Tangled

Somewhere

in

the

middle

is

a

luminous

thread

of

truth

Trust

Trust your instinct to the end, 

though you can render no reason. 

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson  

The woman is

Two of Swords - Sacred Isle Tarot

... CENTERED.

(untitled)

It’s the part of me that didn’t break.

It’s a place inside of me that receives the world, and finds its meaning.

It’s a true compass, that sets a sure path for my hesitating foot.

It’s my infallible sentry, which warns in danger, and stills in safety.

It reads energy and places, not faces. It feels out the shape of their intent even while untrue words are washing over me.

It grasps the whole story, even when the disassembled parts tumble uncaught through my hands.

It whispers the wordless language of dreams in the waking world, and is never wrong.

It’s as essential as the blood that pulses within my body.

It’s not a sixth sense. It’s my primary sensation.

It doesn’t need to remember. It knows.

It has never let me down.

It’s the part of me that didn’t break.  

Knowing things before they happen

This is where it gets tricky.  Knowing things before they happen.

We were out driving in convoy on the weekend, with my parents-in-law following us in their large 4WD.  As we passed a sporting oval, the road was lined with parked cars, leaving one full and one very narrow lane.  I caught myself thinking, they are going to have an accident.  So briefly, it was nearly a physical sensation, not a thought.  Just then my husband made a comment, which distracted me just long enough to put it out of my mind.

Seconds later, we turned into the side street, and the car behind us disappeared from the rear view mirror. 

Yes they’d had the accident.  A very minor one (no one was hurt), but an accident nonetheless.

Which presents me with a quandary.  Should I have attended to the whisper of a sensation and somehow warned the in-laws?  Was that even possible?  Say I had somehow managed within a few seconds to convince my husband to fumble for his phone, to ring his parents, to say something succinct enough to create the conditions to avoid the accident – what then?  I would be a frootloop, right?  (Warning somebody about an event that subsequently does not occur - because of that warning - is not a good way to establish yourself as a credible witness).  What if I’d had the time to warn them and yet it still occurred?  Then I would just be a freak.  And not a helpful one, at that.

Not that it matters now.  There wasn’t time to do anything except note the feeling.  And politely keep my big (presentient) mouth shut after it all came to pass.   

Intuition vs Science: a revelation

Today I went to see my fabulous GP, but instead of a prescription, I was given a revelation.

I was there to have some paperwork filled out.  The receptionist brought in the records that were transferred from my previous doctor when we moved here from another state.  I asked to look through the notes, because I hadn’t seen them at all since my diagnoses.

I was fascinated to discover that I had complained – repeatedly - about both pain and lumpiness in the outer quadrant of my left breast as far back as Nov 2006.  During visit after visit with my then GP, I brought this up.  I insisted on several rounds of investigation, and the GP begrudgingly ordered scans, more to shut me up than anything else, I suspect.  The ultrasounds were clear each time.

This is because, despite its huge size at diagnosis, the tumour was still invisible on ultrasound.  What was needed was a mammogram and/or a biopsy.  For my concerns to be treated with more than a token response.

I’m a little shocked, to be honest.  I knew I had reported my concerns previously, and been reassured, but I had forgotten how sustained my worry was.  All along my body was telling me something was wrong, and I had heard it loud and clear.

After I was diagnosed I started to doubt my intuition, my psychic sense, my experience as an energetic healer.  What sort of a healer doesn’t spot the growth of an enormous cancer in her own body?  How could I have allowed this disease to manifest so splendidly in my life, completely unawares?

Now, I can’t believe that I doubted myself.  My intuition was fine.  It was science that failed me. 

All along I have asked, Why? What is the meaning of this illness in my life?  Now I’m starting to understand that it might be about learning to express my truth, clearly, even in the face of rational scepticism or the personal biases of other people.  This is the lesson of the throat chakra, and it has everything to do with writing, and healing, and just being myself in the world.  Being. Fully.

Cancerversary

On this day two years ago, I heard the words “…lymphoma in your gallbladder.”

I stared out of the grubby hospital window into an abandoned courtyard, and thought, “Just like that, my life has changed for ever.” I knew immediately that lymphoma is another word for c-a-n-c-e-r, and the shock was disembodying. I think I floated around, dazed, near my own head for a minute or so, and didn’t really come thumping down into the experience until I heard the word oncologist. Then it was real. Coldly real, sickening, and applying to me.

It came completely out of left field. For all my intuition, I did not spot this coming, most of all not at this time. Whereas a typical cancer diagnosis comes after a person presents to the medical system seeking answers or for routine screening, this hit me completely unawares. Yes, I was bitter and deeply unhappy and had been for some time, but I held no awareness of the way this dysfunctional energy had coalesced in my body. I was less surprised when the breast diagnosis finally came, weeks later, as I’d had suspicions nearly two years earlier - but had been repeatedly reassured I was too young for either breast cancer or a useful mammogram.

Ironically my youth and fertility disguised the blatant lump of post-menopausal woman’s disease, while leading directly to the discovery of the occult lymphoma. And only then circuitously back to the breast cancer, which was again disregarded, even in the face of a known cancer diagnosis. It took one of the most highly radioactive scans to identify what my fingers and intuition had been saying all along: something’s not right. All is not well in my world.

I have never desired an intimate knowledge of the medical system, and yet my life path was suddenly paved with drab linoleum and lined with a succession of sharp instruments. The detour has been psychic as well as physical, and I’m not yet done with making meaning out of it, either. Maybe I never will. Maybe it doesn’t matter, beyond really grasping that the NOW is all that we ever have.

But the detour has changed me. Obviously some of these changes are physical, like the numb heaviness of muscle and implant where there was once a soft breast, and the strange itchy vacancy where the muscle was taken from my back. Some of them are mental, like the moments when my processing memory drops out and I can’t understand what was just said to me. And some of them are nothing less than sacred, like the exquisite weight and blessing of sitting with a friend on the day she died of a disease that I survived.

What does one do with all of this, the unasked-for foray into a land that my contemporaries have no ken of? The last of my youthful expectation of a long life yawning rosily in front of me has been stripped away, along with my fertility, my sharp memory and my eyesight. I am now biologically aged well ahead of my years. But I hope that, along with being so much older now than I was two years ago, my wisdom has grown in equal measure.

I hope the experience informs my compassion for the invisible stories and strength of people who walk among us, changed by their own unexpected detours. I hope it feeds that still place of presence and kindness towards my own self. I hope it makes me greedy for the joy of a life well lived, moment by moment. And I hope it spills out into the world in unexpected and delightful ways, transformed by the sharing of it.