For the last few weeks, I’ve been training for some inexplicable event. I obsessively rebuild my strength. My days are filled with fierce mental and physical preparation. I hoard moments of joy and peace like morsels as I go, collecting every shade of color that I see, noting every minute sensation of being a body. The thought that this could be the last time looms over my world, a gentle yet persistent reminder of inevitable fate.
And for weeks, I have been terrified of admitting why. It is almost a year to the day since I was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, since I stepped out onto a half-frozen lake, thinking I was safe, until one footstep tumbling with a crack into the depths below.
I am fine, I tell myself. I am totally fine. I ignore my therapists because I am scared of putting into words the notion that I may be anything but. I see the monthly email with the cancer blood test results and my heart sinks deep into my chest as I sit down to collect myself before reading it. Each twenty-one-day cycle is a microcosm of my life, a repeating wave of rebirth, living, retreat. I am not a statistic, yet I am acutely aware of how thin the ice is.
Last year, two weeks before my initial cancer diagnosis in February, I wrote “No one is going to save you,” in my journal as my Q1 goal. I meant it in terms of self-defense, learning martial arts, establishing disaster recovery plans, and strengthening my sailing skills to set out alone on the open sea.
And in the months that followed, I learned the deeper meaning of that phrase. Death will come. Disaster will hit. As my mom often reminds me in her brilliant, stoic way, “You may have cancer,” she says, “but I could get hit by an Uber Eats bicycle any day.” We cannot control what happens to our loved ones or to us. And we also have no way of knowing whether any given change ever results in an outcome that is inherently better or worse than before. The idea that we are in control is as much an illusion as the idea that we are in danger.
I wonder often how to live inside of that.
At a 5Rhythms dancing retreat at Esalen, I sat with the question, “What is true now?”
It hit me hard as I’ve been searching backward and forward to reach a state that is anything but my present. I’ve been frustrated with the superficial remains of treatment’s aftermath, my boyish hair, my fickle hormones. 5Rhythms leads you through a practice mirroring the energy of a wave - flow to staccato to chaos to lyrical to stillness - to practice moving through the rhythms of life.
You move through the dark and the light. In flow, the weight you are carrying shifts to your strength. Staccato locks you down in control but also to load power and prepare. Chaos confronts you with confusion until you relinquish the need to know it all. In lyrical, the dissolution can sharpen into pure focus. Stillness can numb you into nothingness or move you into reciprocity with the unknown.
Staccato has always been my favorite, a state of power, control, and execution. It’s the rhythm I default to in fear, comfort found in the safety of order. But, in trying to control my experience, I separate myself from it.
As I lie in the sulfur baths under a new moon sky with the ocean crashing beneath me, I finally let myself lean into chaos, my grip softening. I meet my fear with wonder. The only way to prepare for a formless state is to embrace change.
I woke up the next morning wanting nothing more than to release a deep primal scream. I rolled around in the grass, feeling the cold moist pricks on my bare skin, breathing in that green smell. I flung my body in dance like a rag doll, limbs shaking wildly, baptizing myself with my sweat. I growled at friends as we pirouetted and played. I stopped watching the others dance. My attention narrowed to my own middle left toe, pressing and lifting against the floor, the swing of my right hip, the ache beneath the wings of my shoulders. I snuck bites of cucumbers from Esalen’s gardens like a rabbit. In the heat of the day, I lay under the cool waterfall of the creek, snorting water out of my nose like a hippo as I dunked my head.
At night, I lay alone on the lawn under the Milky Way, luxuriating in my return to wild being, as if I had just been born there, a new fawn, this grass all I had ever known. Could I trust the sky to guide me?
I thought, as I counted seven above me, about how we are all shooting stars blazing across the dark into oblivion. Everything is out of our control but the ability to recognize what is true for us in any given moment, and live that fully.
The stars spiraled above as I surrendered my weight to the earth, into the darkness, into wonder. Somewhere below the cliffs, the ocean gathered another wave.
When I arrived at Esalen, my friend Kate and I found this on a bench, and both gasped - LIVE NOW, spelled out in rocks. Sending you all love and a deep wish to do just that.
