Living in the Question

Recently the Universe/my belly told me loudly I am to take at least a year off to mourn and rebuild. No outside responsibilities, no extra agendas other than family and land doings. Time to nurture and nest. Time to mourn the summer and what happened.

Stay with the Bean and work on the land. Seriously? I am going to go bananas. 

You need a year to recoup. This is not a choice. You are grieving and there are many levels to this.

After many such belly conversations, the year has begun. Yet just last night, I had the opportunity to share that learning and its provenance with a group of supportive ears and I balked. 

I balked because I didn't want to tell my story - this story of miracles and magic and cancer survivorship and fertility lost.

I was feeling really great last night, lipstick on and hydrated. I wrote a book about not choosing to listen to the voice of Fear in one's head. When I am listening and aware, I can choose to not feed despair, fear, depression, etc. So my thinking was this:

I am not actively weeping inside - why would I deliberately bring down my energy, lob out the big C, become that person?

What person?

That person that lives in the rut of their tale of woe. Their identity, their experiences, their vision of the world is lived only through that story.

#1 - You are judging. So let's take a moment and sit with this. The rut of their tale? How about their reality. How about their life.

#2 - Expressing your story is who you are, speaking your truth is who you are. Aren't you here to express you? And YOU is YOUR STORY.

Woof. Okay. Speak my truth.

I am mourning the effects of chemotherapy on my body. I am mourning that my ovaries look like raisins on the ultrasound (ovaries that have not received chemotherapy look like fluffy grape bunches). I am mourning that, barring a miracle, we cannot have another genetic child to chase after our towheaded Bean.

I am angry breast cancer survivors have their breasts rebuilt courtesy of their insurance. Those of us with raisin ovaries are expected to find $30-40k to adopt a child or find a surrogate. I am angry we need to make a decision about a sibling that involves paperwork. I am angry it feels selfish to be upset when we have a Bean.

If only I had pushed harder when I was just diagnosed to have eggs harvested. If only I hadn't gotten sick. If only our medical world cared about my ovaries.

Classic Kubler-Ross - bouncing all over depression, anger, and bargaining.

I am sitting here, crying as I write this, wondering why it is easier to write than talk about it around a fire. Wondering if my decision not to feed the wrong wolf has, in fact, meant that I am shutting down a part of myself that needs to be expressed and flushed through.

Yes. And also, be kind to yourself. This is a process.

So here you go big world - expressing and flushing. Thank you for listening.

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This hello was brought to you by the letter K and this quote:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke