead him on. He can no longer be at home,
he cannot return, unless he begin
the circle that first will carry him away.

(day 4)

Inking over

 

A year ago today I stared out at a sunset so painfully beautiful that I wept to watch it, my heart overflowing with the delight at being alive and the fear of the chemo which would begin in the morning. My body was coiled and taut, ready for the assault to begin. My curls were still long and soft around my neck. I had no idea what was going to happen next. In the morning I got up, went to the hospital, laid down on the bed, and began the process I hoped would help save my life.

Two weeks ago I found myself in a hospital bed in a very different setting. Melissa and Michael were there at the foot of the bed, as they had been during chemo. And there was a man with a needle beside me. But everything else was different. This was Kakapo Ink, and Roo, my gentle and kind tattoo artist, was about to make his mark.

There was a way these two experiences were eerily similar. I laid back for the nearly three hours of sometimes mild and sometimes biting pain in both cases, both making me a little light headed, a little dizzy.  Both times Michael held my hand, and Melissa cracked jokes from the foot of the bed. This time, though, I was choosing it.

In February I had gone to Kakapo Ink  (a new kind of tattoo parlour devoted to tattoo newbies like me—bright and open and lovely) and had met Roo and Katy who would design this piece for me. With their help, I described what I wanted: a tattoo that would help me reclaim this blank fake breast of mine, something beautiful and delicate that would make me smile rather than frown each time I saw it. Something that symbolized new life and love and hope rather than being a constant symbol of the cancer and loss and fear I have lived with this past year.

Over the course of a month or so, they sent me designs, and I printed them out and showed them around and thought about them hard and sent back feedback and waited for the next design. And then suddenly a few weeks ago, I opened my email and smiled. Yes, that was a design I’d like to wear forever. I’d like that to be a part of my body. (I'm including the picture Katy drew though we had to make some modifications of it once we got it on my three dimensional body--but you can see how pretty it is.)

Now it is.

I talk with my clients sometimes about writing their own story, about picking up the pen and making their own choices. I had never understood this part of the tattoo craze (to be honest, I’ve never understood any part of the tattoo craze) and I had never thought I would come up with a reason to indelibly write on my own body. But every time I catch a glimpse of me in the mirror now, I have a totally different sense of me. I used to shy away from my reflection, seeing myself as scarred, marred, damaged. Now I catch a glimpse and stop and stare. Wow, that’s beautiful I think, again and again. That’s me. That’s not me written by cancer, but me writing over cancer. That’s not me partial and broken but me taking the open space of a vacant lot and cultivating beauty.

This is a beginning of a new chapter for me. I need a hair cut. My book is out (Here's a picture of Keith and me at our book launch and you can order your own copy here Simple Habits for Complex Times: Powerful Practices for Leaders). We have a new house. Naomi and I are going to visit universities next month. I have literally inked over the scars of last year with new leaves of possibilities. I wonder what will flower next.

(And in a little coda, two more pieces. First, this from the NYT about life after cancer treatment . A little chilling. And this from Mark’s poetry box, Day 3)

After the Diagnosis

Christian Wiman

No remembering now
When the apple sapling was blown
Almost out of the ground.
No telling how,
With all the other trees around,
It alone was struck.
It must have been luck,
He thought for years, so close
To the house it grew.
It must have been night.
Change is a thing one sleeps through
When young, and he was young.
If there was a weakness in the earth,
A give he went down on his knees
To find and feel the limits of,
There is no longer.
If there was one random blow from above
The way he’s come to know
From years in this place,
The roots were stronger.
Whatever the case,
He has watched this tree survive
Wind ripping at his roof for nights
On end, heats and blights
That left little else alive.
No remembering now…
A day’s changes mean all to him
And all days come down
To one clear pane
Through which he sees
Among all the other trees
This leaning, clenched, unyielding one
That seems cast
In the form of a blast
That would have killed it,
As if something at the heart of things,
And with the heart of things,
Had willed it.

Lucille Clifton: "Blessing the Boats"

Here is the poem that ran through me with a jolt on the second day of chemo--the images were so powerful, yes, as a stand alone poem. But the extra power of it was that Lucille Clifton was in the English department (my department) at St Mary's College of Maryland (my tiny college) while I was there.  She came when I was nearly finished there and so I never took a class from her, but her form and her voice at meetings and walking through the halls fills me with love and connection to a place that was so important for me. This poem in particular is doubly important for me because St Mary's is a place where I started the crew team, so her blessing the boats is in part a blessing for me. Mark didn't know any of that when he printed the poem on thick cream paper and sealed the envelope with a golden circle. But the many layers of relationships in this poem--encircled as they all are by love and by water--swept through me on the (surprisingly easy) second day of chemo.

Lucille Clifton: "Blessing the Boats"
(at St. Mary's)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back    
may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

(Pictures today are from the last visit we took to St Mary's. You can see how long ago that was--maybe a decade.)

The gift

Nearly exactly a year ago, a box arrived in the mail. It was marked FRAGILE and wrapped with great care, but the contents on the customs form just read: STATIONERY. Why would stationery be fragile? I wondered as I opened the box to find another box and in that yet another.

The inner box was beautiful, golden waves with frothy tendrils in blue and white: a tumultuous sea, maybe. And inside, from my dear friend Mark, were thick cream envelopes, each numbered 1-90, each sealed with a golden circle, and each containing a poem Mark had picked out as a companion for my chemo journey.

My hair is back now, thick short curls, and my nails are strong again. The last of the chemo side effects seems to be behind me—except, I hope, the life saving effects which (I hope I hope) will long continue. Still, the memory of the kindness of the people around me covers me in an enduring cloak, perhaps best symbolized by these daily poems from Mark.

And, to spread the gifts of these poems out to whoever might stumble across this blog, here is Day 1. Watch here for the other days to unfold, here in this year where I don’t have cancer, and I get to watch my nails and hair grow again, here in this year when many people will be diagnosed with cancer, and they will find themselves inside the chemo tunnel. May these poems bring comfort and love to you, no matter which sort of tunnel—of delight or sorrow or love or illness or heartbreak or health—you find yourself inside in the coming months. These are with love, from Mark.

Day 1

The Lightest Touch

Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then like a hand in the dark
it arrests the whole body,
steeling you for revelation.

In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

  -- David Whyte

Anniversaries

This time of year is, for most of us, a time to consider past and present and future. For me, this time of year now has a second—and right now more powerful—resonance. This is the time of cancer anniversaries. Last November and December were those months last year when I had cancer but didn’t know—a sort of Eden before the Fall. As I watch the dates pass, I think, “Last year you had no idea what life was about to hand to you.” Yesterday, one year ago, I ate of the tree of knowledge;  I found the lump I wasn’t looking for and didn’t ever expect to discover.

The moment of discovery is indelibly etched. I was showering, thinking about something else entirely, and my soap ran smoothly over my body and then clunk clunk over this foreign shape. I tried it with just my fingers. Still there. I sat down on the shower floor, suddenly dizzy with the possibilities. I gave myself a firm talking to: I was 43 years old, for goodness sake. There was no history of cancer anywhere in my family. I had no risk factors at all. It was surely just a cyst and I’d have the whole thing cleared up by new years. I was still wet from the shower when I called the doctor.

And with that, 2014, not yet even dawned, spiraled into darkness.

I have had such mixed feelings about this year; 2014 has had cancer woven all the way through it. When I was first diagnosed, people said I could kiss the year goodbye—that it would just be miserable from here on out. And of course nothing is that simple. I have had a year of deeper fears and sorrows than I’ve ever experienced. And there have been beautiful moments in spite of it all. And perhaps most unexpected are the beautiful moments because of it all.

Many of those moments are about the love that has come from around the world. I got letters from old students, from clients, from high school friends, from brand new friends who began to know me through this blog. It was a year of deeper connection than I’d ever have imagined: me in my chemo bubble, seeing so few people for weeks at a time, but somehow more aware of the invisible web that holds me in place with others.  This time has been a fire that burns away some relationships and forges others to steely strength. I can’t think of a single relationship that is unchanged by this experience.

It has also been a year of standing much more strongly in the present of my experience. Reflecting too much on the past is painful; the future is too uncertain to dream about. That leaves today. I have struggled (probably with many of you) to focus on my breath, on the present, on the now. But one of the gifts of cancer is that there’s no need to try to focus on the now anymore—it just arises that way. I am more awash in the tastes and colours and sensations and emotions and connections in the moment than I have ever been. I have never felt so alive.

On this anniversary day, I woke in New York City. We have come on this wintery trip to Europe and the US because the summery one we had planned ended up on the cutting-room floor—a chemo casualty. Yesterday we got up early and walked down to the 9/11 memorial where the twin towers once stood. The events of this year have made me more porous to the beauties and the horrors of being alive.  Being in the space of this horror and then thinking about the fallout from it—the war on terror that has casualties somewhere in the world every day—took my breath away. Here I am, worried about the minor discomforts of my new body and the medical prognosis of my future, and each day there are families ripped apart in tragedies local and global.

Our breath catches for far away tragedies nearly too big to imagine. The planes that disappear from the sky. The children killed in school houses. The drones that fall on houses with sleeping babies. We are so fragile and our lives so short and we can be so horrible to one another. The deaths that don’t make the news change the world forever for the living, too. My friend Nicki whose cancer killed her in six months; my ebullient cousin James who died in a pedestrian accident five days before Thanksgiving.

Each of these moments could be a cause for us to retreat, exhausted, from the love that brings us so much pain. Or we could take that pain as the price of a life well lived, the entry ticket for a existence of glittering love and connection. This is the ultimate message for me of 2014, which I have often described as the worst year in my life. Here as the clocks start ticking over (it is already 2015 at home in New Zealand), I would like to revise that moniker. 2014 has been a year with more lessons—and in many ways more living—than any year I can remember. It has kicked me in the teeth and left me gasping and breathless. I have never wept so much—and most of those tears were for the losses around me and not for my ordinary little cancer journey at all.  I have found the strands of my life—the sadness, the delight, the love, the fear, the pain—forever tangled and inextricably bound. And now, from the vantage point of these anniversaries, I am seeing the beauties in the tangles, and finding the patterns in our connections.

Flashbacks

How often in your life have you turned some corner—perhaps in a city you visit rarely, or when hearing the voice of a friend you haven’t seen for years—and bumped into a version of your old self. Suddenly you remember—and can almost feel—the twist of anxiety, the bellow of laughter, the fears and delights of the person you once were.

November is a month for flashbacks for me; it’s like walking down that street again and again. I remember last November well. It was ripe with new possibilities.  Sometimes the pictures come up on my screensaver from that time: carefree blonde curls, a ready smile, and the undiscovered tumour ready to change my life. I have such vivid memories—of conversations with clients, long plane rides nestled next to the book I was writing (now finished and in galley proofs), soaking in the hot tub with Michael and the kids. As I peer into pictures or slip into memories, it comes as such a shock to feel so absolutely normal just before everything turned on its head. I think of all the events in life that can do that: the month before the car accident, the week before the earthquake, the day before you bumped into the stranger who would become the love of your life. We are on the cusp of unexpected and shocking change in each moment, and in nearly all those moments the conditions don’t align for that change to take hold. But in the moments when we get the phone call, or have the conversation, or step off the curb into disaster—it is not just our future lives that are refigured, but our past ones too.

Last week I had the last of the reconstructive surgery. A minor, out-patient event in the same hospital where I had my major surgery in January. As I checked in at 6.30am, I could see my former self, suitcase in hand, checking in for the most frightening surgery of her life.  I was struck suddenly by how brave I was then, how terrified (hands shaking so hard it was difficult to sign the admissions papers) and how matter of fact. I remember the tense jokes with Michael and Rob, the room with a view of the car park, the marks on my skin indicating where the cuts would be made.

This time there was no suitcase, no trembling hands. The hardest part were those shadows of that former me around each corner. But oh, what a surreal experience to be awake while people cut and sew my very own body, to hear the casual conversation, chatting about the weekend and the weather, the surgeon singing to Ed Sheerhan on his side of the curtain, while I sang softly on mine, our faces inches away from each other. I was me and also not me, awake and not awake, the star of the show and a bit player.

In the recovery room after of the surgery I heard Stan talking to someone going in, encouraging her in his soft, matter-of-fact murmurs. I heard her tight cheerful laugh, and heard myself in those notes. And I suddenly realised how little I knew then about what my future could be. I didn’t know then what terrible news I could have gotten after the surgery (I could have had triple negative cancer, or many lymph nodes infected, but I didn’t). I knew I was afraid, but I didn’t know how much more there was to be afraid of. And then, along with the sadness of what has been lost, I have the most astonishing sense of gratitude.

Every day there are horrible things that don’t happen. Each day that our life stays sort of ordinary and regular, we don’t notice how lucky we are. We don’t notice the bad news that never came, the accident we didn’t have, the tragedy that never arrived. We should be singing in gratitude each commonplace day. I parted my hair yesterday for the first time in eight months. I was near giddy with the delight of it. I got a papercut and realised that it wasn’t dangerous (as they are during chemo) and I got a strange little surge of joy at the thin line of bright red blood. I agonised over the decision we’re trying to make now about where to live next year, and in the agony and tedium of it, I felt this bubbling spring of happiness—look at the choices we get to make today! We are alive and together and meandering through the days of our lives. Every day we get to wake up and look out at a world that can be so beautiful, every day we climb into bed and set the alarm and look at our calendars for the next day, every day we are breathing and alive—these days are miracles. It is so easy to forget that the ordinary days, because they are so common, are each precious jewels to be strung together on the necklace of our lives.

An awareness of the horrors that could await me might make me afraid and unhappy—and I admit that some days I live in that space too. But the horrors that don’t visit us each day could be a renewable source of energy and exhilaration, a reminder that the ordinary love and work and laughter and tears of our ordinary days could become extraordinary in the face of a coming disaster. Or we could make them extraordinary just by realising that there was almost no chance that we would be here at this moment having this experience, no matter how commonplace it seems from our current perspective (think of all the tiny choices that could have gone a different way and made it so that you were never born, or so that you had a totally different life). We could tap into the spring of joy that invisibly surrounds us, like the oxygen we take for granted. We could run into the shadow of our former selves on a street corner or a hospital corridor, and we could flashforward to now. Because right now is all we ever have: the feel of the sun on our backs, the scent of coffee on the stove, the soft snoring of a dog curled up in his bed.

Or, as e.e. cummings said it better:

"i thank You God for most this amazing"

e. e. cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)