Starting Over

If my life had a soundtrack it would be Modest Mouse all the time these days. I've stumbled onto  Ocean Breathes Salty, and Missed the Boat, both ditties capturing a sense of bewilderment at life and wondering what constitutes not wasting it. An approaching surgery date and my nasty habit of catastrophic thinking force me to consider what is truly important and how the hell is it I find myself rushing through my days and schedules. It's likely I'll live after going under general anesthesia, despite my exaggerated and self-absorbed worries to the contrary. Once the fog of pain meds lifts, I figure this unanticipated halt  will give me time to assess what is essential and what is crap. It's a chance, really, to slow down. I'll have every excuse to say no to obligations. I'll have every opportunity to minimize and, I hope, find richness in less. That's about as much a positive spin as I can put on this thing, but it's enough.  World at Large gets me thinking on how, though I've physically not moved around too much, life seems marked by starting over and starting over, moving from one phase to another. I stayed at home with my kids when they were little. I've worked simple jobs since. I threw pottery for a season, knitted scarves for everyone I knew another. I find myself in this teacher role lately. All the pleasure and insight from my past six years from yoga will now significantly change. I don't know which parts of me will hang around. I feel like I'm heading out to the porch to have a thought, but when I get to the door will I be able to stop? I don't know. Let's see. At any rate, the Dashboard is broken, but I've still got the radio.

Disease a Metaphor?

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
Walt Whitman 




I loves me a little irony from time to time, I truly do. In fact, the very day I wrote and published my last post on floating on, not fighting the river, I went in for my routine summer physical. I do it every year, only apparently I missed last year. Sort of wish I hadn't done that (or had done that--which?).  But no sense crying over spilled milk, right? Long story short, an ultrasound and MRI later I find myself looking at an October surgery date to remove what I've come to fondly call my BFT--Big Friendly Tumor. Friendly on account of the likelihood that this lovely companion is benign. Big because it extends a whopping 9.5 cm above my uterus and measures 8 cm front to back. Or, as the MRI tech let slip, "That thing's gotta be as big as my fist!" Ironic that I'd be needing my own advice so soon. As Elizabeth Bishop wrote: 

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

She goes on to recommend practice, practice, practice at this One Art, starting small then moving up to places, names, uteruses--things like that. Things like rental car keys sitting at the bottom of Flaming Gorge Reservoir and the few hours badly spent there are simply a warm-up for the inevitable biggies: relationships, identities, life. I get plenty of practice. In fact, last Monday I misplaced my keys after a yoga class and only just found them this morning. My usual strategy of resting assured that they will turn up eventually worked, only quite a bit more slowly than usual. Ah, well. So you'd think I'd be pretty good, maybe even stoic, about my latest adventure in losing.


I've been through the five stages of grief a few times, even while realizing that my simple affliction is nothing in comparison to what others are facing. I'm not sure what my post-surgery life will look like, how long it will take to build up my yoga practice, how my students will react to having a substitute teacher for a month, how my body will function minus an organ. I've been on an Internet research rampage, weighed my multiple options and accept the choices I've made. You have to take what you read on the Web with a grain of salt. You all know that. There are enough anecdotes out there to keep the toughest of us quivering in the dark for a lifetime. Fortunately I'm blessed with good friends who have been there, done that and gone on to LIVE tremendously satisfying lives. No guarantees, of course, but a girl's gotta have hope.


The threads of thought that rub me the wrongest are those that suggest these physical maladies are really metaphors for things like blocked creative energy, latent self-destructive tendencies, that sort of thing. My brain is as much a meaning-making mechanism as anyone's, but this kind of thinking only adds a layer of guilt to an already bothersome set of circumstances. I don't believe for a minute that if I could only somehow release pent up energy in my root chakra this delightsome growth will bid me adieu on its own. I'm not discounting a mind-body connection; I'm only saying this level of belief in it goes too far. Things arise and things disintegrate. That's an undeniable fact. I'm joining Walt Whitman's team and delighting more in a morning glory on my windowsill than in a theory of why things are they way they are.