I have a "blinking" interest in the entire subject of cancer.
By "blinking", I mean that I am a tad fascinated by this "emperor of all maladies", as Siddhartha Mukherjee calls cancer in his extraordinary new book. But at the same time I am looking through my fingers at it, wanting it not to be in my awareness even as my prickly bald head serves as a constant reminder of my daily engagement with clearing away any hiding cancer cells. My head now serves as a slide for the late winter winds that course down my back; scrapes my pillow at night with irritating groundhog-like spikes, and resembles a patchwork quilt due to the fact that I am not permitted to smoothly scrape it with a razor into a shiny reflective orb.
Thanks to the wonders of chemotherapy, nothing that goes into my mouth reflects a familiar sensory memory: water tastes like fish oil, fried foods must be banished from sight and smell; quinoa and black beans, a regular meal for me, can no longer even be present in the refrigerator.
I am losing that energetic "edge" I counted on my entire life to rev up my productivity.....the inboad engine that propelled me across personal and situational rapids is now still.....I bob up and down in the smaller licks of energy in this lake, taking the shifts left/right/up/down with equanimity, and, I must admit, I am enjoying being just where I am.
From Mukherjee:
"We tend to think of cancer as a 'modern' illness because its metaphors are so modern. It is a disease of overproduction, of fulminant growth---growth unstoppable, growth tipped into the abyss of no control....Cancer is that machine unable to quench its initial command (to grow) and thus transformed into an indestructable, self-propelled automaton."
He quotes Susan Sontag in her Illness as Metaphor when she compares tuberculosis as the illness for the 19th Century. Cancer, he argues, is our metaphor in this age of desparate individualism. The origin of the dreaded word metastasis "is a curious mix of meta and stasis---"beyond stillness" in Latin---an unmoored, partially unstable state that captures the peculiar instability of modernity."
Cancer is the pathology of excess, the expansionist disease, setting up colonies and raping the natives. "It lives deparately, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively---at times, as if teaching us how to survive. To confornt cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are."
Cancer thinks it is God.
It colonizes from one primordial Master Cancer Cell...and then it evolves! As this chemo in my body destroys the breast cancer cells, some that are more adapted to survival and growth can mutate. That is the ever-present fear.
How old is this scourge, so that we do not make the magical mistake of presuming it came upon us in modernity to serve as a warning bell? Louis Leakey found a two million year old jawbone that carried signs of lymphoma, and two thousand year old Egyptian mummies were found riddled with various bone cancers.
Apparently the first written record comes from Imhotep who transcribed his examinations of cancer patients in Egypt around 2625 BC. But then we do not read about cancer until around 440 BC when Herodotus wrote of Persian Queen Atossa's successful treatment of inflammatory breast cancer. So filled with gratitude was she, that she persuaded her husband Darius to invade Greece, which led to the Greco-Persian wars which altered Western history.
Regardless of these early mentions,cancer was a rare disease. Longevity and better diagnoses have added to the cancer figures annually.
Now to my personal "problem" with cancer: I was born under the sign of Cancer the Crab, July 12th as well as having two different types of cancer.
Being asked "What's your sign?" during the '70s and '80s would trigger my constricted attempt to rework my discomfort in having to admit that, rather than being Aries the Ram, Taurus the Bull, Gemini the Twins, Leo the Lion, Virgo the Virgin, Saggitarius the Archer, Capricorn the Goat, Aquarius the Water Carrier, and Pices the Fish, I was a feared disease or a nasty pincer in a hardened carapace. (In all fairness, let me note that Scorpio is a Scorpion, and Libra is the only inanimate sign of the zodiac. But still, cancer??)
"I am a Moon Child," I would coyly respond. Far better to be perceived as a luna-tic than a carcinoma. This dreaded word acomes from Hippocrates around 400 BC when we see the first mention in medical literature of karkinos, the Greek word for "crab", denoting cancer the disease.
"The tumor, with its clutch of swollen blood vessels around it, reminded Hippocrates of a crab dug in the sand with its legs spread in a circle....Others felt a crab moving under the flesh as the disease spread stealthily throughout the body."
This burden being carried about the body brought along a second linguistic association: onkos, Greek for load or burden, both physical and psychological, from which we derived oncology.
I will skip the centuries of misdirected and confused understandings of cancer, and will epecially skip over the horrendous radical cancer surgeries of the early 20th century. Such barbarism is best left to slasher flix.
It was not until the 1930s that "modern" oncology connected the disease to a hypothesis made by Galen around 160 AD: that "Crablike and constantly mobile, it could burrow through invisible channels from one organ to another. It was a 'systemic" illness, just as Galen once made it out to be."
And as the world drifted into a second world war, then into "cold" wars, the cancer researchers of modernity hit on a military theme of a Manhattan Project to "kill" the steadily increasing diagnoses of this horrific disease. We were at war. We needed an all-out attack plan. And in the forefront of our troops we had the Heroes, the Doctors! They were the Eisenhowers, MacArthurs, Pattons and Deweys of the War Against Cancer. There was one enemy, there was one cancer, and the Heroes could certainly track it to its roots and vanquish it.
But such was not to be the case. Cancer appears as hundreds of variants around a common theme. "Cancers possed temperaments, persnalities---behaviors." One size was not going to fit all. With the advent of chemotherapy, it became obvious that combinations of combinations of toxic drugs had to be infused, in a form of total therapy that the author refers to as "total hell."
To those who came before me, to those who endured 10-12 vomiting sssions every day during their treatment, to those who went under the scalpel numerous times in an attempt to root out the evil, I bow down to you for your trials. It is becasuse of you that I can sit at my computer and, although queasy and salivating what feels like fish oil, do what I wish to do today. I am so deeply grateful for your sacrifices, your courage, and your commitment to life when none could promise it to you.
Yet little by little, cancer by cancer, drug combination by drug combination, we began to see cancer patients in the 1960s showing signs that they coud remain cancer-free. The doyenne of cancer philanthropy, Mary Lasker, made liberal use of the moon landing in 1969 as the propulsive thrust to her War On Cancer which hit the national media Dec. 9, 1969. She used her wealth and media savvy to agitate Pres. Nixon to create a NASA-loke organization that could direct the battle against cancer.
Gone were the days of whispering about the "Big C"; from Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward to Brian's Song and Love Story, cancer had insinuated itself into the popular culture as it does into healthy cells. The enemy was within now, within us, maurauding, unheralded until such time as the system could no longer take the assault. The scalpel and the radical mastectomy heralded the Heroes of the War, with their rapier excellence hacking away at this cruel enemy within.
By 1981 the entire metaphor of combat had fallen into disrepute. The Heroes were actully butchering women; the chemotherapy trials were sadistic. The doctors fell back into being scientists looking at the data, if they dared....for the data did not prove their hypotheses.
We now recognize that the story of cancer is not really the story of doctors who struggle to survive:
"It is the story of patients who struggle and survive, moving from one embankment of illness to another. Resilience, inventiveness, and survivorship---qualities often ascribed to great physiciasns---are reflected qualities, emanating first from those who struggle with illness and only then mirrored by those who treat them."
And thus I come back to being born under the sign of Cancer. Such a dismal beginning from a socio-cultural point of view, far better the Moon-child that I can drape around my shoulders.
But what if----what if I read it to be borne under the sign of Cancer?
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Bear \Bear\ (b[^a]r), verb (used with an object) [imp. {Bore} (b[=o]r) (formerly {Bare} (b[^a]r)); p. p. {Born} (b[^o]rn), {Borne} (b[=o]rn); p. pr. & vb. n. {Bearing}.] [OE. beren, AS. beran, beoran, to bear, carry, produce; akin to D. baren to bring forth, G. geb["a]ren, Goth. ba['i]ran to bear or carry, Icel. bera, Sw. b["a]ra, Dan. b[ae]re, OHG. beran, peran, L. ferre to bear, carry, produce, Gr. fe'rein, OSlav. brati to take, carry, OIr. berim I bear, Skr. bh[.r] to bear. [root]92. Cf. {Fertile}.]
1. To support or sustain; to hold up.
2. To support and remove or carry; to convey.
3. To possess and use, as power; to exercise.
4. To possess or carry, as a mark of authority or distinction; to wear
5. To possess mentally; to carry or hold in the mind; to entertain; to harbor --Dryden.
6. To endure; to tolerate; to undergo; to suffer.
What do we glean from this reading? I am certainly not happy that I had to undergo this series of bodily, emotional and spiritual assaults. Had I a hand in this decision, I certainly woud have turned the "opportunity" away. My bald head is no mark of distinction. My wounds do not support me in any manner whatsoever.
But permit The Witness to apprehend the puzzling and dazzling patterns of my life as I have been borne by the encounter with cancer, and then let me attempt to sacrilize my journey.
I received the scary mammography report in September 2010 as I prepared for my ordination as the first Integral minister (along with colleague Michael Pergola) in Sedona, AZ at the end of the month. I had been working on the introduction of the Integral Mentors and Ministers program for a few years, and my energy was directed with laser-like focus on its professional unveiling.
As I sat with my gynecologist, I placed the program before any concern about my own health. I needed to know now if my life were in danger, so that I could cease enrolling students and end the program before encountering uncertainty over its ability to proceed. I begged her to find me a surgeon who might give me a diagnosis immediately, which she did. I raced to the surgeon's office and received her promise that she woud attempt a quick diagnosis. The results from the needle biopsy would be received the day that I returned from my ordination.
How and why does someone "create" an ordination for a group that has not yet emerged as any type of congregation? Because this is something that will emerge, I had no doubt, I felt that we should be prepared by maintaining an appropriate and supportive home. We have Christian ministries that are segueing into Integral ones, others that are commencing their functioning friom that all-inclusive perspective. Knowing how religious and spiritual orders have emerged and evolved in the past gives us a template by which we can best serve the future, andf this was my goal.
Not wishing to impose any dogma onto Integral spirituality, I hoped that by locating it at One Spirit with its tilt toward Integral, it would offer the best foundation for the future. And although I have no ordination or seminary training, I was a willing learner and participant. I concurred with Rev. Diane Berke's idea that I should take their 2-year interfaith ordination program so that I would at least have a modicum of seminary background. That began in September as well, but has had to be postponed during my treatment and recovery until next year.
With this consecration before me, Michael and I co-created the ordination before those who stepped forward in person in Sedona and on-line to form an Integral Spiritual Nexus. My thoughts on clerical garb were informed by my NYC Integral cohort, and we wore white outfits with 10 feet lengths of turquoise satin around our necks that drooped to our feet. The white was for the clear light to which we aspired, and the turquoise represented the level of self-development which we hope to achieve and within which we wish to function. Joining traditions was the fact that the long length of satin appeared a a yoke over our shoulders, which was to signify the yoga of our practice, and the self-selection of the "burden" of living within the highest expectations.
Michael and I co-ordained one another with the question as to whom we took as our spiritual guides, our inspiration, and those who would form our lineage. Mine were Plato, Hegel, and Ken; Michael spoke to his full Christian lineage.
Michael has spent decades within the world's wisdom traditions, but I, to be honest, have not, and have come to spirituality from my Jewish roots and then Buddhist traditions. Did I feel as though I were an Integral minister after the transmission? No, that, we agreed, would occur over time as I sank further into my covenant.
Many years ago I had covenanted with Spirit to live my life with as much authenticity as possible, and then engaged in deep reparative work. "To covenant" is to come together in mutual agreement, and I made this covenant aloud to the heavens forming as sacred contract that I would open myself to that which would most deeply align me with God/Love/The Mystery. To be very honest, I did not really understand what such a covenant with Spirit might entail, or I might have fudged the details a bit....
The ordination over, I returned to New Jersey where the oncologist met me at the door with a grim face. The biopsy was positive, and I made the instant decision to direct my care to Sloan-Kettering, the gold standard hospital of cancer protocols. As I have detailed before, it was a prudent choice given the three major surgeries I endured.
But I might not have joined together the synergistic events on or around the dates of thuis past fall: the diagnosis occured near the birthdate of my only child, my beloved daughter, 31 years before.
She became pregnant with our first grandchild on ior about the date of my mastectomy. THINK about this congruence. WRAP your minds around any karmic or coincidental understanding of this. The breast...the nourishing of my child when she was born 31 years ago that very month...the pattern repeats...I find it difficult even now to spell out what all of this might mean, or if it is just a series of inkblots on a page peppering patterns to our sense-deprived minds.
I have, nonetheless, undergone, tolerated, endured, and held up under extraordinary challenges. I have received blessings and awakenings to Spirit that I never would have assumed possible. I have also entered a time of respite, which comes from the Latin word for respect. I need to repair myself and to postpone any vestige of frenetic activity in order to respect the sacred changes going on within me. This does not make me special or distinctive by any means. It has never been part of my upbringing to openly respect my internal needs, and thus I am engaging in an overdue period of self-nurturance. It is crushing for me to admit that but for the 2 cancers, I might not have awakened to this holy need, and would have continued on a course of frenetic activity towards some ego-framed end.
Long ago dear friend and trusted guide Bert Parlee gave me a nickname of Righteous Rebel, and I have lived up to that tagline. Fighting for the good, the true, and the beautiful, I often overextended myself physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Being an admirer of Dzogchen Ponlop, let me now rename and reclaim myself as Rebel Buddha, one who is exploring what it means to be free.
I am in a Space I have never been before, a Space of luminosity, gratitude, quietude, and rest, rest, rest....I do not have the inboard boat engine revving up at exaggerated rpms to prove that I deserve to be alive. I breathe, therefore I AM.
I do not have the need or ability to scuttle crab-like hither and fro, nor to extend myself beyond my smaller self. Cancer bore me to this place, tho, as odd as that might seem. My birth destiny has somehow delivered me to this soft, quiet resting nest where I need to BE, quietly, as I expand, healthy cells to healthy cells, into new spaces that will offer my Self as best I can, in peace, authenticity, and Love, by just breathing in...and out.
