Beginning again

A new diagnosis, a new journey into trust and despair, love and fear, and how the opposites always dance together

Let’s start at the new beginning, then. A few months ago I was diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer, and have just begun a 6-week course of radiotherapy and a little dose of chemo.

That’s that out the way then, the sharing of the facts.

So today, the first full day of beautiful sunshine, I’m too wiped out to venture beyond the seat in our garden. Oh how I want to be in the woods, on the beach, on the moor, walking or cycling. Just to take part in the world in this newly-fresh spring day.

Yes I am doing all the right things- I am grateful for so much, I am resting and surrendering (albeit gracelessly) to this whole new state of incapacity. I’m reminding myself it could be a lot worse, and even that this is a gift in rags - another part of some soul initiation I must have signed up to in some moment of karmic bravado. Anything, any story to make sense of what is happening to me, with me.

But I will be honest. This is shit. There is no denying it and no dressing it up. I can’t even summon eloquence about it all today.

I think it might feel better if I could muster a cleansing sob or two. But the grief feels stuck somewhere, well, sticky. Life feels stuck, slowed down and very very still. Like death, really.

Meanwhile the sunshine beams in through grimy windows I haven’t got the energy to clean. My husband comes in from not one, but two runs this morning plus a sauna, one daughter is at the beach with our friends and the other one is off to yet another party. Life swings past me, so it seems, gathering up everyone in her spring skirts and leaving me out.

So there you are. I like to write posts about inspiration, illuminations on dark bends of life’s path. This one demanded total, frank and brutal honesty. And I know, as I write, that I am writing only a slanted glimpse of this latest journey, that there is so much more to write about the astonishing love of friends and family sweeping in with support, love, cooking, lifts to hospital. About the value of a life lived in small, quiet ways. Even about the healing fire that is chemotherapy.

But all that is for another day. Today, just sitting in between opposites, inviting them to dance around my still centre. Today, about giving up frustration at the grimy windows and revelling in the blessing of sunshine.

Thanks for being here.