Some Gifts Are Hard to Unwrap
on account of the knots
What if you like to regularly send out truthful and inspiring newsletters but your life at the moment is anything but inspiring?
Well, you check. to see if there might be a gift in the pile of rubbish because you are pretty sure there will be one.
After being diagnosed with cancer in 1991, I flew to India to be with my teachers and healers there. I had a strong sense that this illness would bring revelations and hopefully some sort of gift; the same sense I’d had but been unable to unwrap nearly twenty years before.
When I was eighteen I had something called ITP, a blood disease that gobbled my platelets. The first word of the disease is idiopathic, which I joked meant only idiots get it, but actually means the cause was unknown. Even without any support for such ideas, I believed there was an emotional underpinning to its existence in my body. Something profound had gone awry and it wasn’t just a breakdown of function. I’d heard about meditation so I sat cross-legged on my bed with my fingers in little loops and closed my eyes. With no one to ask how to plumb the depths of my sadness that I sensed was the disease’s seed, I succumbed to allopathic directives: a long course of prednisone—which increased the platelet count but when the dosage diminished so did the platelet count—and eventually, a splenectomy. And I was cured. But the lingering sense that I’d missed an opportunity persisted.
In India, I underwent every conceivable alternative healing method imaginable. I was a practitioner of a method called Tibetan Pulsing Healing which had to do with re-establishing broken or damaged electric circuitry in the body by connecting the pulse at various points along the skeleton. It was a powerful process that linked the emotional, psychological, and physical. I had literally thousands of these sessions.
As well, I had shopping bags full of supplements, ate only raw food, meditated, went for a series of revelatory hypnosis sessions, took art therapy sessions, wrote down and studied my dreams, and rested.
For years I had the cancer monitored, watched it expand, contract, shrink, and sit still. All the while, I was unearthing every aspect of my personality, its flaws, and its protections. I explored my grief and my guilt. Cancer compelled me to plumb the depths of my dysfunction in all its expressions. It halted my frantic rushing forward and set me in place so I could truly see myself and reset. I wrote in my journal, “I’m turning over every rock to see if there’s a worm underneath.” In one hypnosis session, my cancer was asked, “What are you trying to get for Deepam?” And a cry rose up in me. “I’m trying to get her to stop.” The lovely Maitri then asked, “Can you come up with three possible ways you could get her to stop without killing her?”
Evidently, there were other ways.
Clever little unconscious.
I’d struggled with its wrapping, but after only ten years of pulling at the ribbons and peeling off the tape so as not to rip the paper, the gift of cancer was revealed. Just to clarify, I am being sincere here. I’m so grateful to cancer for holding up a mirror, and that I had enough time to have a good deep look into it.
Back to the issue at hand.
One of my wonderful teachers, Barbara Turner-Vesselago, advises writers to allow the big moments in their life to “compost” for ten years before attempting to write about them – whether in memoir or fiction. This is to allow for perspective and to avoid writing rants.
I’m not so sure I have the luxury of waiting ten years to write about my current state of affairs.
When a thing goes down, when what was held so fervently together falls apart, what does a writer want to do?
Write about it. Right? They want to write about it.
Here are some questions that arise:
1. How deep must one dig to unearth the jewel?
2. How long must one wait to write about it so that it isn’t a rant?
3. How slant can a piece be when it’s still bubbling hot?
4. Can a rant be valuable?
As may have been surmised, some turmoil exists in my life. I’ve been writing rants and poems and scribbles and scrawls, but its complexity and deeply personal nature make it almost impossible to share in a way that is transparent, helpful, reassuring, or inspiring to readers.
The best I can do is share a poem that is sort of a rant but is hopefully slightly elevated by metaphor and imagery. Now, I am kind of joking.
Saving oneself means
masks must dry and crumble,
The invisible shell cracks and splits.
It’s the only way.
Expose the rust and rot
So stinking blood can flow.
You cannot save your life
Simply by asking.
But I can stop tilting the mirror
So only your good side shows.
Writers write. And write. Then they edit. Sometimes they trash. It’s the nature of the beast.
And they search for jewels amidst the flotsam.
Note: I’m in good health, by the way. Because the “issue” isn’t directly about me, I’ve kept details purposely obscure.
Although the following isn’t a result or even tangentially connected to what I haven’t been talking about, it did serve to lighten things for me.
I drove by some furniture set at the side of the road that made me turn around for a closer look. I’m not in the habit of picking up furniture left out on the sidewalk. (At least not since I was a very poor eighteen-year-old in an apartment I couldn’t afford, working part-time for less than a dollar an hour.) However, this wasn’t your ordinary cat-scratched, baby-peed-on furniture. It was two deep red leather armchairs and a matching ottoman. Absolutely gorgeous. I stood for the longest time waiting for the owners to come screaming out to tell me to bugger off. But the sign said, “FREE.” I turned the chairs on their sides and looked underneath, examining them for their fatal flaw—the reason they’d been tossed to the curb. Aside from a tiny paint splotch on one side, they were in perfect condition.
They are so beautiful and make me smile every time I walk into my sitting room. They are MY colour and I love how they’ve transformed the room where they now live.
Onward.
In my workshops, shimmering jewels of poetry and prose are created in fifteen and twenty-minute increments. I’m always stunned at what these writers manage in such short bursts of time. Clever, heart-breaking, poignant, skilled writing that never ceases to snatch my breath. I want to shout their praises from the rooftops. (As long as the rooftop doesn’t require a ladder. Say, a dollhouse…)
Having them show up on my screen week after week—now that is a gift I have no trouble unwrapping.
Wow. Thanks for sharing. Life was always strange but for some the strangeness is so present. I was introduced to the strangeness when my wife had a brain bleed last April. More circumstances compounded the strangeness and I spend a lot of time outside of myself. Your story is beautiful and meaningful. And being at risk of sounding weird, I say, so are you.