Traveling Light

Sansaku: Traveling Light

8/31/22

I didn’t like the portrait she’d painted and handed it back.  Lee said, “Let me look.”  I instantly regretted.  He said, “Lisa, come here.  You’ve caught Colin’s shadow.”  I asked to see.  “No, you’re not ready.”  And then he fed it to the flames.  “Maybe next time you won’t be so fast.”

Hanging out with a shadow side of self, crazy-making cancer.  This time I take a good look.  The painting is called “Diagnosis.”  Lee’s standing behind me.  I’m ready and won’t be so fast.  Cancer looks back.

My style of writing is highly didactic.  I’m teaching and counseling myself.  And because I taught and counseled forty years, I’m doing to self what I did with them.  It’s a process.  Reflecting on reflections.

When I was young, I didn’t like school; maybe because my spirit knew, I’d be spending my life there.  I mostly taught psychology and counseling.  Theory and practice.   My journal reads like lecture notes.

Today the PSMA PET scan will search out prostate cancer head to toe.  Highly detailed and sensitive, another painting in the series.  It’s said a good sickness takes you farther than a trip overseas.  One of my graduate degrees is academic, the other on the road and in the wilds.

The underground doesn’t advertise and I was careful who I told.  We worked behind closed doors.  It took some synchronistic serendipity to get into group.  Quite a few knew but few chose to come.  

It’s not because I’m busy I fall behind; it’s all this time within.  Two sides to trauma and I intend for post-traumatic growth.  Positive psychology.  I’m counseling myself.  Last night’s dream.  A similar theme.

With a group on the road, packing up, getting ready to leave.  Looking to find some food.  And from the look of the bags, I was traveling light.    

Time Slips Away

Sansaku:  Time Slips Away

8/30/22

A sentence from the journal caught my eye: Therapists are taught to love what’s authentic and to openly dislike what is not.  Carl Rogers makes it sound simple.  Poetic license is intentional deviation from the rule of fact.  Far from fake, wild and free, just like dreams.

The best book on dreams is the one you’ll write.  It doesn’t take long to learn how to write; it takes a long time to read.  Record them every morning.  Make them up if you must.  Poetic license.  Walk all around, put in context, whatever comes to mind.  There’s no better book.

Cancer plays a role in every dream.  I was late to catch a plane and hadn’t packed.  Time slips away; I was looking for something to eat.  There’d been unwanted guests at the house where I was staying.  I blamed them in part for what had gone wrong.

I’m living in the center of chaos.  So much is unpredictable.

I forgot about cancer for most of the day.  Running fast to keep up to a faster electrician.  What he did was close to magic.  And I was waiting on the phone for insurance authorization.  Hours late in coming.  We’ll drive to Farmington tomorrow.  Two hours with radioactive isotopes in my blood and an hour inside the machine that looks inside of me.

I’ve got phone calls, emails and texts to reply; things I need to do.  Reminds me of the dream.  I’m falling behind.  The unwanted guests, a little too obvious.  So is the theme of the dream: time slips away.

I’m not prepared to leave.  It’s a sad and poignant feeling.  Late in the day, a friend stopped by.  He’d just learned and wanted me know he cared.  He’s older and has lived here longer.  We miss the old Durango, but we were young back then.  He said, “This makes it easier to leave.”

One Page

Sansaku:  One Page

8/29/22

If you were to wake in a dream and realize you possessed limitless power to choose, what would you do?  In the dream I’d fallen asleep on a rock in the middle of a stream.  Half in sunlight, half in shade.  Sudden darkness and a bear.  Pure terror.  I was eaten and being digested.

Consciousness survived and deep in his belly I heard a voice: “In the darkest night, there’s always a star, go towards it.”  I looked all around.  Focusing on the point of light, it took me there.  Death and rebirth.

A courtyard with a fountain.  I can still see the stones, hear the plash of liquid light which sparkled with a diamond iridescence.  Now fully awake in the dream, I knew that the fountain was conscious and asked.

The answer I got surprised me.  I entered the light.  I could ask any question.  I was interested at the time in the life in-between.  The gap between death and rebirth.  I got a sweeping view.

I saw where I’d find my place in this life.  Where I’d meet the people I needed to meet.  Just south of Baker’s Bridge, where the valley ends and gorge begins.  A year before I moved.  I told any number of friends or I might not believe.  At Timberline, the vision held true.

I could have chosen to die in the dream, but then had the thought I would die when I woke. The diamond-liquid-light said that knowing what I knew, there was no need to fear.  Back to the very first question:  What would I choose?  I asked for what I needed.

I met Lee the next year and told him the dream.  He was rare and could listen with skill.  In the same way good friends finish each other’s sentences, he seemed to know what I wanted to know.  It’s taken me forty-four years.  I could easily write a book, but I only write one page.

A Reason to Remember

Sansaku: A Reason to Remember

8/28/22

It’s gone on for years.  A woman appears in my dream.  Disguised and wearing a new face, I’m slow to recognize, then suddenly realize it’s her.  I call her Mahri and she was there last night.  Just watching.

She’s been in my dreams a long time, but she stays behind the scenes.  Cancer is not her concern.  She seemed detached, perfectly composed; she lives in a timeless dimension.  She’s very old but doesn’t look it.

I’ve entered a new stage of life and she’s curious how I’m dealing.  Not always well.  I’ve never been an elder, which sounds like elderly to me, and I don’t know what it means.  Lee and Irma, my two basic models.

I didn’t know I was searching for a sage until I met him.  His paintings all over the house should remind me, but I don’t always see them.  They were recently moved to repaint the walls and now they stand out.

I pass them every day, but rarely stop to see.  I told a friend how I came to meet him.  It took a dozen synchronicities.  Like being married to Chyako.  Meant to be.  Had I known, I would have walked a thousand miles and sat on his steps until the door opened.

I can’t help but exaggerate.  That magical for me.  Like learning to wake in a dream.  Turns out, I’m a lot like the way I perceived and projected.  Old, very old, I was never quite sure of his age.

I’ve mentioned his name and the time we ate death camus – which looks like wild onion.  He didn’t get sick.  Camped by a waterfall, sitting around a fire, the trip had just begun.  I studied the man like a map.

The man I might become.  I was young and full of ideals.  Somehow, in the midst of a crumbling world, he’d kept his vision alive.  Not just alive, he lived his ideals and was showing me how.  A reason to remember.

Invisible Fields

Sansaku:  Invisible Fields

8/27/22

Robert Graves said a well-chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the most common mental disorders and can be used to prevent and to cure.  It’s what I’m doing with the journal.

Mythos is a word that describes how we organize perception into narrative and meaning.  Elder and old, two names for the same stage, have diametrically opposite associations.  Weak and wise.

I haven’t played with magnets since childhood.  To reveal the magnetic field, we’d gather iron filings and put them on paper.  With the magnet underneath, the invisible made visible.  Like the earth, north and south poles.  The ways of attraction:  like poles repel and opposites attract.

A friend of mine said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor.  And all things being equal rich is better.”  He was neither at the time and probably most happy.  What about being young and old?  She said, “The elders are gone, adults confused, and adolescent’s naughty.” 

Where did all the elders go?  Basho took his name from a banana tree that didn’t produce, but provided good shade.  Chyako calls me Stick in the Mud.  I love the feel of soft and sensuous mud.  She’s a Japanese woman.  Smart and strong, high spirited.  I call her Nail Sticking Out.

Everything is sensitive to scale: fast and slow, near and far, large and small.  This is true with problems.  But life is not a problem to be solved.  It’s a mystery to be lived and experienced.  At the moment I’m living with cancer and using dreams to help with the narrative.

Young people feel hopeless about the future.  The conundrum in counseling: they’re probably right, but certainly wrong.  It’s a problem with scale, too fast and far away; and the invisible fields of mythos.      

Everything

Sansaku:  Everything

8/26/22

If asked:  How would you change and what would you do if you learned you had but a few years to live?  I answered it at twenty-four by quitting grad school, not finishing my thesis, and living on the road.  I wanted to spend time with my dad before he died.  Perfect timing.

I haven’t stopped asking the question.  It’s a relative measure of congruence – living true to oneself.  I wasn’t made to be an economics prof.  Now at seventy, even with cancer, I’m living the dream.

Cancer gets a bad rap.  I watched two friends take the trip.  Both wrote books looking back on their lives, what mattered.  Cancer as motivator.  They weren’t depressed and the future wasn’t hopeless.

Until the day she died, Irma cared about things.  She brushed and flossed, made sure the plants were watered.  Things seemed to know that she cared.  Everything lived a long life.  Corder died young.  He wasn’t sad.  It’s not how old a tire is.  It’s how many miles it’s gone.

I’ve never been as healthy as the night she poisoned us.  I had a bad dream and woke up puking.  Lee said, “That’s funny.  So did Lisa.”  He felt fine.  Later I discovered the source; it could have killed us.  “Why didn’t the poison effect you?”  He’d eaten as much as we.

“I’ve made my peace with everything and everything’s my friend.”  He actually said that.  And as far as I know, he didn’t get cancer.  But if he had, he’d have surely befriended.  There’s a reason I’m remembering.

The critical point in chaos theory is when things turn turbulent and unpredictable.  The same word suddenly means something vastly different.  I didn’t see it coming.  Touchstones open our eyes and according to the mystics, everything is holy.  Everything.

A Good-Looking Friend

Sansaku:  A Good-Looking Friend

8/25/22

The dream was much like my life.  Opening a book, I looked at the table of contents.  It appeared to be an anthology of short stories.  I noticed one by Salinger, “For Esme with Love and Squalor.”   At the top of the page, this title caught my eye: “A Good-Looking Friend.”

An easy association.  Last night I went out to dinner.  A good-looking friend picked me up.  We drove downtown; found the best spot to park.  Reserved for deliveries until six, almost six.  It was empty.

We sat at our favorite table and ordered a beer.  The wait staff is three times mellow.  A good-looking friend walked in, saw us and smiled.  We were there for hours, doing what we always do: talk, laugh and eat.

They’re aware of what the diagnosis means, probably more than I.  They know I’m walking an edge – much yet to be determined.  But I feel on belay if I fall.  I’ve entered a new stage in life.

The initiation began with penetrations into the body: a blood draw, a biopsy, two scans.  After that, the formal diagnosis.  The cancer was named.  I heard it pronounced, four times by four different doctors.  The treatment begun and my return to normal life.  Not quite.

I wrote my quasi-thesis in counseling on death attitude and image in dreams.  The image is the touchstone.  Feelings take on form.  Cancer is a toxic weed that’s thriving in my garden.  It’s also a book.

I took a walk with a good-looking friend and she asked how I was doing.  It wasn’t a casual question.  We walked four miles, but talked much further than that.  She’s the wife of a good-looking friend.

Have you ever noticed how beautiful a friend, especially those you love?  The touchstone is cancer and stories in a book.  

An Unexpected Blessing

Sansaku: An Unexpected Blessing

8/24/22

A shift in the symbol last night.  I gave myself a lecture on the topic of Solomon’s Seal.  I know nothing about it, but I did in the dream.  It was used as a touchstone to see the without and within, the now over time.  It revealed what mattered, what didn’t.  An unexpected blessing.

The touchstone is cancer.  The lens from which I’m looking.  I rarely if ever forget.  The snake at the root lets me know.  “Don’t take your eyes off me.  Don’t fall back asleep.”  It wakes me up in the night.

I’m standing in the shadow, looking out.  Ordinary reality seen from a visionary point of view.  It’s not at all as it seems.  The cancer seen through touchstone eyes, let’s me know:  I love this place.

When I asked, she gave me her name.  Cynthia had treated our good friend Reece and I mentioned his name.  She said, “I’ve been to his house.”  You couldn’t know Reece without knowing his house.  He’s one of my guides on this journey.  He loved his life, just as it was.

Cynthia asked about side effects from the androgen depriving shot.  “So far, I’ve had none.”  I felt special when she said I was blessed.  We talked about chemo and why it’s not for me.  She said, “If it’s not broke and works, why fix it.”  Fine with me.  No change in medication.

Then she blessed us again: “May our relationship be long and boring.”  I let her know how grateful and glad I was to meet and work with her.  I needed a touchstone to see.  I’ve been a wee bit judgmental.

Immediate experience is the root of life, and cancer makes the experience more urgent and meaningful.  A guru once told me, “Your heart is open, but you need to stop fighting the pain.”  I didn’t know what she meant at the time.  Now I feel blessed.

Where the Road Goes

Sansaku:  Where the Road Goes

8/23/22

Meta-analysis is a statistical technique that samples the results of many studies and combines them into one.  Dreams do something similar.  They take all of our experiences, everything we know, including things we don’t, and factor the whole into symbols.

When I read that a dream is a letter from the self, I couldn’t believe I’d left so many unopened.

Today I meet the medical oncologist, yet another doctor to deliver the same diagnosis.  I won’t be shocked or surprised.  I might even beat her to the punch.  And since cancer is personal for me and the treatment in general is not, I want to keep it personal, on a first name basis with her.

The doctors and meds are mostly in place.  My final scan next week.  The end of my beginning.  Last night’s dream:  The road peters out in someone’s back yard.  And in the next scene, I’m leaving town on a highway and driving too close to the edge.  But I keep it on the road.

The final scene:  I’m looking back.  A spectacular home on a ridge.  The road down the hill is hairpin steep and narrow.  I wonder how they do it in the winter; it comes dangerously close to a drop-off into water.

My brother read me to sleep, usually science fiction and alternate realities.  Because he believed, I believed.  It was easy to jump into dreams.  Wizards travel to the source of danger.  The dragon that lives in an active volcano.  It’s where treasure and magic are found. 

Dreams are real while they last and we have to be taught that they’re not.  The beings and things, like us, long to relate – to express and understand.  The snake in the tree by the pool.  At the root of the spine, as deep as it gets.  It’s where the road goes and from where I’ll return.

Harvesting

Sansaku:  Harvesting

8/22/22

Even with a context like cancer, dreams are hard to read.  Most of my associations with cancer are rough.  The only good ones come from dreams.  It’s never what we think.  The poverty of perception.

The work is most productive when conditions are the hardest – provided we remember the work.  This stage of life I’ve suddenly entered.  A slightly foreign language.

I earned my idiosyncracy credits in high school and college.  The way I look, evidence enough.  It’s the difference between status and power.  The Fool and King Lear.  And then, of course, there’s dreams.

Last night:  Looking out the window.  Spring snow, except it’s late August.  The squash and tomatoes won’t like it.  But the sun is shining, the snow beautifully bright, even glowing.  It’s going to be okay.

I woke and went outside to see the waning moon.  The sky was full of clouds.  Stars showing through the gaps.  Passing through the Pleiades, now that I can see, a satellite.  Orion on the rise.  And framed by ash tree leaves, the moon.  A change and chill in the air.

The dream had another scene.  I was able to pee a good stream and then I remembered I couldn’t.  As soon as I thought that, I dribbled.  Belief and expectation are powerful predictors.  I need to be careful.

Still reading the dream:  My summer cut short by the snow.  I’m older than I thought.  It’s a warning, get ready, do your work.  It’s a poignantly sad and profoundly beautiful time.  Take full advantage.

Dying, he seriously joked, “I’ve sown my wild oats, near and far, and a bumper crop’s come in.  Too bad my reapers are all worn out.”  Take it either way, the harvesting.  Corder wanted to share and enjoy.  As do I.