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Two years ago I was host to a cancerous tumor, which grew to the size of a grapefruit before I noticed it, and was quite a bit bigger by the time I was rolled into surgery and they cut it out, perfectly round, perfectly contained. I carry on my body the memory of this: a pink, nine-inch scar. The emotional memory, the waves on the water, carry themselves throughout intervening months and recreate themselves in each year’s language.
Last month, for example, the radiologist who did my yearly check-up ultrasound told me as he turned from the huge white computer that he saw a fair-sized cyst on my (only remaining) ovary, with “debris” in it. It could be anything, like a hemorrhagic cyst, normal, go away on its own, but since I had a history of malignant tumors, he was sure my doctor would want to follow up next month. You can probably imagine me saying thank you, walking back into the long hall, field of vision a diffuse blanket of vague perception. Sensing my way back to the car, back to the interstate, back to my house. But this is my life, now.
In the next week, telling Marshall and my mom, I realized that an awareness of illness, or infertility, or the mortality that all of these unavoidably imply, is a much more peaceful house guest than I had thought. Maybe I’m too young and too healthy to have a right to say that, but — maybe not. Because I lived January with prescience, weighing all possible ends, and still knew so much joy.
For example, Marshall and I are writing a check and signing papers this week to reserve Ijams Nature Center as a wedding site. For example, Marshall’s gentleness and unbending loyalty is teaching me things I never knew about love. For example, true vulnerability and trust are making us new people, and we’re already walking over black chasms on a rope bridge. No risk = no glory. We’re presupposing. Visions of Aslan and the letters of Rilke rise up in our dreams and we awaken to snow falling, in long straight crystals or great cattail-fluff flakes.
For example, Dr. MacDonald sat us down in the office yesterday, shook our hands, and said congratulations on some good news — the ultrasound images were clear of anything worrisome. So we took a cloud down to the first floor, a connecting cloud to the car, and a cloud to Carabba’s, where we had an extreme amount of incredible food at 4:00pm.
Last night I decided I needed an evening and morning to myself, so after Marshall dropped me off at my car in the Old City I drove home, cleaned up the kitchen, turned on the radiator, and opened up my journal from 2008. I read from July to November, rapt, and finally put it down well after midnight.
How different my life is, now. It’s so easy to forget how I was living, three years ago, to let my life run through me like glasses of water, or wine. Or like a river through a gorge: being changed, but petrifying each change into a new identity, forgetting the pieces of myself that are being washed downstream or left in piles on the bank, the part that is the motion of the river. Not to be too talky. But I’m remembering how lonely I was, how I subsisted on Job and Psalm 13. I forgot that I was reading Job, then. I soaked it in through my pores, I immersed myself in that sea of cataclysm like it was saving my sanity — which it was.
Yesterday morning, Marshall and I had gotten snowed-in at Evan and Casey’s and woke up with the family. After some biscuits and watching Marshall chase the kids around with a blanket (“playing monster”), Casey brought out The Secret Language of Relationships: Your Complete Personology Guide to Any Relationship With Anyone, and we read about love potentialities between a Scorpio-Sagittarius and a Cancer III, and others. When we got to the other huge book, the one about karmic paths and destinies, I was pretty hooked — not necessarily on the gavel-ringing “truth” of any of these methods and conclusions, but on the suggestions, the predictions, the possibilities. You are walking on a path, they say, and more than likely you’re going to have to make some decisions. Curb some impulses, encourage others, and you will find growth in yourself. Necessarily. My karmic path, apparently, is leading me to an understanding of my worth that’s independent of the work I produce, which (confidentially) is something God has been trying for years to get me to accept.
So, I leave 2008, the year in which all I produced was ovarian cancer and tears and patience, and have already entered 2011. On New Year’s Eve (on Marshall’s balcony with bacon-wrapped dates, mulled wine, and toasted bread with venison sausage and a fancy French brie), Katie Gray, Marshall, and I started & didn’t finish a conversation on what 2010 was, and what we hoped 2011 would be. There’s still time to have that conversation — and I guess that’s what this blog is, partly. Remembering all things, hoping all things. And I hope I’m not saying all this just because the sun came out today.
People are multitude in their variety. There is the meeting of three earnest people at the table over there, long black leather coat and houndstooth scarf, the tight gray jeans and infinitely chic sweep of hair over the forehead, big brash Guess snakeskin bag, red converse sneakers. They are leaning on the table or leaning back in their chairs, alternately, talking about what awesome things they’re going to do once they get back to the City, maybe. This is the kind of slick scruffiness you don’t often see in our town. And there goes the guy who ducks his head and smiles, wearing the awful old running shoes and the tweed blazer with elbow patches. I’ve come here to Coffee & Chocolate from the library and the post office. I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov and thinking about how easy it is to love humanity, and how hard it is to love a person. Because I’m loving all these strange and beautiful people, and worried about going to work tonight.
Knoxville now has a street paper, and I bought a copy. I want this to be a success. Everybody should buy The Amplifier.
As I’m filling out my application to UTK I’m realizing that I have lame-sounding jobs. In reality, they are so far from lame. I’m a caretaker, which means I have a friend that I spend 17 hours a week with, who loves me and makes me laugh, whose life is cracking but whose spirit is almost unnervingly whole. I get to do that. I clean houses, which means I have a friend that I see once a week and help with things she can’t do, on account of her health. She tells me about how she hates being dependent and how she loved learning to cook during her years in New Orleans, and we put our heads together about so many things. On paper, on a paper being sent to UT in a priority mail flat-rate envelope, that looks stupid. Oh well. There’s not much I can do about that. Best I can do is remember real values, which is the perennial struggle of the human being in general. Especially the follower of Christ, right? This morning I was crabbed into a corner of my teal armchair and realized that the God of the universe is larger and kinder than I understood. Leaves opened and my life is changed again. Thank God.
Another thing I wanted to hear myself say was that it’s odd how working (again) toward a concrete thing (such as graduate school) makes me feel different. Like I have opened a window and here’s an eddy of fresh air. There are other concrete things I’m working toward, of course, like a wedding and a trip to Europe in the summer of 2012, like publication of my writings, like a new car, like a series of quilts, but none of the above have deadlines. That I can see, anyway. But here’s a deadline, and if I miss it, nobody’s going to feel bad and extend it for me. Something is so enlivening about it.
When Marshall and I met K. Woodhull to talk about potential pre-marital counseling a couple weeks ago, we ended up talking a lot about how Marshall and I both need (need) to have a purpose or goal, something in the future to work toward. Or we both get so effing depressed. I think one of the biggest things in our life is going to be finding and pursuing those goals, and knowing that is empowering. Working toward grad school, even if it’s a bad idea, even if it’s impossible, is empowering. I’m searching out my own heart, here. Being taught. Thank God.
Tonight I downloaded a free DVD player and watched The Royal Tenenbaums. I hadn’t seen this movie in years, and its immersion in a specific period of time in my life meant, of course, that it brought some very old thoughts and emotions to the surface. When I was watching this movie for the first and seventh and eightieth time, I was at college, my friends’ marriage was dying, and I was as alone as I have ever felt in my life. The despair in Richie’s eyes was most familiar. I used to lie on my stomach on the cool gray tiles of my dorm room and make slicks of tears.
The characters in this movie are all — and this was my favorite metaphor — walking on broken legs, and I spent some/enough days feeling like I was walking on broken legs, too. Wow. The huge presence of sadness, and the strange beauty that supports the sadness so you can walk all inside it, were, just as God was, closer to me than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. I wrote papers, too, rode my bike to coffee shops and went to parties and Sacred Harp singings and talked to my mom on the phone, but the predominant tone of most of my junior and senior years at college was this dark room with shafts of light falling in like the play of light and shadow in water.
I’ve been mostly happy, for a while, now. What a revelation, is happiness. What a ray of light, is Marshall. The long loyalty, the kiss, the lashes on the cheek, the knowing glance, the shock of mutual vulnerability. But the beauty of happiness, even mostly-happiness, is of a different sort than the beauty of sadness, and we are to suppose that each sort is only a facet of a unified beauty, who is God. I believed this then, and I believe it now. How strange to remember all those nights and days, now, when I’ve been watching a different sun set and rise on my days. I’m relieved to find that I have so much compassion for myself, in that time.
Maybe this time, with its particular character that I haven’t fully understood, will come to a close as every other time has. Maybe the broken bones of this time (of course there are some) will be set in five years, the way the bones of five years ago are being set, now. God is teaching me how to have compassion (and patience) for the present time, I think. I’m such an emotional paraplegic of course but I am, I think, learning this.
The wind has been whipping around all morning, blowing gray clouds over, shaking the yellow and orange leaves off of the maples and sending them hopping along the ground in great hurrying crowds. Wind chimes are tinkling all throughout the neighborhood, and the sound of the tossing, bowing trees is nearly covering up the sound of the nearby interstate.
I planted daffodil bulbs out here today, moved some thyme. My rain barrel fills up so fast that I’m going to probably have to start watering plants all year round … isn’t that weird … to have fifty gallons of water just sitting in a barrel, when some of my garden perished in the summer for want of water. This rain barrel is one of the coolest things I own, and I sometimes daydream about the sort of person who would decide to pay me for house-sitting by buying me a rain barrel (and one for herself) and paints and brushes, and inviting me to come over and paint it with her in her garage. I’m talking about Marshall’s brother’s wife, whom I like so much, and hope to be fast friends with. Because I daydream about her, for heaven’s sake. Surely.
But anyways, I got on here to say that I’m taking a lunch break after pickling & canning the last of the jalapenos, and am on the back porch being washed up in the surf of the day. Everything’s moving so quickly — the clouds, tree-leaves, shadows, birds. The year is turning over into my third fall since college, second fall since loving Marshall. First fall of the rest of my life, which I declared I didn’t like in the last post, but which is being blown of its wrinkles, this afternoon.
I’m reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoirish book Eat, Pray, Love and finding it both welcome and obnoxious. Obnoxious mostly, but no matter how irritated I am by her style and attitude, I’m relieved to find an amount of wonder in her voice, an amount of realization that one’s life is larger and longer than it seems in seasons of suffering or confusion. Things carry on without your attention and anxiety, even your own life carries on. Or, especially your own life. Whoever may turn out to be master of the universe, there is someone who wants to answer your desperate prayer, and who often answers it even if it hasn’t been prayed.
For instance, I bring my coffee outside into the morning leaf-devils in my yard, and sit perfectly still in the midst of the winds, and end up inside my own heart, being at peace with it and with God. A place I’ve been too busy and distracted for, and which I’ve been suffering terribly for avoiding. For instance, instead of worrying about my car trouble and finances, or working on money-making projects, I shed it all and work with a shovel and dirt. With jalapenos and Ball canning jars, daffodils, turning the spigot on the rain barrel on and off, bringing my scarves out into the open & pinning them up on a ribbon. Doing all these things with the sound of wind in my hair, and the living fact in mind that I am being actively cared-for. Like the birds, lilies.
I remember how I used to have an office job and couldn’t really have this kind of day, especially not on a Tuesday. Isn’t it strange how life changes? Or — am I missing my own point? — how God draws out the miracles so slowly, one by one? Every single miracle, today standing as a single tall miracle, and still … I don’t know why I should make much of a miracle. “Every hour of the light and dark” — all miracles.
I haven’t done a ‘Bible study’ in ages, having developed a strong distaste for them somewhere in my past, but I signed on to a study of John that my mom was doing with two other girls because the title of the study was from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and there were quotes from Beuchner, Rilke, Eliot, Lewis, Augustine, Chesterton, L’Engle, and others whose writings I have loved and lived by inside it. It’s been a series of small revelations, just like a study of a gospel must be, and the question we are contemplating this week, “Woman, why are you weeping?” is ringing a nearby bell, so near.
In John, after the resurrection, Peter and “the other disciple” ran to the tomb to see if what Mary saw was right (door wide open, no body inside). After they saw what they came to see, they wandered back and left Mary there, “outside the tomb, weeping.” At some point Jesus is there, having walked around or having gone and come back in the guise of man or light or wind or whatnot else, and looks like the sort of person that lives in backgrounds (gardener). He asks, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
Up to this point, Jesus’ question felt shallow to me, almost like he walked up behind her and said, “Guess who!” A conversation-starter, meant to arouse her curiosity — self-concerned, self-revealing. As I’m reading through all the excerpts and answering all the irritating questions, though, this act & these words are turning from shadow into shades of light. It’s beginning to seem as weighty and selfless as any other word from the mouth of Christ, like the words of Aslan when he was still shrouded in darkness, walking beside an ignorant Shasta in A Horse and His Boy (Lewis): “Tell me your sorrows.”
That a hugely powerful being could concern itself with our language, our opening our mouths to say what’s so terribly the matter, is incredible. Jesus is tortured and killed by a frenzied mob, and comes to meet Mary to ask her to tell him her grief. As if that act were a catalyst for her healing, awakening, richer being. As if that were the point, the primary concern.
As a writer, I spend vast amounts of time considering my own griefs and trying to organize them into some kind of coherence, some kind of orderly expression, something that makes sense. Ever since I read Aslan’s question to Shasta, years ago, I’ve hesitantly come forward with my own sorrows, hoping it was ok, and have met with the kind of grace that I didn’t recognize in the small story of Risen Christ and Mary the prostitute … until now. I don’t know how this all can be true, but it may be. I’m entertaining (wildest) hopes.
I have been invited into a writing group with two very gifted poets at the small church I’ve been attending, and I am (again) changed. Perhaps more than anything else, I am a writer, and going to college and entering an academic and creative atmosphere like the one in and around Lipscomb’s English department was a powerful catalyst in my development as a thinker, poet, observer, essayist. Graduation sent me in a bee-line toward graduate school, cancer put me in a tail-spin and the year of recovery has seen me slowly entering a new season of life that includes love, a new understanding of commitment, and, more recently, a new creative community.
It’s grand. It’s a rush. It’s more exciting than I can say to come back into an awareness of the honor of poetry, and writing in general. I’ve always understood writing to be a high calling, but I left most of my friends who understand this in a profound, first-hand, experiential sense, behind in Nashville. Or in Colombia. Or in Mississippi. Meeting this morning for the second time with Mary and Austin (who, serendipitously, or providentially, was part of that Nashville creative community for a brief while!) is gathering up so many of those loose ends I left hanging.
1. Hummingbirds have discovered my hummingbird feeder, and also the red trumpet vine climbing up the pillar on my back porch. They hover and hum and buzz off like bullets.
2. Katie Gray is a my great good friend, and her visit reminded me. It’s hard to find a friend, but you keep hoping and looking because when it comes to you, it comes like the first days of spring, or the first days of fall. We’ve only been friends for a few years, but already we have grown beyond the women we were, and are now the women we are, together. I’m rich beyond words.
3. The garden is dying back, and I’ve killed Marshall’s rosemary, the one I was babysitting. Eff. But this means that the back yard is in transition, and it’s kind of exciting to think about what its life will be through the fall and winter … return of the fire-pit?
4. Jordan said we couldn’t talk about a wedding until we were engaged, but I don’t know! I want to talk about things like, where it would be, if it were to happen! And who exactly would be involved! And what kind of wine exactly we should get!
5. The little white bird chimes that Katie J. brought me from Colombia are so lovely in the breeze. Chinkling and tinging and falling in so perfectly with all the other small & thrilled sounds that are settling on the day.
6. I’m playing tennis, now, and riding bikes, and making a quilt. And fighting powerful urges to tell everyone about how awesome I am at these things. (Succumbed!)
7. Seven is the mystical number. I’m meeting the changes of the season with a lot of excitement, and a little anxiety. My older sister is getting married, a younger sister is starting college, and another younger sister is considering moving to California for a while. In an effort to get reins on the changes, I’ve written lists, hoping each bulleted entry will tie it to a more solid ground. I make goals, I check off goals, I journal and write poems and run through the days with each unremembered and unrecorded possibility flowing behind me like smoke. After a long spring and summer of false starts and aborted attempts, it feels like a bridge is unrolling before me.
8. And eight is divisible by four, which is the number of days Marshall and I will be camping out in Winfield, listening to bluegrass and Irish folk and flatpicker-virtuosos, in a few days. We got a blow-up sleeping pad for me yesterday, and with that dazzlingly luxuriant possession we are launching ourselves into the heart of camping weather, into the Smokies and the Blue Ridge Mountains and a cramped campsite in the center of the Walnut Valley Festival land-rush.
I knew on the drive home from work that I needed to go to the mountains. So, I came. Not far from the Elijah Loop trail off the Cades Cove loop, I took my books and Josh’s camp chair and walked down from the road and off to the right, skirting a wooded rise through grass up to my shoulders.
I found a big barn with a tin roof, no walls, and a wind blowing through. Wasps and swallows were nesting in the wooden rafters, and all the space between the four rows of crooked wooden poles was full of solitude and the busy hum of wild places. I wandered around for a while and then sat down just outside the barn to write … I must have been completely absorbed by swatting at the gnats hovering around my face, because (after being aware almost to paranoia of any wildlife) I heard a rustling, and thirty yards behind me was a black bear the size of an upright piano and three cubs scampering up trees beside her.
Now, being a native East Tennessean, and having visited the Smoky Mountains at least twice a year since my birth, and having developed a great love for this park in spite of tourism and bear attacks — I mean my mom’s family has only recently moved away from the foothills of the Smokies for heaven’s sake — in spite of all this, the file in my cerebral library entitled “What to do when a mama bear is in your face” is disturbingly empty. This bear was obviously interested in me, sniffing the air and even rearing up to get a better look at me in my chair, but I was too far away to just throw myself on the ground and play dead, right? Surely this was only the modus operandi for angry or actually approaching bears.
So, since the cubs were scared enough to climb trees, and she was calm enough to be waiting for me to do something, I figured it was time to go. I also figured that folding up the chair and taking it back with me could be rather fatally punctilious. Articles reading “Woman was seen running with a large bag and folding camp chair when the bear caught up to her” kept popping in my mind like bubbles, and who wants their brutal mauling to be even slightly humorous, so I picked up my bag and without making eye contact walked not-too-fast out toward the clearing and up around the rise toward the parking lot. Sans chair. I feel, under the circumstances, Josh will forgive me. It took the rest of the loop to wash out that adrenaline, but the inner jerk and flash of wonder has stayed with me.
On my way back I stopped at Thunderhead Perk and am here now at a window table, surrounded by log walls, jars of local honey, quilts, and black-and-white prints of Smokies scenery. The Avett Brothers keep coming on. There seems to be, if it can be believed, a hummingbird on the feeder outside the window.
I wonder if the time will ever come when I lose the genes that tie me to these mountains, the wild places and wild bears, the danger and the beauty. I keep wanting to draw lines between this place I have inherited and my actual genes, in my mind. Since I’ve had ovarian cancer and my grandmother died of breast cancer, there’s a possibility that I may have a damaged set of genes somewhere that’s predisposed me to cancers of the female system … thoughts of inherited damage, of irreparable things, and of slow-growing disease drift in and out.
Today I feel like I’ve been washed out of all the terrible anxieties and led into a quiet place. Surely if I can be broken into by reality like this, so unexpectedly, I have a lot to hope for.
…having cave days again. includes being sick, reading a lot (a lot), listening to music, putting things in order. I wonder if making friends will ever be easy for me.
now, I’m housesitting, and the kitten is climbing the back of my rungback chair, then climbing my knee. you know, with claws! and I watched the day go by, processions of grim clouds and then sky, clouds, sky, rain, all the while remembering my love for the song, “Oh Do Not Fly Away,” Innocence Mission.
oh I love these still, open places. a gang of swallows prowls the backyard, nesting, swooping, nesting, swooping.
