As I write this, I am sitting in a small hospital room receiving my first chemotherapy treatment. My cancerous bladder was removed but the cancer itself survived to migrate to other organs, including my lungs. Hence, the chemo!
To make this a memorable week, yesterday I had surgery to create a fistula in my left arm. This is a joining of an artery and a vein to make a “docking port” in case I need to have dialysis. My kidneys are now one of the targets of the cancer.
After the vascular surgery, I got to marveling on the skill and knowledge it took to make the fistula. Who thought of this in the first place? So, I did some research. Fistulas, it turns out, occur naturally when two hollow organs that should remain separate somehow get connected. Normally, this is a pathology. But hemodialysis fistulas such as I now have were created deliberately out of many attempts to help people with kidney failure. The research goes back to the turn of the last century. But the kind of fistula I have wasn’t developed until the 1960s.
As I lay in bed last night, filling my arm with Light and welcoming the new joining of one of my arteries and veins, I couldn’t help but appreciate the amount of human energy, creativity, skill, and caring that went into this medical procedure. So many unknown heroes whose efforts made this possible, of which I am now a beneficiary.
This is true for the chemo now entering my body. It, too, is the product of many lives, many intelligences, many souls working to find and improve ways of dealing with cancer. Whatever one may think of “Big Pharma,” behind all these endeavors is love and caring, and for many, a call to service. This is what I tuned into last night.
As I lay in bed, preparing my body energetically for the therapy I’m undergoing today, I had this deep sense of peace and of love and appreciation for all the human energy that has gone into the whole field of healing, allopathic and otherwise.
We see the destructiveness of human thought, feeling, and action displayed daily on the news. What we may not see, or see as clearly, is our human creativity, or the love and caring we bring to discovering ways of helping each other. We rightly decry the state of the world with its brutality and suffering, but we also need to celebrate the beauty we bring into the world as well.
I have always had a hard time adjusting to my physical body. It has been a consequence of the particular attunement to the subtle and spiritual worlds that I’ve had all my life. Not that a spiritual focus necessarily means a lack of physical focus or vice versa, but I teach Incarnational Spirituality in part because incarnation has been a challenge and something I’ve had to learn. The world often seems strange to me in ways that it doesn’t appear to be to others. This has never prevented me from loving the world and taking joy at being part of it. But it has meant physical challenges as my soul works to adapt to physical life. This latest struggle with cancer seems to be a part of that.
I certainly would rather it be otherwise; I have no desire to be ill. But what my latest illness has done is given me a portal into this arena of human endeavor on behalf of humanity. It has made me even more aware of the beauty of our human energy and creativity as we seek to make the world a better, safer, healthier place. Now, I take into my body not poison, not chemicals, but Light flowing from this human energy.
It makes me love our strange and struggling species even more.