The Impulse of Love

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey."

     The other night, I attended a large function that privately I was calling "my coming out party". It was Maine Conservation Voters' "Evening for the Environment" which is always jam-packed with the people who tirelessly and with some inexplicably bottomless optimism keep trying to protect Maine's natural resources and fend off climate change. These are my people. I know and value a lot of them. A lot. And I had not yet emerged into a public venue since my cancer diagnosis became widely known.

    This is not about the tremendous love I got -- and gave -- there, though in some way it does all tie in. This is about a story that the speaker, Richard Louv, told us. Richard Louv is a hero. His 2005 book Last Child in the Woods named an insidious fear many of us sensed was rising in young people alongside the ascending infatuation with "smart" technology: a disconnection with the natural world he called "nature deficit disorder". He had data. He tied it to physical and mental illnesses. By naming this, he created a cultural pivot point and started a movement getting children back outside.  
I will bet that everyone in that room could point to a time or place where they had a transformational experience in nature, whether standing in the dawn light at the top of a building in Manhattan, floating in a lake at Girl Scout Camp, or watching whales rise on a whale watching boat tour. Connection with the profound otherness of the wild is like a turbo-boost of life-force energy. Now doctors are literally prescribing time in nature for their young patients. We gathered to listen to what else Richard Louv had to say*.
     He told this story: One morning a young mother walked into her dining room where her six-year old was lying on the carpet alongside their family dog, Jack. He was stroking the dog's fur. It was a peaceful scene. Then the boy spoke. "Mommy, I don't have a heart anymore". The mother was startled. Then he said, "My heart is in Jack". 
     The impulse to love is native in us.
     With my cancer diagnosis has come great clarity. There is no reason to be shy or protective about loving. And there is no reason to deflect love when it comes to you.
     I am a great lover. I was blessed to be raised with safe love, and with constant access to nature. And I married the most amazing man who not only loved me but let me love him with the full energy of my love. That second part is huge: the impulse to love needs outlet. We all need to give love, open the faucet, not hold back.
     Now I am on the receiving end of that. Love is flowing in to me in voluminous quantity. It's astounding, humbling, and invigorating. I do not want to be in the cancer seat, but now that I am here I must say out loud that the impulses of love coming from everyone is a real, felt thing.
     It's like I'm at the center of a wheel, and all these spokes of energy coming from every direction are literally holding me and filling me with unbounded joy. How can this be? -- I have cancer! My answer: I don't know. Perhaps it is that I am not my body, I am my spirit. The love coming in generates joy, delight -- and gratitude. Gratitude, I've learned, is entwined with the impulse to love.
     I stood in the predawn dark/light again this morning, awed at the sharp silhouettes of the pines against the glow on the horizon - rose-cantaloupe is my name for that color. One step further from the house and the crescent moon slid from behind the roofline. I gasped at its unexpectedness. Bob came out. "Look. Look!" I said. We stood together in silence. And then I blurted "How can anyone not be in love when you see this?"
     The impulse of love. It doesn't have to be manifest as a gift, a hug, a dinner, a card, flowers, a wedding vow. The energy of love itself is real. I feel it strongly now, coming in. I feel it flowing out of me as joy. It is connection. It is gratitude. It most certainly is beautiful. It is natural, native to us. It is life-force energy. It is who we are. It is little. It is big. It is between a boy and a dog; it flows through a room of five hundred people on an October evening.
     I am grateful. I accept. And I give you my love.

*Richard Louv's new book Our Wild Calling will be in book stores in November.

Making room

     We had a Nor'easter last week. I awoke at 4am to the sound of wind stampeding up from the fields like loose angry bulls, sometimes wrecking through the forest behind the house, sometimes slamming the house itself. Rain spattered across our metal roof. I lay in bed, a baby pillow pulled up to relieve pressure along my incision line of 28 staples, and listened to the outrage outside.
     We lost power for two-and-a-half days. At first it's quiet. The storm pulls away pretty suddenly, and there is no sound of a refrigerator humming, the furnace turning on, no radio or dishwasher. Just -- silence. It's a reminder of what living can be, at its truest core, what it sounds like when things stop and all that's left is the structure of the house over my husband, the dogs and me. 
     I learned something yesterday from the trees. I asked them about the violence of the storm. Most years we get these big blows in autumn that strip the leaves from the trees, or if it's early and the trees aren't ready yet, the wind shreds the leaves leaving parts hanging and parts in shards on the ground. I wanted to know about the energy of autumn. We call it "fall", and it has always seemed like a passive season to me. Words like "transition", "release", "yielding" describe what I've always thought of as the final stage in the loss of summer.

     But the trees told me something different. Fall is not about loss. Fall has power: "We don't yield our leaves; we push them off ". You can see it more clearly in the pines, firs and cedars: a layer of needles turns yellow while the ones closest to the light remain green. "We push off our needles and leaves to make room, to build capacity, to clean ourselves". Autumn is not about an ending or giving up. It is an active preparation for renewal.
     Wow. There is so much energy here: blazing trees, crashing storms, clearing out -- all to make room in the silent pause of winter for possibility to incubate. No longer will I perceive fall as meek. As I walk to the meadow's edge to greet the dawn this morning, knowing that storms are about to rampage through my own body to clear it of the cancer, I will ask for help from the trees. I may lose part of me. Will I be passive or active, release or push? What can happen in the silence after the storm?
     My favorite poem walks into my mind. I memorized it in high school.

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors—

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise-- 

~ Emily Dickinson

Dawn Prayer 1

     Every morning when I reach down to touch the earth and connect with her deep strength, some prayer comes spontaneously to my lips. The very act of squatting or bending over is humbling, and reminds me of kneeling in a church. Except this is not rote. There is no "should" here, no prescription - just desire for connection, desire for repeated contact, desire for a small ritual that opens me to something fuller*. Touching the earth every day is the beginning; what comes next is spontaneous. This dawn prayer is close to what I spoke yesterday morning. The sense I had of riding the spinning earth towards light stayed with me all day, and I try to recapture it here. The last two lines are often how I end.

Mother, somehow I feel you turn toward the sun.
Hold me, as I hold on to you,
As you hold all of us who ride on you.
In my roots I feel the nestling of earthworms, voles and acorns.
As I stand, I feel a brush of breeze on my cheek
And wish I could hold your touch there,
Just for a moment, loved.
Instead I press my hands into your wet meadow grass --
Good morning Goldfinch! Good morning Blue Jay! Good morning crickets! --
And wait
Together
Feeling the rise of gratitude 
With the oncoming light.
May the work I do in the world today be the work of spirit;
May the energy of the earth pass through me to all beings today.


*Maybe church liturgies did start this way; this is something to ponder.

Approaching the blaze

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey".

    October 15

     I'm trying to imagine being a tree.

     In some people's minds, I'm already there. I've been told I'm like a tree, and in all honesty, that didn't always sit well with me. Something about the solidness and immobility of the trunk of a tree, gray or brown, echoed in an unfortunate way the self-image I carried of the tall, "big-boned" adolescent in an 8th-grade class of blonde gymnasts. At least I think they were all gymnasts. 
     But I kept veering in the direction of trees as life pulled me along. Camp and canoe tripping in the North Woods first woke me to pine trees - to this day, the regal red pines that stand wild on the shorelines of rock-rimmed Ontario lakes are my absolute favorite trees. Then came forestry school for my Masters degree: I thought I was there for rare plants and ecosystem management, but I graduated with a silviculture orientation - growing trees. Returning to my home in Ohio with my fiancé, I saw the broad-leaf hardwoods growing in the rich soils of my back yard as something close to miraculous: here were cherries and beeches bigger than I could reach around with soaring canopies that I'd never noticed growing up! 
Once married, I settled in Maine where the white pines kept my heart alive in winter, soft-needled and green against the deep blue sky, the colors of earth and life. 

     I'm falling in love again just writing this.

     Autumn was a real problem though. The trees changed. They didn't seem real in the blazing reds and yellows and even maroons (some ash trees) that everyone else oggled at. I felt betrayed, I think. Green soothed my soul. These colors were gaudy. And they were also tied to two things that put pits in my stomach: back-to-school (the blonde gymnasts), and the coming of winter. I also lived in northern Ohio where winter meant slush, five solid months of lake-effect gloomy gray overcast skies, and bare gray tree twigs without one single pine or fir intervening. No green, no blue. Those fiery autumn trees could not be trusted: I knew what they meant, and I closed my heart to them.
      Living in Maine for over thirty years has gently shown me that autumn and winter have their own beauty. I will always swoon at the slow greening of spring, and revel in the warmth and aliveness of summer. But my heart has softened - a bit - to autumn and winter.

     Now I find myself living in the moment, a bearer of a cancer as yet unidentified. In my dawn prayers this morning, an answer came to a question unasked: The trees are your teachers. I blinked. I looked at the trees: reddening, golding, some still green. They are changing, and right in this moment they have stepped out of their chlorophyll kinship to be seen as individuals, unique. You are my teachers. I am changing. I am no longer in my summer. What does it mean - what does it feel like - to blaze? Does it take courage? Or is it thrust upon us like it or not? I know where this is going, in some sense: I will be stripped bare - more like released perhaps (the gentler energy of letting go) - and I will stand naked, still rooted, still reaching upward in prayer, through the dormant, raw, incubating time until spring comes. 
     But that is not now. Now is my time to walk in the forests of color, among my fellow trees, and shift from observing to sensing, separateness to belonging. Keep teaching me. Keep me alive without fear. Take me deep into what you know. 

When the corral breaks open

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey."

 September 28

     I believe that Spirit infuses all things. ALL things.
     And let's just get this out of the way: if you don't believe in Spirit - aka life-force-energy, Something Other, divine impulse, God, etc. - I respect your belief. But please know that it is a belief. There is no scientific proof that there isn't (or is) Spirit.
     Spirit is the word I've settled on for the quality that is both within me and infinitely beyond me. It defines me as me, the animating essence that gives my DNA-derived structure a unique persona. It is the connective tissue between me, other people, all of nature including the winds and deepest aquifers, and the endlessness of what we can only lamely call "space".
     This is my experience. It is real to me. What is gratitude if not an upwelling of desire to respond to such connection? And what is love if not a soul-level connection to another being? And for that matter, what is soul? To me it feels like soul is the word chosen to somehow corral the sense of spirit unique to a person. A person in love - with her spouse or partner, her child, her dog or horse - is a person in whom the corral has burst open in the direction of that being.
     I know great love: I love, and am loved deeply, by my husband. That we chose each other after living years of individual lives makes this, in some ways, a miracle. No formula can predict or create such a love. Intuition, soul connection, risk and trust were present when we made the decision to marry. And I suppose they are all still there, though the balances have changed with the years.
     I know great love for my children, love that is soul connection from conception. It has different qualities than my love for Bob. It's the love of nurture and release, like carefully laying a strong and well-supported fire in the fire-ring in the field, and as the time approaches, setting a match to it, watching it slowly and surely burn until it gains strength on its own and finally releases sparks skyward on a still solstice night.
     I know great love for the Earth. I talk to the Earth. Usually my prayer is an unbidden and unrestrained "Mother - thank you." This morning on my walk with the dogs I talked to all the zillions of monarchs in the air and on the few remaining flowers in the September meadow. It was an exclamation of amazement: "Hello! Oh my gosh! Good luck everyone!" I even offered advice: "Fly together you guys!" I stood there counting them for a moment, realizing it was pointless but just being so happy about how many there were.
     This urge to communicate I believe is my way of offering connection - extending my soul - within the limits of my human body. Maybe those monarchs don't have a clue that I'm wishing them luck powered by my love. Maybe the spirits of the seven directions that I greeted with spoken prayer at dawn this morning have no clue that I even exist. But it doesn't matter to me. Because my formless, barely (if even) corralled spirit expands outward at times when the connection between "me" and "other" is thin, and by releasing it in my limited human way of speech, I am acknowledging its existence in me and nurturing it. When I began to sense the urge for more intimacy with Earth's creatures, committing to a soul connection held elements of intuition, risk and trust. Who, after all, talks to monarchs? Sometimes I greet every plant I see on my walks by name, out loud. What, in fact, is crazy? And, really, do I care?
     There's another pitfall: expecting something in return. The Buddha told us that attachment is one of the primary sources of suffering. Expectations of reciprocity with a god aren't uncommon: "if I'm good enough...", or "if I pray hard enough..." are subtle temptations. When I sink my feet and consciousness deep into the earth, behind the upwelling of gratitude that pours out is often a prayer: help me. Usually it is "help me be the pass-through of Spirit into the world today." All I want, all I can be, is the vessel, the tube, the culvert for Spirit to flow. Lately I have been asking for help with my cancer: "Stay with me Mother, let me feel your infinite strength and nurturing every day, especially when things are rough," or "help me feel the enduring presence of all life and beauty around me," and "help me heal". But my attachment to a "sure Libby, I got this" is low. There is no bargaining. 
     And so what comes from my prayer? There is a response, though I do not feel it directed to me particularly. It is the sense of rising strength and love, my senses opened even wider in aperture to the massiveness and eternalness and beauty of Spirit present in the dawn light, the night's fading stars, the lone catbird song in the willow thicket. It's not just for me, but I am included, one among all beings, held, animated, filled with love. 

Now it has a name

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey".

 September 27

     I have been waking before dawn these September mornings, something that has never been part of my make-up. Tired of sleeping, my swollen belly no longer finding comfort by rolling to the other side, I ease out of bed to let Bob sleep another hour. We have neared and passed the Equinox.

It makes less of a difference to me now that I have stood in the wet grass by the barn above the meadow and watched the sky transform. It's like a secret, this act of dawning. A few remaining birds sing; if there's a mist on the meadow it dissipates quietly. But the colors in the sky, held by the dark, sharp silhouettes of maples and oaks at the far end of the field, are so silent. The colors are silent, and it feels like there should be a great celebration of harmonies announcing this astounding beauty that precedes the rising of the sun. Instead, it is a secret shared by all of us who wait at the edge of the field - crow, catbird, perhaps the barred owl who has just stopped hooting and is watching too.
     Today my life is drastically different than yesterday at this time. And yet not: it is only my awareness that has changed, accompanied by a plan. The mass still occupies a bulging space in my belly. But now it has a name: cancer. The gynecologic oncologist said he's 99% certain, but he won't know until they open me up and take it out. There is that other small mass in my lymph node up near my spleen, indicating the cancer has spread. He'll try to take that out too, and with it the spleen. Somewhere around my fourth week of recovery, I will begin chemo.
     We began to tell my family yesterday. Miraculously I reached all three kids by phone, Mom and Dad, and my sister. There has been a sense of calm in me that has carried through to them, and I'm profoundly grateful for it. Maybe it's the love you've been sending me this past week, I told them. Keep sending me that. It's real. Our connection has nothing to do with distance.
     The other thing I told them is that I feel very grounded, and I am continually grounding. "Like your reminder on your phone to touch the earth every day?" one said. Yes, like that.
     My connection with the earth has been changing. Going back as far as I can remember, I always played outside. I spent summers in the North Woods. As a teenager I sought refuge in the maple-beech-cherry forests beyond the borders of my yard in Ohio. There, in those high-canopied forests, I learned the names of every wildflower I found, making lists, nearly memorizing my Peterson's guide. When you know the names of your companions, the relationship changes; no longer an observer, you become familiar. I was beginning to become less separate.
     A short career in forest ecology found me measuring and counting - and re-measuring and re-counting - the salamanders and juniper berries and insect frass along permanent transect lines, year after year, at a research forest in midcoast Maine. I think I got the job there despite being overqualified because I wanted to get to know a forest on an intimate level. I had no plans to use the position to leap into a more prestigious job at the University in a year or two. I would stay.
     And I did. For six years I spent up to seven hours a day crawling along the forest floor counting Canada Mayflower berries. I learned to call birds closer to me by pishing them. I caught flying mosquitoes - scourge of a saltmarsh-bounded forest - and threw them into spider webs, curiously watching the spider race out to secure it. I reached my arms around hundreds of trees, hugging them with a measuring tape to record their diameter at breast height. I ate lunch sitting on a ridge in the forest to catch the only breeze on a hot August day, and in January I walked out on snow shoes to check animal tracks.
     Twenty years and three grown children after I left that job, I met a new forest. I went on retreat to an island off Mount Desert. The gift of this retreat was a full day of silent, solo wandering wherever your feet and heart took you, in search of whatever insights might come. The woods were so much different than my rich Ohio woods, so different from the mixed pine-oak woods of my midcoast research forest. These were the old undisturbed grandmother and grandfather spruces and firs of the harsher coast, a blanket of moss overlaying the forest floor belying near constant presence of fog's moisture.
     I did not wander too far. I let the forest pull me in, and I slowed. I visited the shoreline, a narrow edge along that great forest. I listened. I re-entered the forest with gifts. I lay in the moss, grounding. I let the idea of ceremony arise in me, and during that quiet immersive day I made the Ceremony of Union with the Earth.
     I don't remember the details now, but I know it changed me. In a way it was a commitment ceremony, like a marriage: a pledge of my soul to honor and deepen our relationship beyond the limits of mind and convenience.
     To be clear, I do not worship the Earth as deity. My background as scientist affirms what my spirit has glimpsed and approached all along. I as human beast am dependent upon the abundance of life that springs from and is harbored by the earth - food, water, timber for my home and warmth - and I can only respond with awe, love, and the desire to give back. A love-infused relationship naturally inspires reciprocity: how can I give to the earth, the source of beauty and a deeper, almost mystical, sense of heartbeat that pulses in me and all creatures?
     The answer is humbling: all I have to give is gratitude. And so every day I reach down, put a hand or two on the earth, close my eyes and quiet myself, and reach my intuitive consciousness down, down to the profound hugeness and solidness that is the source of so much, to the spirit that infuses earth and all that live, the spirit that is greater even than all that, that moves among and within us all like the fog in that ancient forest watering our souls - and all I can say, and I do say it squatting there, is "thank you." And I ask that Spirit to keep flowing through me today so that I may serve it by serving others. May I be the "pass-through." May my huge but inadequate gratitude be the life-force within me as I walk the steps of this day.
     This will not change as I walk through the upcoming days with the knowledge that I harbor a growing cancer. It will get rough for my body. Who knows how it will resolve? But that is not what I think about now. I am beginning to prepare. This morning I stood in the pre-dawn light, my bare feet sinking into the wet chilly grass, and I closed my eyes, sinking down, spreading wide into that silent symphony of color, and whispered my prayer of gratitude.

Finding my spiritual way

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey".

September 25

     Three months until Christmas. Just noticing.
     Today I would have been leaving for a Buddhist retreat center called Wonderwell Mountain Refuge. A five day program called Green Dharma: A Residential Retreat for EcoSattvas had caught my eye, and I signed up. I was calling this fall my "Continuing Education" time, finding myself hungrily signing up for a couple of retreats in which I could learn more about healing in the face of climate stress and anxiety. 
     This is my life's work, now. There has been a dawning

Black Elk among other teachers

awareness that I have the resources to help others with this: Reiki, my studies of Buddhism, Hinduism, shamanism, Sioux spirituality, Christianity - though none of them in depth or immersive except the Christian component. Perhaps a catalyst for this hunger was listening to Penobscot water keeper, activist, lawyer and teacher Sherri Mitchell speak for a day this summer.
     All morning we had listened to her talk about the relationship between her people and the land, how that was constantly under assault by colonializing cultures. She spoke non-linearly, almost like a story teller. She had been at Standing Rock; she was battling the State of Maine for the life of the Penobscot River; she was working on a second book; she had speaking engagements around the world.
     During the lunch break, I waited quietly for a moment to speak with her privately. When it was my turn, I told her I had been given a sacred pipe, and...
     Sherri's face changed slightly as she listened to me. I could sense her displeasure. My humbleness and reverence meant nothing. My stumbling question was: should I use the pipe or was this wrong? When she spoke, she said "Pray with the pipe for yourself. But these are not your ways or traditions, so don't use them ceremonially, and certainly never when money is involved." I flushed; I knew that much. But I was embarrassed deeper down at having offended her. In her eyes I was not so much an individual as one more wound-maker in the cloud of white colonists stealing the spirituality of her People.
     She was right. I knew it. But I had hoped she would say something else, something like "you must be special; I will find you a Wabanaki teacher." It was that slim hope, as well as a desire to settle this question in my heart, that had propelled my courage to ask her face to face.
     I thanked her and went to eat an egg salad sandwich.
     But here is the lesson:
     After lunch, when we had all regathered and Sherri had settled in on the chair up front, she opened by recounting our conversation in general terms, saying she wanted to discuss cultural appropriation. My ears felt warm; they were probably red. Playing Indian was not ok. I looked at the woman sitting on the floor in front of me, her blond hair tied in braids with a leather thong, soft moccasins on her feet, her body that had been leaning forward eagerly hanging on Sherri's words starting to shrink back a bit. Internally I had scoffed at her when I first sat down, but really, how am I any different?
     Acknowledging that those who "play Indian" do so because the customs and spirituality that attract them feed something missing from their own spirituality, she charged us with staying in our own inherited cultural traditions and finding what we need there.
     Christianity. I blanched. I grew up in a Christian household, had practiced actively, took my own young family to church and taught Sunday School, even led the charge to awaken my parish and Diocese to what we called "stewardship of Creation." As my nagging awareness that I didn't buy some key aspects of Christian theology and creed deepened, I threw myself into deeper study of it in a four-year course for lay people. But eventually I just drifted away from the Church, realizing that I did not need a mediator with the Divine, that for me a Savior, a sacrificial Son, was not an icon I could find meaning in.
     So what was I to do?
     Sherri's charge to stop appropriating and stick-with-what-you-got stuck in my craw. The second part at least; I understood the part about not appropriating.
     All summer I mulled this. I knew I couldn't go back to Christianity, though in my many studies and experiences with other wisdom traditions I had come to see and even appreciate the qualities of Christianity that were mystical and profound. It was one of many, many pathways to the Divine, the Creative Spirit that is at once within and without, inhabiting, connecting, encompassing.

     And this is where I have finally settled, thanks to Sherri's uncomfortable message: go back to what is yours. Mine is without label, a direct connection with Spirit, informed and supported by the arrows found in all traditions pointing to it. My spirituality is self-referential, as my Reiki Master teacher would say. I inquire within, where Spirit resides in me. I have my own daily practices, and they shift and deepen in a dynamic flow of my own ongoing awakening. For me, the most profound gateways to Spirit is the Earth itself, her depths, her beauty, her renewal, her seasons, her marriage to air and sky and cosmos, her constant pregnancy and nurturing and release of the creatures that come from her. And I am also Earth, and of the Earth, and we are only small manifestations of Something More that I cannot really comprehend.
     Stepping into the authenticity of my own spirituality, I believe I can help others who, like me, are suffering as the world moves towards drastic change at a frightening speed because of an overload of carbon and methane into the atmosphere. I can offer my wisdom and practices, and I can offer teachings and practices from other traditions that are freely shared.
     That is why I was signed up to go to the Green Dharma retreat: to learn directly from Buddhist teachers about this very problem of climate change suffering.
     Except I have a growth in my abdomen. And I have been scheduled to see a gynecological oncologist on what would have been the second day of my retreat. 

A new journey

This is the beginning of a new set of posts. The seasons have changed since I began this blog, in most every way. My children are grown, in college or beyond. Climate change is here. And yet the wheel still turns.

September 22

    "Sitting here in limbo..."
     Lying in bed before dawn, these are the words that gently sing in my mind, like a gull sitting on a smooth undulating ocean. "I should write this, journal it" I thought. Go back a few weeks, then take it forward step-by-step as it unfolds.
     I first noticed the bloating in my belly when I stepped off the porch of our cabin at Temagami to pee in the middle of the night. Squatting in the pine duff, it felt like there was a pressure in there that wouldn't ease up. It will pass, I thought. Gas.
     Ten days later, at home, still with the bloating, I had a sinking feeling that perhaps the water we were drinking hadn't been as pure as everyone said. I must have picked up an amoeba, something that was causing this constant bloating. If it didn't resolve, I'd have to go to my doctor and admit I'd been drinking unfiltered lake water. Beautiful, clear, deep, big, wild, unpolluted lake water. But yes, unfiltered.
     The inquiry through my doctor's portal resulted in a phone call from the nurse. She asked a whole list of severe questions like was I having pain, was there blood in my stool, when was my last period? (8-10 years ago). No, no, no. So she suggested I eat more frequent smaller meals and keep Dr. S informed. When she asked if I still wanted to be seen, I declined because I felt that since I'd said no to all the severe questions, it couldn't be that bad.
     Six days later, in a yoga class, we were told to go into shoulder stand. In shoulder stand, you lay on the edge of some stacked blankets, flip your legs over your head onto the floor behind you, then raise them up vertically straight towards the ceiling, like two clock hands going from 9 to 12. I was having a little trouble straightening which was unusual for me. With my chin curled into my chest and my eyes looking up my torso to my toes, a horror began to rise in me as my yoga teacher came over to assist. I stopped hearing her, focusing instead on the distinct mound stretching the skin of my tight yoga shirt, a mound more on the right than left side, a mound with a confirmed shape and not just 58-year-old belly flab, a mound in me that wasn't mine.