Category: Spiritual

Breast Cancer & Beyond— Book Excerpt

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. In my new book Breast Cancer & Beyond: An Unexpected Soul Path, I describe my recent experience with breast cancer in 2021–22. A cancer diagnosis can be daunting as well as frightening, but I wanted to write about how, in spite of that, for me, it turned out to be a deeply spiritual and often peaceful journey. Below is a short excerpt from the Introduction to the book. Both the print and ebook versions of the book can be ordered at https://amzn.to/4aka0eu.

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I am a breast cancer survivor. After the diagnosis, my surgery and treatment proceeded over several months. It took me a while to assimilate the medical information, as well as my emotional reaction to it. Coming to peace with it all is the essence of my journey. Since I am a writer, my first impulse was to write about my experience—what was occurring in my body, my emotions, my mind, and my soul. I wrote about everything as it happened, week by week. Gradually I came to see that it was part of my life plan, what I had chosen (pre-birth) to experience in this lifetime. We each have unique soul paths within which we grow and evolve, and this was mine. That inner awareness steadied and uplifted me every day as I moved forward.

What you will read in this book is what it was like for me to live with a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment over a period of seven months, and then the months of integration after that. There are some sections where I don’t mention cancer specifically, but everything here took place within that framework. Each part can be read separately or in sequence.  I wrote from my soul’s perspective because that is mostly how I experienced it, and that is what centered me in peace and acceptance. In the very beginning, my hand seemed somehow guided to find the lump myself just two weeks after a “normal” mammogram. I believed it must be part of my soul’s journey on Earth, what I (and God) had designed for my physical life and spiritual evolution. Within that context, there are no mistakes, and I am flowing with each day’s experience.

In the last part of the book, I write about the wider view of life (and eternity) that I received as I journeyed along the unexpected path of cancer and how it affected me going forward. With each week, the universe seemed to expand, and my sense of my place within it also expanded. That expansion has not ended, and I do not foresee an ending because that is the nature of human life as we grow gradually beyond the confines of our physical form and open to infinity. Every experience becomes an initiation into something greater. A blessed gift, all of it.

Experience or Interpretation?

Philosophers, historians, and scientists spend their lives interpreting the world around them. We grow up seeing our world through the filters they have created with their interpretations. Even the language we use to describe the world reflects their views. Yet these very interpretations change from decade to decade, century to century. If we pause and step away from the filters, we realize that these ever-shifting, but seemingly solid “truths” may be keeping us from the immediacy of a life experienced without filters, sometimes called “Presence.”

If you are fully present within each moment, aware of each breath, filters fall away, and the need for interpretation falls away too. Yes, language is useful to human beings for communicating and connecting with one another, but an even deeper inner connection happens in silence. The stillness of your soul “speaks” wordlessly in that silence. This must have been what poet William Blake experienced when he wrote of seeing “a world in a grain of sand” and “eternity in a moment.” The poetry of Presence shows us an infinite interwoven tapestry of light that fills the multiverse beyond imagination. Language falls short as the heart overflows with wonder and awe. The only adequate response is, once again, silence.

This is what I experience every time I walk alone in Nature. There is nothing between me and Presence. Any interpretations I still carry with me dissolve in the stillness. I feel one with all beings and with pure Being itself. I am Presence. In those moments, I am aware that there is nothing else. How to remain centered in that space as I go through my day? Not always easy. Old interpretation filters remain within me and bombard my consciousness from every direction. The key is to keep bringing myself back to the direct experience in front of me.

To take a deep breath and see rather than think about what I’m seeing. To not get lost in my mind and its meanderings. We have a choice in each moment to fully focus on the experience before us or to sidetrack into the thought process it engenders. Distraction happens, it’s human, but we can bring ourselves back to the present moment and the present experience by remembering. Conscious awareness.

Will human beings continue to interpret the world around them in order to understand it better? Probably. Yet at a certain point in our lives, as we live year after year with changing reality filters, we may come to see constant interpretation as somehow falling short of a full experience of life. Interpretation can be fun at times (some might call this blog an interpretation—ha!), but perhaps as a side trip, not the entire journey. Interpretation as one experience in a vast spectrum of experiences.

The key is to keep returning to the conscious Presence within us, which connects directly to the experience before us. To shine the light of awareness on any potential filters and allow words to drop away, if even for a few moments. How can words possibly describe the extraordinary magnificence of the universe we inhabit without getting in the way of our direct experience of it? Silently inhale the stillness and you become one with it all.

Sweet Peas and Dancing Trees

When you move from one place to another, the way in which you view your surroundings day to day changes. Depending on how far you move and how different one location is from another, your perceptional shift can be imperceptible or radical. But it always happens. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I used to move frequently for just this reason: it was like throwing everything up in the air and starting all over again. Whether across town or coast to coast, the world was a different place. Traveling has the same effect. All my senses come alive in new ways. I am consciously interrupting habit, and I love it.

My partner and I recently moved to a condo on the opposite side of Boston from where we had lived for years in various apartments. This was after a move to Florida for two years. It is wonderful to be back in Massachusetts, and this current move has introduced us to an entirely unfamiliar town, quite different from where we used to live. It took a number of months for me to open fully to the change. I really missed where we lived for so many years (which was very close to Mt. Auburn Cemetery, my favorite nature sanctuary). Now, however, gradually, the sense of newness is reawakening my full awareness in unexpected ways.

For instance, last week on my daily walk I discovered bright pink and white sweet peas growing wild in the area next to the woods across from our condo. It was such a delight because it reminded me of my childhood in the Illinois countryside, where sweet peas blanketed the fences with their beautiful blooms. I never knew they could grow wild in the fields like I am seeing here. These were covered with bees and butterflies, and I stood watching them for quite a while in deep appreciation.

This past spring the cherry, crab apple, and red bud trees blooming here were also a surprise, as were the dozens of song sparrows and house finches singing all day from March on. Joined by cardinals, robins, Carolina wrens, gold finches, red-winged blackbirds, and catbirds, they have been a particularly powerful welcoming for me, as I was uncertain how many birds would be nearby. But the woods that surround the condo buildings are a natural habitat for them. Flocks of spring migrants have flown in, as well as birds that remain here all year. The entire area is alive with avian life.

The trees themselves are my latest source of inspiration and wonder. As the weather and winds change, the tall, intensely green oak, maple, beech, birch, and other trees reflect the shifts in air movement in quite dramatic ways. They dance! From our third-floor windows, I watch them quite literally dance with the wind, swaying synchronously like an Alvin Ailey or Martha Graham dance troupe. The music of the spheres seems to move them, and I feel a part of the greater movement of the universe as I watch their collective branch and leaf motion so perfectly in unison against the sky and clouds. Each time I gaze at them is a fresh look at life itself.

Every day now, my heart expands in gratitude for these gifts of Nature that surround me—and for the ability to see and hear them. As my habitual ways of perceiving fall away, the world opens up around me, and I remember that this can happen anywhere at any time. Moving does shake things up, but I can also keep my sensual acuity sharp by living each moment with wide-open awareness. Even walking in the same area in different seasons is a continually new experience. As I look out my window each morning at the ever-changing details of the natural world before me, I feel such joy—and my soul dances with the trees.

Heroes Among Us

When people think of heroes, they often picture those who risk their lives to save lives, such as first-responders. Indeed, these individuals are definitely courageous heroes. Yet, there are others in our communities who are also heroic and touch our lives in many different ways. For instance: teachers, who with dedication and purpose hold the door open to our education and growth as human beings. From teachers, we learn to think, to explore ideas, and to expand our minds to include all kinds of views of the world. One of the greatest gifts that teachers can give is support for being ourselves.

My grandmother, uncle, and aunt were teachers. My wife has been a teacher all her adult life, first teaching history to potential high school dropouts (using Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States), then graphic design to college students and adults, and eventually web design to people of all ages. One of her fondest memories is of a student who told her how kind she was and how much she had helped him learn. Often kindness and compassion are what we remember most about our teachers.

My fourth-grade teacher was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. She treated her nine-year-old students with gentleness, humor, and respect for each of us as individuals. My favorite part of the day was a reading hour in which we could read the many varied books she had collected at the back of the room (or any we had brought ourselves). She honored our independent directions and choices in learning and in life. Not all teachers are encouraged to do this, however, especially now.

Today, many local and state laws are dictating what can and can’t be taught, as well as what books are available in libraries. The history of slavery, systemic racism, gender identity, and climate change are prohibited from mention in increasing numbers of educational institutions. The lists of “banned” books grow nationwide (classics such as The Diary of Anne Frank and The Color Purple). Belief systems constrict how we are “taught” and what we read. Teachers are currently facing a particularly heroic path in this country. And they persevere, in spite of the challenges.

I feel such gratitude for the teachers in my life, past and present, wherever I may encounter them. For not all teachers are in classrooms or education venues. In daily life, I learn from friends, as well as strangers, who speak and live their truth in the world. Wisdom can be passed on in so many ways: a shared poem or song; a calming insight; an expansive, inclusive idea. I learn from activists who speak out for freedom and justice (Bernice Johnson Reagon, Howard Zinn), as well as from spiritual teachers whose lives are centered in loving-kindness and peace (Thich Nhat Hanh, Sharon Salzberg). To live love by being love is deeply heroic and inspiring.

Sometimes people become heroes in the simple act of being themselves and in doing so teach others how essential freedom of expression is. The transgender community especially embodies this kind of heroism. When we listen openly to those who have been silenced or outcast, we learn to become more compassionate human beings. The courageous voices of everyday heroes who speak and act from their hearts and souls inspire us to do the same. Together we all step into living heroic lives committed to kindness, freedom, peace, and unconditional love.

Rewriting the Lyrics of Our Lives

Songwriters sometimes rewrite their lyrics to expand or change perspective. Today, we are all called to rewrite how we see ourselves and our lives in the 21st century, to be more truthful, more inclusive, more expansive, more heart-centered. Not only in the U.S. but everywhere in the world. We think we belong to countries, to nationalities, to races, to religions, to belief systems. In truth, we are none of those. We are immigrants on this planet, traveling here from somewhere in the cosmos to sing our human songs. We think we have identities as we move from place to place. Those identities arrive at birth and depart at death. What is left is a soul, traveling light. In a rewrite of the lyrics of our lives, the words will fall way and there will be nothing but that light.

The longer I live, the less I hang onto. Even the language I use to describe my own feelings and thoughts flows through me but doesn’t really stick. It is spirit speaking in the mother tongue of my soul, and I am just a vessel through which it pours. Each of us is. We are souls passing through. We speak and listen, but it is our hearts that discover the deepest wisdom, in silence, in love. Human/soul connection beyond lifetimes.

When those we love pass from this dimension to another, life can take on a limitless, ethereal quality. Memories are both close and distant, bright and dim. Everything merges into one somehow. I miss my parents and friends who have died, but they are also with me. Life on Earth is what we shared, but there is something larger than those lives that holds us together in ways that are outside of language or description. Infinite consciousness.

In recent years, I find myself floating in the intangible: something as fleetingly beautiful as a morning sky or a summer’s sunset. And it is not just one thing. It is everything. I walk but really I am carried. Music carries me. Birdsong carries me. Poetry carries me. Love carries me. I speak but I am speechless. The lyrics of my life rewrite themselves without any effort on my part. They are both vivid and neutral. They shift with the changes in light and sound and being.

In the end, it is grace that carries us. We are part of something we can only sense but not fully articulate. Early in life, we are immersed in the wonders of living. Death is distant. Then it comes closer, perhaps touches us in a sudden unexpected way. It is then that we begin to see a wider view. The lyrics we have written to describe our lives no longer entirely fit. We realize that at the deepest level, all of us, no matter our background, race, or beliefs, share a common destiny and are woven from common threads. The tapestry of life on Earth enfolds us in its wondrous complexity. When we finally see that fully, “lyrics” fall away, and there is nothing left but the grace of being and interbeing.