I’ve now taken the second of my two healing infusions for this 21 day period. Great to get that second one in after missing it due to my high platelet count last round. And I’m fortunately feeling well. I went to the Cedar Lane Revolutionary Love “Seminary for a day” today – and loved learning from Rev Jacqui Lewis, Rev. Dr. Graylan Hagler, and Rev. Amanda Poppei, among others.

I meant to post this yesterday and since the post seemed to be getting long I saved it for today:

May we learn to open in love so all the doors and windows of our bodies swing wide on their rusty hinges. May we learn to give ourselves with both hands, to lift each other on our shoulders, to carry one another along. May holiness move in us so we pay attention to its small voice and honor its light in each other. —Dawna Markova

Prayer for today (FYI – MaaBaap is the conjunction of mother and father in Hindi, and is often a reference deity in Hindu worship, or as Indians acknowledge a person who has helped them a lot. It is one of my personal names for the divine). comment on someone who has been

Maa Baap, This is a time that calls for persistence and resistance on so many fronts. For all of us persisting and resisting to create justice in our world. And for Alexa as she continues to heal from and learn from cancer. Let us all persist. Blessed be

Today I’m so grateful for friends and family.

New friends, young with children and lots of energy. Three of you have stepped into my life either as new friends or as deepening ones. Your stepping forward in the ways you have throws me into wonder. And I love our visits, texts, pictures of kids doing silly things and calls. Exchanging drawings by mail. You know who you are but maybe you don’t know how much your reaching out heals me.

Long time dearest friends, calling, texting, monitoring my chemo schedule and reaching out to see how things are going, bringing treats and just showing up. Impromptu tea parties. You know who you are, and again their is renewal and deepening in our connection.

Friends who have thoughtfully recommended books, or given me books. How great, giving or shipping me a well traveled stone they carried to a special place or picked up at a special place. Even sending a photo of them at the rally on their honeymoon, or with a poster inspired by my posts. Or just reaching out.

People sending with beautiful cards and words through email and texts.

Cousins deepening and renewing connections through many means including joint daily spiritual readings and fun magazines to enjoy.

Other family reaching out with long eloquent emails focused on kids and daily life with enough concern embedded in them to deeply touch me. Oh and one who didn’t go to the rally to be with me.

And I won’t even get into how helpful Ken and Nathan are.

I can’t express enough how these things touch me, and heal me. That became more palpably true as I began to read the book “Speak the Language of Healing, Living with Breast Cancer Without Going to War.” It is important to me to avoid war, battle, survivor, victory (and by implication loss) language from my vocabulary of this – no can’t say fight – healing process. This book is all about it. The book is by 4 women from different faith traditions (including 12 step, Sufi, Jewish and Christian) who separately decided they wanted to focus on the spiritual journey offered them by cancer. It doesn’t matter that mine is uterine and theirs breast. They break their process of cancer treatment into 4 steps which they admit can loop around a bit. These are Chaos, Choices, Community and Spirit. I’ve only read Chaos and much of Community so far. This book is so rich I bet I write on it again more than once.

The specific reason that I’m linking my appreciation for all of you and this books is that the “Chaos” chapter is about the horrible process all 4 women went through of trying to answer the question “why me”. That isn’t a very interesting question to me. My answer is some combination of genetics, environmental exposures and yawn. But most people get really cought up in this and it ties to blame. Their friends and family exacerbate it by suggesting a healing vegan diet (by implication, if you’d been vegan all along you wouldn’t have gotten it) or a particular prayer practice. But if you can heal it – then you could have inadvertently caused it. All 4 women point that out

What is important to me here and what I honor you for is that not one of you have done this to me. No, “Its all for a reason” or whatever. You are remarkable because you know how messed up it would be to pose these “helpful” suggestions. Thank you all. So I sort of jumped over this step.

The next step is about choices on treatment etc. Thanks so much to those who helped so much on that side, so much I had a world class doctor within 24 hours of my diagnosis. Wow, guess I’ll move straight to the community chapter. And I’m glad to have read the others.

Source of grace – Thank you for the grace all my friends have shown and continue to show toward me. Let that spiral of grace extend beyond the walls of this group and through our expanded contacts to the world. Blessed be.

I started round 3 of my chemo last Friday and seem to be reacting as before. Not bad, just tired. Second treatment of this round will be this Friday.

We’ve rescheduled our trip till the end of Round 4 (late March). That was when my doctor was certain I could swim. We are coming St. John – yes we are!

Nathan is back at school and doing very well. His mood and energy are good. He has returned to fencing and is determined to get back his performance back to where he was before his extended absence and even get better.

Ken continues to support us all, often driving me where I could drive myself. But I’m always grateful when traffic hits and I can close my eyes and rest rather than keep my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel. Happy Valentines Day honey.

Recently I’ve been thinking about a lecture by a Hindu Guru I attended back in my teen years. He was talking about the human need to label sensations. To label them immediately and immovably and then hold onto that definition. His context was how you might label the sensation of a spiritual practice such as breath exercises (pranayama) or a deep meditative moment. He saw people label sensations as painful or in some way negative when they were just sensations and experiences. This comes to mind because there are times when I can name a sensation as pain or ‘pulling”, pain or “pressure”. A cramp or a tightness? I can label the sensation of hairlessness as cold or “fresh”, a shower hairless as inadequate or “weirdly honest, just me and my skin doing this shower thing”. How far can I go with pausing in my labeling of sensations, to come to a more refined characterization that allows for nuance and pause? I’m not sure. But I can do better than I do.

I just finished “A Man Called Ove: A Novel” by Fredrik Backman. I recommend it wholeheartedly. The book is about a man who on a happy day is a curmudgeon, and most of the time is a lot less pleasant than that. He makes a friend and one of her insights about him is “that Ove didn’t know how to bear his nameless anger. He needed labels to put on it. Ways of categorizing.” In short Ove often fights the wrong fight – the one that is a sidebar to his real anger and sadness and loss. He fights what is in front of him, not the truth behind what is in front of him. So he fights the men in white shirts who want him to put his wife in a nursing home, but perhaps doesn’t so much feel the direct sadness and anger at her disability and how it happened.

How much of that do I do? How much of the time when I’m mad at the person on the phone denying an insurance benefit, or wasting my time through endless time on hold is it really my disease I’m angry at? How much am I labeling a sensation just for the reassurance of having a name to give that experience, even if a slower more nuanced approach might yield a different more profound and insightful label?

Graceful dancer – Let Alexa pause before labeling, let her perhaps not even need to label at all that sensation, that demand on her time and energy. Give her more energy for being, and less for labeling. Let her feel that gift for herself. Let me feel it for me if it fits. Blessed be.

It was great to see so many of you at church today. Just wonderful. And I also see that in exploring the more overtly spiritual part of this journey here, perhaps I’ve not done as good a job about talking about daily life as I could.

My energy is probably at about 60% or a bit better than it was before all this happened. Since I was at about 120% of energy of most people I knew before I’m left at about 75-80% of what most people have. I’m up and about. Almost every day I do a few things outside of the house, whether it is a meal out and a doc appointment, blood draw, shot from the doc, infusion (all on the medical side) or a social event with a friend, or errands I’m definitely up and about. And some days I’m out for 12 hours, as doctor’s appointments fold into social into Nathan’s school events… And I sure didn’t have the energy to go to the big rally, or any of the other important civic actions going on around me. I’m conservative (ha) conserving energy and focusing on healing.

In addition to my changed energy level, I’m also not as focused or driven right now as I have been all my life. I sleep more, I am gravitating toward novels (light recommendations for reading welcome) more than serious reading. I’m watching more movies or streaming TV with Ken. And a huge drain on my time and energy is paying attention to our President’s shenanigans and trying to figure out how I fit into addressing those. I just signed up for a text per day on what I can do in my area (All you have to do is text the word DAILY to the number 228466. You’ll be prompted to enter your ZIP code and that’s it—you’re signed up.) And I assume my focus will return as my health does.

All of which is to say, I love your prayers and that is really what I cherish from you. People coming up at church and telling me about their daily spiritual practices and how my name is fitting in. Oh I love that.

This is an illness for the long haul. Our needs for meals or driving or other support could change in months or I pray years, or even better decades.  I’m viewing my cancer as a chronic illness not an acute one – kind of like John Edward’s wife Elizabeth’s breast cancer.  She had many good years before it got her.  And she knew it would likely get her sometime.

Life is good right now, very good.

Prayer – Ground of being. Each of us only have one day – the day we are experiencing right now. Sometimes that feels confining and tight, and even as we live this day we wish for the next. Sometimes we can hold onto today and know it is good. It is better than good, it is after all the only thing we have. Let Alexa and all of us feel the joy of friends, and wind on our cheek, spiritual connection to the divine or the energy that drives us and joyously do what we need to do and want to do today. Eat, drink, be merry – we have today.

The wig was first and it was good, but I don’t feel like myself in it. It is in the back of the closet for now.

Then came some shopping with my hairdresser friend and being someone who focuses on how heads look, she pointed me toward draping caps, of the sort many Orthodox Jewish women wear. I got some. And thought about the choice to cover hair as a religious one.

Next my friend Jenny knitted me a perfect cashmere cap, soft as a cloud and always the right temperature. I wore it the whole time I was in the hospital.

Then I started thinking about head wraps that African American women sometimes wear. I love those bold, graceful, sculptural Kente cloth wraps you see in some African American churches and at Sweet Honey and the Rock concerts. But that is not me, so I went for a simple daily wrap that African American women on the street and friends have told me looks good.

Next, I was speaking with a UU woman minister and she offered me membership in a sisterhood of women UU ministers who had cancer. I accepted with tears in my eyes and she sent me a group of powerful healing women’s chemo caps worn by sisters I didn’t know I had.

Last, one of the Muslim women in my interfaith women’s book group offered to go shopping with me to buy a scarf and teach me how she and her fellow Ahmadiyya Muslim women wear their scarves. And I started to think about other group of women’s choice to cover their hair for religious reasons. She also gave me a cap that is so beautiful it makes me smile.

The 200th anniversary of an important sermon in Unitarian history is coming in Baltimore and they have asked ministers and seminarians to process in robes. I hope I can go and I’ll be wearing my scarf. I’ll feel good about that.

Source of Love: Good can come out of evil. Good doesn’t have to win, just be as weighty as a feather landing on grass to show entropy isn’t victorious. Alexa is now joining this sisterhood of head covering women a group she never knew existed. It is a sisterhood composed of so many branches of beautiful, powerful, religious and healthy women. Let her celebrate membership. And let us be open to siblings we don’t even know we have, as life with its twists moves us forward into deep connection with new and important ties to brothers and sisters that will bind and hold and support us.