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.