Fall Awake

Meditation and mindfulness were in my thoughts when I woke up. To be honest, it has been on my mind for a while as I try to make peace and honor my inner chatter. It would be all to easy to shroud myself in the subject that is cancer. To me that would be like creating another cancer on your mind if you are not a medical professional choosing to help eradicate it.

The sea of depression that can accompany such a focus on the disease does tease me with its ebb and flow on my psyche. My toes feel it but I keep myself on the shore where it is warm, safe and happy to observe and not get caught in the undertow. Some days I still find myself knee-deep but no more than that.

I bought a book Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips by Kris Carr last Wednesday. It is not my desire at all to buy books on cancer. I've received enough literature from the center and enough online reading selections to save myself the expenditure; however, the title appealed to my sense of humor. In just the preliminary pages, I find myself engaged and thankful that someone addressed the plight of twenty to thirty somethings. Many cancer documents either deal with children or folks around retirement age. What about the rest of us who are still grappling with being a vibrant adult or even a sexy Asian Goddess of Love? Apparently cancer had never heard of Sarah Sprinkles!

In my new shiny book, it recommends finding a happy place and going there to get away from things. My places are not close to my apartment; they are hundreds and/or thousands of miles away. The one place I know I can be anywhere is my mind where there is no distinction of imagination and actual visits to my happy places. Lucky me!

The universe must have been listening because on one of my blogs I follow posted the following link and poem. It was an "aah moment" (as opposed to a-ha!). Jon Kabat-Zinn's hour long talk on his google campus visit was illuminating. He talked about using meditation to "fall awake" in awareness. Watch it if you can.

At the end of his talk he shared this poem by Derek Walcott:

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

I can correlate this poem to rather than letting any kind of cancer eat away at us and take over, we can choose to focus on what is really happening and not the bullshit we unconsciously get caught up in. We can feast on our own life and how that can be more beautiful if we let it. You know from recent entries how the idea of losing my hair to chemotherapy is worrisome. I must remember that 'pruning leads to blooming'. What if the surgeon's carving the cancer out of my body in January and now my imminent hair loss is a way for God to help me reset my life on a course more beautiful than I have ever imagined?
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Fall Awake