First Farmer's Market

At the Summit Farmer's Market with Chris and the kids. Discovering Indian Cucumbers, white eggplant, breakfast radishes, pickles on sticks, puppies, farmers in trucks, holding hands, conserving money, sun protection, how to wander around aimlessly, good cheese, where things come from. A lovely slice of unschooling life and a Sunday morning well spent.

Sunday Night

It is Sunday night. The kids are asleep. The cat is at the window. These tomatoes taste so sweet. I am craving chocolate.
So.
I have had a clear MRI. No structural brain issues. No brain tumor.
The 24-hour sleep-deprived EEG with photic stimulation. Normal. No seizure disorder.
The Electronystagmogram. Also normal- so no inner ear involvement. (I don't totally buy this).
Our working diagnosis: Migraine Associated Vertigo.

An excellent article.

I go for my breast check tomorrow- I think I have a cyst. I am hoping that it is nothing serious. I am trying not to think that I have been panicked about the wrong ailment. I don't feel panicked- but mainly because while I was on the Google train I discovered that breast cancer is normally not painful. My breast is very tender and the spot where I think there is a cyst was hurting. Ugh. I have no idea where things will go with this. Maybe all my dizziness and craziness was just a rehearsal for the big diagnosis just around the corner. Maybe I am just being given an opportunity to prepare my mind for some really hard shit..................

ALL ABOARD-!!!!!!!!!! Next stop- Double Mastectomy! See how it works? I bet you didn't even hear the whistle.

I am so fucking tired of being in my body- noticing every little thing. As I write this, I am realizing that this is precisely what I have needed to learn. How I have struggled with this- I never even knew what it meant until about 5 years ago. I find that when I can be in my body I am so much more able to be in relationship- with myself, those I love, those I am trying to help. I am so grateful for my Gestalt training- I think it is really enabling me to use this whole experience (at least during the parts that I wasn't freaking the fuck out).

May I take a moment to describe the exquisite focus that comes when contemplating your own death? The mixture of panic, fear, grief, anger and sometimes, in a strange way, acceptance? It is a room that you decorate with all your thoughts, fears, unfinished business. It is familiar to you and you are drawn to it, but when you are in that room nothing else exists.
It is also very hard to leave.
I will probably forget what this has felt like.
But I hope I don't.

Throughout this process, my biggest fear was leaving my kids-it still is my biggest fear really, just not as intense as it was before.
Will living with this fear help me realize how many ways and how many times a day I leave my children mentally- to check my email, to clean up some mess, to wish something is unfolding differently than it actually is? I hope so.

I was out to dinner with a neighbor couple about a year and a half ago -the woman was dealing with some crazy scary medical stuff that eventually turned out to be Lupus. They have triplets who were 4 at the time, and a 3 year old. Rather matter of factly, over a shared appetizer, she told me she knew her kids would not remember her if she died in the near future. I remember feeling as though a big giant hole opened inside my belly when she said this. I can feel it now even as I write. It is imponderable to me. Is that a word? If not, it should be. I could think of nothing to say.

So. I am still operating at about 40-60% of my usual life-energy. I have experimented with this by driving home from the doctor (the farthest and longest I have driven in weeks). I did ok. Last night, I went to Barnes & Noble. Alone. The night driving was weirding me out a bit, and being in the store I would say I felt half as weird as I felt those times in the drugstore and in the thrift shop when I actually had to leave. I am off the Prednisone. What a crazy fucking drug. It helped me function, but it was like I was putting on this mask of okayness for 6 weeks. I finally had to come off at 20 mg because it was making my heart race.

As of now, I have been taking Lorazepam for two weeks or so- only .5mg- and feeling like a total pillhead. I tried going without it this past week and was knocked on my ass by a mammoth headache the likes of which I have never seen. My doc thinks that taking the Lorazepam will help with the dizziness feeling (it does, indeed) while my body continues to come off the Prednisone. He initially prescribed it (at my request) for the fucking panic that I went into the moment I heard the words Brain MRI. I didn't take one today just as an experiment and felt mildly like shit all day. So. I continue to feel as though somebody is missing something. Although the MAV diagnosis does fit me, I am not excited about the prospect of lifelong dependence on medication.

More importantly, I am aware of how quickly I have returned to the old arrogance about my life. I finally hear that I am not going to die (OF ANY MAJOR ILLNESS RIGHT NOW) and I busy myself being pissed that I might have to do something unpleasant to be able to live fully.

I haven't had chocolate in 4 days. In the past few weeks I have discovered some strength I didn't know I had. Not that giving up chocolate is like donating a kidney or anything. But I turned off my smoking switch back before this all began by getting fucking real with myself for the first time in a long time. Some day I may post the letter I wrote that helped me do that. Now I am giving up chocolate in the hopes that it was triggering this Migraine shit. I am just amazed at how I am managing to do this. I wouldn't have thought myself capable. I will do anything to hang around until my body can't hang around anymore. And I know I have to do everything I can to make sure that I honor this vessel that is my body.

I love being alive. I love learning how to be who it is I am. I have never been so awake in my life. I feel like I was asleep for so long.

(One of my favorite authors asked at the Omega Adventure of Being Alive conference: What if the question is not why am I so infrequently the person I want to be, but rather, why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am? A good question, no?)

I also must note that I am aware of this: Today, thousands of people- mothers, babies, children, fathers, grandmothers- are suffering in places far away from me. (Suffering is everywhere, really, though, isn't it?) I cannot do too much to alleviate that suffering- except to support people who will work toward peace and cultivate peacefulness in my own life. (Some would argue that I could do more- they are probably right.)

I am aware that my current struggle is nothing compared to what people in our world are facing right this minute. I still cannot get out of my mind one particular scene in The Translator, a book about Darfur, that describes the most horrifying of all experiences I have read about in human history. Here is the link for the book.


I know that I am here, in my red house, with my food, with my animals, my sleeping babies, and my blog and my laundry hopping in the washer. I remember when I was doing Save the Children and corresponding with the father of the child I had sponsored. The organization's guidelines for sponsors suggested not referencing family pets because this is a concept that those in extreme poverty cannot understand- how we keep and feed animals who exist in our lives for no other reason than that we feel good to have them around. I can remember finding it very hard to find anything to write that didn't make me feel like a priveleged white woman from AMERICA who is sheilded from any real suffering. But, that is what I am- at least on paper. In my heart (and I am not saying this counts for anything at all because there is no way to measure these things) I am connected to others suffering. I try to use my pain. The practice of Tonglen, which I return to every once in a while, helped me a great deal to feel as though I was connecting, in whatever small or large way, with human suffering.

This may have been my most important learning of all during this.

An article about Tonglen:

From Shambhala.org:

"THE PRACTICE OF TONGLEN
In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves. In particular, to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean —you name it— to have compassion and to care for these people, means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves. In fact, one's whole attitude toward pain can change. Instead of fending it off and hiding from it, one could open one's heart and allow oneself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind. The tonglen practice is a method for connecting with suffering —ours and that which is all around us— everywhere we go. It is a method for overcoming fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our heart. Primarily it is a method for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us, no matter how cruel or cold we might seem to be. We begin the practice by taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and who we wish to help. For instance, if you know of a child who is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of that child. Then, as you breathe out, you send the child happiness, joy or whatever would relieve their pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in other's pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open, and breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever you feel would bring them relief and happiness. However, we often cannot do this practice because we come face to face with our own fear, our own resistance, anger, or whatever our personal pain, our personal stuckness happens to be at that moment. At that point you can change the focus and begin to do tonglen for what you are feeling and for millions of others just like you who at that very moment of time are feeling exactly the same stuckness and misery. Maybe you are able to name your pain. You recognize it clearly as terror or revulsion or anger or wanting to get revenge. So you breathe in for all the people who are caught with that same emotion and you send out relief or whatever opens up the space for yourself and all those countless others. Maybe you can't name what you're feeling. But you can feel it —a tightness in the stomach, a heavy darkness or whatever. Just contact what you are feeling and breathe in, take it in —for all of us and send out relief to all of us. People often say that this practice goes against the grain of how we usually hold ourselves together. Truthfully, this practice does go against the grain of wanting things on our own terms, of wanting it to work out for ourselves no matter what happens to the others. The practice dissolves the armor of self-protection we've tried so hard to create around ourselves. In Buddhist language one would say that it dissolves the fixation and clinging of ego. Tonglen reverses the usual logic of avoiding suffering and seeking pleasure and, in the process, we become liberated from a very ancient prison of selfishness. We begin to feel love both for ourselves and others and also we being to take care of ourselves and others. It awakens our compassion and it also introduces us to a far larger view of reality. It introduces us to the unlimited spaciousness that Buddhists call shunyata. By doing the practice, we begin to connect with the open dimension of our being. At first we experience this as things not being such a big deal or so solid as they seemed before. Tonglen can be done for those who are ill, those who are dying or have just died, or for those that are in pain of any kind. It can be done either as a formal meditation practice or right on the spot at any time. For example, if you are out walking and you see someone in pain —right on the spot you can begin to breathe in their pain and send some out some relief. Or, more likely, you might see someone in pain and look away because it brings up your fear or anger; it brings up your resistance and confusion. So on the spot you can do tonglen for all the people who are just like you, for everyone who wishes to be compassionate but instead is afraid, for everyone who wishes to be brave but instead is a coward. Rather than beating yourself up, use your own stuckness as a stepping stone to understanding what people are up against all over the world.
Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us.
Use what seems like poison as medicine.
Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings."-by Pema Chodron.

I am learning about how to stay awake in my life. I am practicing being Here- not There with that thought or idea or fantasy of how I think things should be. I am seeing how we are all the same.

It is Sunday night. The kids are asleep. The cat is at the window. These tomatoes taste so sweet. I am craving chocolate. I am wanting Chris to kiss me again. I am here.