When I sat down on the hospital bed, listening to the doctor tell me that I had cancer, it landed on my like a feather that had absolutely no weight. I didn't have any reaction at all because I think that I knew somehow that it was going to happen, feeling strangely prepared for the next phase of my life to be one of serious illness.
I wonder somewhere in the back of my mind if there is some kind of spell that I use to draw towards me these things, like injury and illness but then I remember that I was wounded a long time ago and this is the journey of a person who has been wounded through the world. There is a kind of sense in injury that binds my life together, which makes me realize that life itself is this tangling with various wounds-some deeper, some shallower-that will follow us.
For me, it is an immense weight on my chest, like those images of night terrors, an old hag sitting on your lungs, not letting you breathe, except for me there's nothing frightening about a hag. I like to think about my cancer like this hag, sitting on my chest, watching over this illness growing inside me like a walker in two worlds, life and death.
My task in this, is to listen to the stilling of my body, the stilling of my breathe and learn something about this, the opposite of quickening. It's a bit like being born in reverse, having the breath sucked out of your lungs and I want to approach the experience like a baby who doesn't understand yet the world awaiting them on the other side of this orifice. Perhaps there's an orifice of death like a giant vulva that pulsates us into the next world. The mechanisms of death seem potentially just as great as those of life.
The strangest thing about all of this is the banal, which seems stranger than anything yet, the minutiae of my life plodding ever onward but it's a hay ride that I am walking beside, not carried along, just walking sedately along astride it, watching. I enjoy the dimensionality of this in-between and feel somewhat like a fish returning to their spawning ground. I realize that the places where we are born as the first summonings of death and so each space of life and death both are a spawning ground for it's opposite, the yin and the yang.
If there was ever a place to be, it would be laying under a rough wool blanket, watching a line of sunlight gleam through a battered and ancient window that rattles in the wind. There is some kind of bliss possible in the rumination on life's mysteries and a vessel slowly turning into stone. There is an emptying of self that I feel like hole in my chest, where the world sinks in and I'm not afraid, not yet, just watching it carefully and feeling and wondering.
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