Cancer Meditations

The descent into the liminal space

I wanted to do a photo shoot at home with my parrots before leaving SF, but they’re wild. I never know when they will come and go. I shouldn’t have worried - the photographer arrived at 11:30, the parrots arrived at 11:31.

---

I have been praying for months for time off work, time for creative pursuits, and time with family and friends. I forgot to mention cancer-free.

---

PET scans light you up from the inside with radiation to see cancer spread. I like to think that this is some version of how an X-Man is made. If I were to have special powers, I would want to channel the flora & fauna in our world. I want to swim like a fish, fly like a bird, stand firm like an oak tree, and spread joy through my flowers.

---

It’s a tightrope walk - to make light of the situation is as avoidant as it is to dive into darkness. I’m trying to find the middle.

---

When you’re radioactive, you get a special card to get through airport security.

---

I like to think that this is some form of what being pregnant feels like - except carrying around life in my womb, I carry around death. But on a longer time scale, isn’t it all the same? To bring life into the world is to know that whatever lives must ultimately pass.

---

I believe that knowing oneself and freeing one’s soul is the most important work one can do in any lifetime. Everything material fades away.

---

There is some uncanny valley about it all - of being so awful that it all becomes hilarious. The hospital ran out of pads, so they gave me baby diapers. I’ve been poked and prodded in every way I can imagine. I had to stick a tube of god knows what up my butt. I am treading a line of disassociating and being as completely in it as I can be.

---

The hardest part is the realization that my past self no longer exists. I can’t do the things I used to do. Maybe I will get back to all those things, and perhaps I will not. I will probably lose my hair shortly. But maybe there is also some solace in that none of that ever really mattered.

---

A song about dying came on Spotify, and I immediately collapsed crying. I repeated it 23 times until I got all the sadness out of my bones.

---

If we are too anchored to what life should be, we lose sight of all that could be.

---

The brass butterfly hanging on my front door fell and snapped the wing off. There is some symbolism there.

---

I know there is a path to healing this through my mind. I believe cancer is tied to deep grief and anger. But I am not gambling my life and forgoing traditional methods to prove a point.

---

I pulled an oracle card the other day, “Now is the time to surrender the misplaced guilt you may have brought, upon yourself or another, some terrible happening. It is time to let go of the shame-based belief in punishment….There is no shame in your learning process. This card’s presence is the sign of a new time - a time to swap the notion of inherent shame for the acceptance of inherent divinity. From now on, how unstoppable you shall become!” Difficult things happen because we are divine.

---

I asked God for a sign, and a friend showed up at my door with a beautiful necklace a stranger had made for me.

---

I am not dying from this. But it’s given me some peace to think that we are all on a path toward death, that we build beautiful lives that dissolve into beautiful nothingness. And in that path, I don’t want to die with my art still in me.

---

Instead of feeling frustrated that I am light-headed and weak, I’ve decided that I’m now an astronaut in low gravity. I can see so much more of the world when I walk slower.

---

Cancer treatment is a form of emptiness.

---

All of this already existed months ago. The only difference now is that I have more information and support. Darkness is clearing.

---

I passed a large blood clot yesterday in the shape of a heart. I am taking every sign I can get.

---

In ancient times, the person in transition - to adulthood, to a vision quest - would leave the village for some time. It is a space-in-between, a time to go inwards, a time of nothingness. It is the end of one chapter and the period in between a new life starting.

---

Pigeons are a type of dove.