Well.
This has taken longer than I expected. Today is the first day of March, 2021, not May 2020, as the title was originally posted. I’m sure many of you can relate to thinking you are ready to share something hard and then… almost a year passes by. Sometimes years. Sometimes a life time.
I’m ready to share.
At the end of 2019 I was diagnosed with Stage 1 Breast Cancer. It was a shock. Diagnosed by mammogram. No palpable lump. Although I had Stage 0 Breast Cancer 19 years prior, I never expected to go down that road again.
After spending a long dark night of anger and resentment over the fact that my fairly healthy life style did not spare me this diagnosis, I found hope in an unexpected place. Figs.
In my refrigerator were a dozen figs that were rapidly losing their freshness. In my cancer anger, I decided I was not going to allow cancer to get in the way of cooking those figs. I could control that much. I was determined to rescue those figs through a delicious recipe.
These figs were not store bought figs. These figs grew from a tree in my yard, that grew from the root of a tree in Italy, that my Italian Nana brought with her “on the boat”. My Nana, my ancestors, and their survival, maybe even my survival, was sitting in my refrigerator disguised as softening figs.
I typed “fig recipe” into the google search bar and the page filled with suggestions. Since I didn’t have much bandwidth I scanned for something simple. For some reason there was an Eckhart Tolle listing on the page.
I ignored it. Then I thought to myself, ‘Why is an Eckhart Tolle link on this page of fig recipes? The last thing I need is some guru preaching to me about my rage. F- off Eckhart.’
I grunted. My nostrils flared as I exhaled.
My curiosity however would not let me pass it by. I clicked on the Eckhart link. This is what appeared.
“Accept - then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you have chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.”
I wailed. ” No. No. No.”
I ranted, “I won’t do it.”
But I couldn’t stop reading the words. I read those words over and over in disbelief until I began to recognize my Self in them. And then I wrapped those words around my Self like a protective, soft, warm blanket of calm and compassion.
“No sense changing who I am now, after all, this is who I am.”
“Damn it.”
“Thank you Eckhart.”
I roasted those figs and we enjoyed their sweet relief over ice cream. I was ready.
I prepared for the mastectomy by listening to and following guided meditations and I used EFT tapping to calm my churning anxieties. Family and friends surrounded me as I opened my heart as wide as I could to receive their love, their gifts, their condolences, their support, their encouragement and disbelief.
I had faith in my surgeon. I explained that I wanted to listen to the healing meditations during surgery. She said yes. I woke in the recovery room and there she was. “I’m going to check your incision. Would you like to look at it with me?” I said, yes.
Recovering from the mastectomy was a lot of work. Again my family and friends were cheering me on.
More writing to come…