Detour Haiku

a swerve in the road

around the curve the cliff's edge ~

better spread my wings

The Next Chapter

In a timely coincidence, I received this link yesterday on Joseph Campbell called Finding Joe - an introduction to not only the man behind the Power of Myth series, but also to what he calls the Hero's Journey. It's a powerful primer about this journey of ours discovering ourselves and what we're capable of through the meeting of adversity and challenges head on, face to face. Watching it last night reminded me of the distance I've traveled in the past almost 9 years of challenges to my health, its accompanying losses and also the gains. Little did I know I was also brushing up on my skills of survival that would be needed again soon -- kind of a review of what I've learned confronting my own personal dragons and finding my way through the dark jungle.

I had a cat scan last Thursday - a check-in with my annoying roommate, lymphoma, to make sure he's respecting the boundaries of the body we share. It was stressful for a number of reasons beyond my control, but I rolled with it pretty well. I had just read an article a couple days before about how being the angry patient and expressing that to the staff usually ends up hurting the patient. I kept my cool, did lots of meditating, counting breaths, listening to music on my iPod -- and waiting while they worked out some snafus. Hours later, two bottles of mocha-flavored contrast downed, one IV with more contrast and a run through the scanning tube and I was good to go.

Today I saw my oncologist for the results. He said the cancer came back in the kidney again - this time in both.

My doc is incredibly good at what he does; he brings the art back into medicine. I look into his kind and gentle eyes and give him my wholehearted trust in his care and skills. So yeah, if one is going to receive crappy news, receiving it from someone I trust in a smooth and non-threatening way leaves me feeling safe surrendering into his very knowledgeable hands. The delivery of the news was cushioned by kindness and didn't even entirely register. In the moment I had heard all of the information, but it took me until I reached the parking lot later to realize I'd lost my remission, saying to myself, "I guess it's a relapse," as I tried to digest the facts.

Am I good at dissociating or what?!

The cat scan showed that lymphoma has returned to my kidneys again so we're going to have to deal with that. We're starting with the lightest and easiest of treatments - a single agent medicine that I've had before with other combo treatments. He wants to experiment and see if the single med might knock it out. I go for infusion 4 Mondays in a row starting next week, then we'll check and take it from there. If it clears then he might want to put me on a maintenance regime of once every 3 months. If it doesn't respond then we move onto trying other things. He wants to protect my kidneys and get this out out before it grows any more.

I'm not entirely surprised. The extreme tiredness I've had the past few months has been reminding me of the time before the first boxing match with lymphoma. I'm not surprised, but there's still some shock -- not exactly what I was planning on for my summer. Oh well. Spend a day in the cancer center and you start to feel damn lucky! -- especially when you see the young people who are dealing with cancer!

So that's my news. I'm about to go do some planting and digging in the dirt now. I call it therapy - and grounding --  and also a reminder about maintaining my mental garden and the beauty before me, the beauty behind me, the beauty above me, below me and all around me as I walk forward on the Beautiful Trail - even with its speed bumps that slow me down.

Tiahui - Forward in Courage.

Let It Go

Let go of the way you thought life would unfold;
the holding of plans or dreams or expectations - - Let it all go.
Save your strength to swim with the tide.
The choice to fight what is here before you now
will only result in struggle, fear and desperate attempts to flee
from the very energy you long for. Let it go.

Let it all go and flow with the grace
that washes through your days
whether you receive it gently
or with all your quills raised to defend against invaders.
Take this on faith: The mind may never find
the explanations that it seeks,
but you will move forward nonetheless.

Let go, and the wave's crest
will carry you to unknown shores,
beyond your wildest dreams or destinations.
Let it all go and find the place of rest
and peace, and certain
transformation.

- Diana Faulds

June Nightwalk Haiku (first fireflies)

in the harsh winter 
it’s too easy to forget
how fireflies shimmer

Recurring Theme Haiku

your breath like a sail 

place one foot on the highwire 

trust in gravity ~ 

Looking Closely - Dandelion Sunset

100 Years Ago - The Ludlow Massacre

One hundred years ago, on April 20, 1914, the National Guard opened fire with machine guns on an encampment of striking miners and their families. Two dozen, mostly women and children, were murdered in southern Colorado by an alliance of business and government attempting to union bust. This came to be known as the Ludlow Massacre - a piece of history of union organizing. My grandfather was there with his family, including my 3 year old dad. They all survived. He quit mining, the only work he'd known since the age of 6 - and became the cemetery gravedigger - still digging in the earth, but for a much more hospitable employer: the deceased.

Thankfully, this is some of the survivor stock I come from. Big gratitude for those tough survivor genes - and gratitude for all those who have sacrificed for all of our basic human rights in the workplace.

 http://zinnedproject.org/materials/ludlow-massacre/

Monkey Lesson

Fall seven times, stand up eight.
How many times should you try?
Even monkeys fall from trees.

Fill In the Blank....

In her New Orleans neighborhood, artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang turned an abandoned house into a giant chalkboard asking a fill-in-the-blank question: “Before I die I want to ___.” Her neighbors' answers -- surprising, poignant, funny -- became an unexpected mirror for the community. (What's your answer?)

I had the pleasure of hearing her speak yesterday about her art and her life, which are one in the same. Check her out -- and fill in your own ending to that sentence.

"Before I die I want to...... "

http://www.ted.com/talks/candy_chang_before_i_die_i_want_to.html

Near Death Experience Experience - Andrew Bird

And we'll dance like cancer survivors -
like we're grateful simply to be alive.

From Across the Border. The Other One. Canada.. Alejandra Ribera - "I Want"

From Montreal, Quebec, Alejandra Ribera singing I Want.

Precious Moment

"Like it or not, for the moment, the earth is where we make our stand."
                                                                 - Carl Sagan

How to Live with Introverts

http://schrojones.deviantart.com/art/How-to-Live-with-Introverts-291305760

Magnolia Blossoms

A Mind Controlling Fungus?!

Amazing, horrific, awesome, severe balancing of nature - which this shows is not in the least bit warm and fuzzy, but more brutal. 

The music accompanying this footage adds even more contrast - emphasizing how reality is far stranger than fiction and making me question how different is having too many people from having too many ants - and how will we be brought into balance?

Nature is mighty bizarre sometimes. This would be one of those times.

"But these attacks do have a positive effect on the jungle's diversity, since parasites like these stop any one group of animal getting the upper hand. The more numerous a species becomes the more likely it will be attacked by its nemesis - a cordyceps fungus."

Still Sweepin'

How much courage
how much presence
does it take to sweep
the road after the tanks
have rolled through?

sweep, sweep, sweep...
one sweep at a time
reclaiming the road
reclaiming the mind
reclaiming peace

one square foot at a time
sweep
sweep
sweep

Breathing Lessons

Over the weekend I caught the movie 'The Sessions'. It offers up some insights into living with disability, but the scope of the movie is small - mostly covering one year of a 49 yr life through the lens of sexuality. Still, it's a lens worth looking through to humanize the face of the disabled.

The movie was only the first breadcrumb on my trail to discover Mark O'Brien - the man behind the story - poet, journalist and disability activist. Disabled by polio at age 6, he lived under his parents care until he was 27, next moving to a nursing home for two years. He escaped that horror to bravely venture into the big, grand world of adult independence and enrolled at Berkley, graduating in journalism. He was also a poet, stating: "Poetry and journalism have more in common than either would like to admit. They both have to tell the truth."

He wrote by poking painstakingly slow at a keyboard with a stick in his mouth as he lay inside an iron lung machine - the contraption that gave him breath and sustained his life.

Mark O'Brien on writing: "I'm living and I imagine it's for some reason. I have my work. I write. I don't have writer's block ever. I have all this stuff I want to write. And I can only write an hour or two a day. There's never enough time to write."

In digging up information on him, I came upon this link to the '96 documentary on him that won an Oscar for best short documentary - 'Breathing Lessons'. It's short - 36 minutes -- and waaaay better than The Sessions. The latter is the "watered down for the mainstream," mass appeal, feel-good, semi-romantic comedy. Breathing Lessons is the real deal - multi-layered, complex, complicated -- like a human being is.  The sexual surrogacy story of 'The Sessions' being just one small chapter of a remarkable life of a writer confined and limited - in body only.

If you take the time to watch this you'll only be enriched. Consider it leavening for the writer in you.

"Everybody becomes disabled.... unless you die first." - Mark O'Brien

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/breathing_lessons

John Cage's Family Vacation

How Does Your Garden Grow? A Sestina of Flor y Canto - 7 Years Later

                                                                        Diego Rivera mural panel
If you want your garden to flourish
you must know discord as well as harmony,
encourage each plant toward its growth,
appreciate and honor its gift,
the bounty it brings from a tiny seed,
work that's never finished and always begins again.

If you're averse to beginning again
you'll never see your garden flourish,
you might as well not bother with seed
or dream of a flowering harmony;
don't hold out for any gift;
hope without action bears no growth.

Drought and storm threaten all growth;
it may take a fool to resolve again,
to see crazy potential as a gift
where others see nothing that can flourish,
to trust this twisting path to harmony
and what this thing is we call a 'seed'.

This little bit of hope in seed,
our faith one day we’ll find new growth,
this rocky ground tilled toward harmony,
this familiar soil turned again,
every obstacle to our garden's flourish,
together, all of these, a gift.

Every season brings its gift;
every choice bears fruit and seed;
and whether we choose a life to flourish
or let virulent weeds choke out its growth
it's ours to choose if we try again,
to work this patch into harmony.

There's no arrival into harmony;
chaos comes bearing its unwelcome gift -
the gift that tells us once again
nurturing the seed,
tending its growth,
is endless work if a life is to flourish.

Every move toward harmony starts with choosing the right seed
and embracing the hidden gift: every obstacle to its growth.
We choose to rise again - or not. We choose a life of flourish.

Standing Strong

I remember like yesterday that initial sharpening of my vision six years ago when my doc spoke the word "remission," and also my wanting to use my added time well, the "gravy years" as I’ve called them as I tried to live them to the best of my ability. Second time around with a second remission, I didn't know it would be all the more magnified. Nobody told me that would happen. I could never imagine it. I've never really been here before.

Life being full of surprises, it’s important to remember many of them are good ones, but sometimes you have to get past some pretty bad ones before you can find the good ones further down the road. Never knowing what lies beyond the next bend, all that's required of me is to try to make the best out of this ride today and whatever it brings my way, i.e: Show up! Show up to the challenges I have to [and get to] labor with, along with the rewards of joining everyone here for one more spin on this blue-green planet another day.

My story is a common story. One could say it’s unfortunately a more and more common story, but with that, so is the good and fortunate story of survival and re-mission.  It takes some luck, but as a good friend reminds me: 
“I'm a great believer in luck -- and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it." 

On that note, here's a song about working hard, standing strong, and becoming a worthy opponent to the challenges in the Ring.