The Wayward Path

Navigating with no map but the compass of my heart

The empty feeling is becoming familiar now, in the 5th week of my treatment. I know the signs - restlessness, boredom, compulsive reaching for distractions that only leave me feeling more empty.

Everything about this journey right now feels as if it’s designed to throw me back into my own arms. To befriend myself as if I were a beloved. To not only be with the emptiness but to invite acceptance and then Love into that space.

Some days and nights, an embodied fear runs riot through bones and blood, hijacking my breathing and my heartbeat, syncopating any steady rhythm until I have to give in to it, to let myself shake it loose from every muscle in my body. It feels like old fear, this, and in a way I’m glad to feel it so acutely, because I can choose to turn towards it, to meet it with compassion and to release it over and again.

Still, I feel there’s something I’m not ‘getting’. Some secret, some key to unlock the door, something I have to do to get better. Our internet culture constantly promotes this perspective, and as a copywriter I can see only too well the hooks and click-bait - ‘What they never told you about…’ ‘The secret nobody tells you….’ ‘Three ways to…..’.

And I’m bone-weary of this kind of consumerism, tired of seeking answers outside myself. It’s dawning on me that the question to ask is less ‘What do I have to do?’ and more ‘Who am I becoming?’. The frantic scrolling for an answer from the internet and the pile of self-help books by my bed leave me hungry, as if my soul has gone in search of sustenance and only found junk food.

This wasn’t the plan. A few years ago, before the Parkinson’s and way before the cancer, I was on a path that felt familiar, rehearsed. A well-worn groove where I was confident of my physical fitness and all the things that enabled me to achieve. This sudden dive into illness has been a swerve onto a wayward path, one whose twists and turns can only be illuminated by a lantern I must choose to find, again and again, in the peace of my own heart. It’s a left-hand path, of receiving rather than achieving, one that calls for the nourishment of imagination and mythic story in order to keep moving forward.

At times the world seems to grow very small. Those days when I’m too tired to even get to the woods, just down the lane, can feel frustrating and claustrophobic. Last week I needed a wider horizon, a landscape that opened out under the blue skies. My love drove me out onto the moor, and I sat on a rocky outcrop and just drank it all in - the mythic beast that is Dartmoor rolling and uncurling before me. It was medicine, in the way that I think we all need sometimes to simply sit on a hill and breathe in the generous expanse of earth and sky that reminds us we are more than the challenges of our daily lives, that we belong bodily to a deeper, slower, more ancient rhythm that can hold us steady when we lose our footing on the wayward path.