Guess What Rested in the Garden?

This morning as I quietly drank my morning cup of tea on the front porch, watching the beautiful morning unfold, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. When I turned to look, I noticed that a very tiny bird was sitting on a rock. It moved to another rock, and I wondered to myself, "Is that a hummingbird?!" I had seen a hummingbird rest in the branches of our spruce tree many years ago, but I am so accustomed to seeing them fly that a hummingbird resting was almost unrecognizable.

Right after I wondered if it was a hummingbird, the tiny bird raised itself a few inches off the ground, hovered in place, and then zoomed off. A hummingbird? YES!

So I ran inside to get my digital SLR camera with my new zoom lens, imagining that if the hummingbird rested in the garden once, it might come back. I spent the next hour enjoying the birds and squirrels and flowers in the garden, and the colors of the leaves beginning to fall. Camera in hand and ready for action.

Did the hummingbird come back? No, not that I've seen yet. But I'm patient!

Faith and Trust in the Universe

As I heal, after working so diligently every day for over 13 months, I am very protective of the progress I have made. I cherish it, and no matter how slow the progress is -- and sometimes it seems that weeks go by before I notice even a tiny improvement in my condition. I am still taking just as much pain medication as I did 1 year ago, and I still cannot stand for more than a few hours before I need to lie down to rest my spine. I still do physical therapy exercises I was given a year ago (and I was told emphatically NOT to stop doing them). So every day when I wake up, I slowly and gently wake up my muscles...

I have had to take the meaning of patience to a new level. I have always been a patient person, but the patience always had a limit. In the past, after being patient for a significant period of time, I would always get to a place where I would feel, "OK, now I have been patient enough. Now it is time for something to happen." Not so any more. I am patient as my body does what it needs to do to heal, and then I have to continue to be patient. And again. And again. And then even more patience.

There is no one who can tell me when my healing will have progressed to the point that I will no longer need pain medication. I will have to find that out for myself. And there is no one who can tell me when I will be able to have a day go by where I do not have to repeatedly lie down. That, too, I will have to find out for myself. And yet I have no doubt that I will reach that level of health, that my body will continue to grow stronger and more flexible month by month, more physically able to walk and hike and ski, and yes, even ride a bicycle!

The fact that I do not doubt for a moment the degree of my healing is part of Who I Am. I have great faith and trust in the Universe. I live a life of abundance, and I have never doubted that. I live a life of joy, and I do not question that. It is part of Who I Am. I can take a challenging situation and find the bright side of it -- for example, of being diagnosed with cancer. It is Who I Am, always looking for the positive lesson in what the Universe and Great Mystery present before me.

And yet, being human (or at least being over 50) means that I am also forgetful. At times, my mind will wander into future and wonder 'what if this happens?' or 'what if that happens?', and then I find myself in fear. An illusion about something that I have no control over, and which is not real. Then I have to remind myself to bring my attention back to the present moment, remind myself that everything is fine right now. Yes, my healing may be slow, but I AM healing. And I remind myself that I do have faith in the Universe, that I do trust the Great Mystery to be perfect in what and how things are orchestrated. This trust and faith in the Universe is for me the truth of what is. And I can say to my fear, "Thank you for reminding me of my human journey."

One doesn't have to have a diagnosis, a label, in order to go to the fear of 'what if?'. Anyone can be paralyzed by fear -- what if I get hit by a truck today? or what if I get hit by a meteorite? These, too, are thoughts that can create fear, but this fear is not (usually) related to the Truth of the moment. It takes attention to one's thoughts -- recognizing which thoughts need to be heeded and which are an illusion -- and diligence in the present moment to bring one's self back to Truth. And in that truth, faith and trust bring a sense of peace and ease, bring an acceptance of what is.

Of course, the irony is that with a diagnosis of cancer, the diagnosis itself creates the tendency to go to fear, worry, anxiety, and 'what if' regarding the future. And yet, the Truth is that none of us knows the future. We just know the present. Is yours a present which is a present (a gift) to yourself?

The Healing Power of Excitement

I am just astounded by the healing power of excitement.

Last summer, when it was so hard for me to move and I was in so much pain, there were 2 exciting events which involved interacting with many people. First, on June 30, 2007, our gardens were one of the 8 stops on the Amherst Garden Tour. I sat on a chair on the front porch, greeted the 311 visitors to our garden over the course of 6 hours, and was thrilled at the show of enthusiasm and delight, along with the wonderful compliments I received about our "Garden of Eden". And with the thrill and excitement of the day, I felt good in my body that day.

Then at the end of last summer -- Aug. 26, 2007 -- my daughter got married. There were times in the middle of the summer when I wondered what my physical state would be for the wedding. But following my hospital stay at the end of July 2007, I had begun to heal from the many compression fractures in my spine, and was receiving ongoing chemotherapy and physical therapy. By the end of August my dream came true: I WAS ABLE TO DANCE AT MY DAUGHTER'S WEDDING. Not only that, but I helped walk her down the aisle (true, I was also using her for support!), and I danced not one but SIX dances in all at the reception. At the time, dancing consisted of leaning on and holding on to my partner, but I didn't care HOW I danced, just that I was able to stand and move and celebrate!!

After the wedding festivities, when my daughter left town with her husband, she suggested that I have parties and as many celebrations as I could, because she noticed how I lit up when I was excited and when there was something to celebrate. I thought about her words, and took them in deeply when I realized the truth in them. And since my birthday was just 2 weeks away, I decided to have a birthday party! So less that 3 weeks after the wedding and dinner and brunch with over 120 people, I had a pot-luck dinner & birthday party with 25 friends coming over to celebrate my birthday. It was wonderful.

And as the year has gone by, I have continued to notice the healing power of excitement. If a friend comes over to see me, I not only do not notice the pain in my body, it truly isn't there, and I don't need pain medication until after the friend leaves. Or if I spend time with family now, I am so excited about being able to walk that I can walk more than I have typically walked in the last 6 months.

And with the excitement I feel, no matter what the source, when it means that I feel better in my body because of the excitement, that makes me feel emotionally even better, adding to my excitement and joy. So there is a positive feedback loop that gives me enormous amounts of energy. I am grateful, I feel good, I can use my body, and I am heaing.

And amidst all of the excitement, no matter how good I feel I still need to lie down for 2-3 hours in the afternoon to rest my spine, and that is something that I have come to love. I read, I meditate, I make phone calls, and in the good weather I lie down outside in the shade and enjoy the beauty of my "Garden of Eden".

So I have come to not only accept my situation, I EMBRACE IT -- I derive great strength from knowing that I am actively engaged in my healing and curing, and I have deep faith and trust that I am well cared for by the Universe.

The Hawk Feather and the Hawk

As my back heals from spinal collapse resulting in 15 compression fractures (15 months ago) and spine surgery (3 months ago), my strength has grown to where I am able to go for a walk in the morning if I go within 2 hours of getting out of bed. I have created several routes of varying length in the neighborhood, some with hills and others which are level, some which take 30 minutes to complete and others which take closer to 45 or 50 minutes. Because my legs have been strong all along, I can walk fast (or what is fast compared to others who I pass on my walk), so my 40 minute walk is over 2 miles.

Today, as I went on my 30 minute walk, I picked up several feathers. One was a beautiful blue jay feather with a white tip and blue and black markings up the spine, and a few were nondescript, grayish in color, from what bird I do not know. Also on this day, because of road construction, I retraced my steps on the return home rather than walk in a loop. So I was quite surprised when I was returning close to home that I noticed a feather on the ground that I had passed by 20 minutes earlier. Maybe I had been looking at something else at the time.

The feather was white and mostly fluff, about 2 inches long, and I almost didn't pick it up. But I bent down, picked the feather up and turned it over, and was amazed to find that I was holding a gorgeous small red-tailed hawk feather, with the distinctive light brown markings up the spine. I was elated.

I am always on the lookout for red-tailed hawk feathers, because there is a nesting pair of these hawks within 1 mile of our house. I often see and/or hear the hawks, not only here at home, but 1 mile away at the Sunwheel -- flying, or soaring, or looking for food. At the Sunwheel, the hawks often sit on the tall standing stones to get a good view of the movement of live food on the ground.

So today, when I found the hawk feather close to home, it was a reminder to take my camera and new zoom lens with me to the Sunwheel in hopes of photographing the hawk up close. And what a gift that hawk feather turned out to be. Sure enough, a hawk was at the Sunwheel, standing on the field of grass that had been recently mowed, about 300 feet from the road. I attached the zoom lens to my camera before I got out of the car so I would be ready to take pictures when I made my presence known, and started taking pictures as soon as I got out of the car. As I walked closer to the hawk, I pointed the camera to focus and take a picture -- the camera (a digital SLR Canon Rebel XTi) makes a tiny beeping noise as it focuses. So the hawk noticed me and/or the beeping noise, and she started to fly.

I took pictures as fast as I could, not really knowing if the hawk was in the image or not. In fact, the hawk had flown to a branch in the tree right over my head. I continued to take pictures, and then the hawk flew to a bare branch in the tree, always looking around for food. I continued to take pictures until it was time for me to rest my back.

At that point I looked down on the grass and saw another hawk feather, larger than the one I had found in the morning. I picked it up, and said a prayer of thanks to the hawk and to the Universe for the amazing gifts of this day. What a wonderful adventure this is!

To view my nature photos, go to my Astronomy and Spirituality web site.

The Magical Organic Blueberries

I love blueberries. And at the end of the summer, the local crop of these tasty berries makes them easily available.

So as I drove past a fresh fruit and vegetable stand last week, I stopped to buy some blueberries for a friend I was going to visit. As I selected the box I would buy, I asked, "Are these organic?" And the answer was no. But I bought them anyway so I would have them for my friend.

I didn't buy any for myself, though. I would wait until I could find organic berries, since I am making every effort to eat organic food.

So I visited my friend, and then had one of my Feldenkrais bodywork sessions. On the way home, as I was driving the same route I had traveled earlier in the day, lo and behold there was a folding table in a driveway with a large sign that read "Organic Blueberries".

I had already passed it by the time the words registered, so I backed up to the driveway and parked. As I got out of the car, an elderly man walked to meet me. $4 a pint for the tastiest organic blueberries around, he said. Taste one, he said. Someone had just bought 10 pints, and he only had 4 left. Hand screened by his wife, he said, so there were no stems. Just the best berries.

So I tasted one of the large, dark blue berries, and its deliciousness exploded in my mouth. I bought 2 pints.

And after getting back in my car I laughed. I was sure those berries had not been there earlier in the day. I gave thanks to the Universe for granting me my wish for organic blueberries, and I felt overjoyed and blessed by the magical gift. Life is truly amazing.

A Night to Remember -- Anniversary in the ER

This post continues the story of what happened after my bowel shut down due to chemo (see post of 8/20/08).

I was taken by ambulance to the ER just before midnight on July 24, 2007 -- needless to say, it was quite a dramatic way for my partner and I to celebrate our 15th anniversary together. I was in a great deal of back pain from the collapse of my spine, so shortly after beginning the ambulance ride I was given morphine. I remember watching what landmarks I could make out through the small upper windows of the ambulance, and paying attention to our progress by the turns we were making.

After arriving at the ER, I was put in a room where I waited. I remember doing a lot of waiting that night. I was waiting for a doctor to help me, waiting to digest my dinner, waiting to poop, waiting to feel better. I couldn't have felt much worse. Luckily I didn't have to wait for my family -- my partner and daughter drove to the ER and stayed with me that night.

I have never been so uncomfortable in my life. It seemed that my body was becoming overwhelmed with systems that didn't work. My skeletal system was incapable of holding me up, and caused me a great deal of pain. But the real reason for being in the ER was the shutting down of my bowel. My digesting dinner could not go into my intestines, which were already full with 5 days of food, so instead of moving through my system in the usual way, the food was going up and down my esophagus and burning my throat in the process.

My body was toxic to me, and I was in a sort of stupor from the morphine. I was in so much pain and discomfort, lying there on a bed in a darkened room in the ER in the wee hours of the morning, that I didn't care if I died that night. It breaks my heart to know, even now, that I had lost the will to live, that there was a moment that I was willing to relinquish this incarnation -- the love, the family, all that I had worked for, all that brought me joy. I just didn't care any more. It took too much energy to care, and I just didn't have any.

When a doctor did examine me, he decided to do an enema to clean me out. Nothing happened. Then another enema, and still nothing happened. Then the doctor decided it was time to do X-rays, and that freaked me out. Because of all of the compression fractures in my spine, I was unable to lie down on a hard surface, like an X-ray table. It would cause back spasms, and I just couldn't choose that for myself. So I suggested that we do another enema first, since that would be the therapy of choice if the X-ray showed an obstructed bowel.

Several hours later, after the X-ray and 2 more enemas, still nothing had moved in my intestines. It was around 4 a.m. in the ER, and my partner was sitting next to me holding my hand while my daughter was sleeping in the corner sitting up in a chair. I was dozing on and off, sleeping in the stolen moments when I could become comfortable, only to be awakened by my faulty digestive system. I turned to Gene and said, "I decided to stay."

The next morning I asked Gene if I had really said that, or if I just imagined it, the words, "I decided to stay". Yes. I had said those words out loud, I had decided to stay. I had been ready to give it all up, to relinquish this life on Earth, and then I had moved through that moment and made a decision -- something shifted inside of me and I made the decision to live. And in retrospect, it is clear that this decision was an important part of what I needed to begin the healing process.

Lying in the ER, before the sky became light at the beginning of the next day, the doctor came in to talk to us. He said there were 2 choices -- to admit me to the hospital, or to send me home. They weren't going to send me home because my bowel was not functioning, so they would admit me to the hospital. Only there weren't any rooms available yet, so I would stay in the ER until one was vacated.

Before the doctor left the room, my daughter said to him that I was very uncomfortable since my digested dinner was not able to go anywhere, and she asked about having my stomach pumped. That sounded like a good idea to all, so the nursing staff came in to put a tube down my throat (in through the nose -- very uncomfortable but effective). And as soon as the tube hit my stomach, the contents came up with quite a force of ejection! I did feel better after that.

By late morning, I was moved to a hospital room in the new wing -- I lucked out and had a private room with a picture window looking out over the green trees of western Massachusetts.

And thus began my first ever stay in the hospital, and a chance to begin a long healing journey -- and that is the story for another post.

The Good Morning Kiss

My daughter came into town last weekend to attend the wedding of some dear friends of hers, so I drove to the airport Thursday night to pick her up. It was another set of firsts for me -- the first time in a year that I had driven to the airport on my own, and the first time in a year I had driven on the highway at night. It was wonderful to drive on a clear summer night down the highway with the wind blowing on my face, the Moon almost full and lighting up the sky.

Even though we got home late and all went to bed around 2 a.m., the next morning I was up early as usual. By 9:30 a.m. I had done my morning routine of tea, physical therapy, prayer, yoga and meditation, and I went upstairs to get my daughter up. She heard my foot steps and opened her sleepy eyes, even though I was trying to be quiet, and I leaned over and kissed her good morning. As I looked down at her smiling face, I realized that last summer when she got married, I was not able to do that for her, to kiss her good morning on her wedding day.

But I could do it now, I could give her that good morning kiss, and I was overcome with such a deep sense of gratitude and joy at being able to kiss my daughter good morning, that tears streamed down my face. Tears of joy for this rich moment of life that is such cherished gift.