Go On Being

some loose threads

1. I’ve been trying to write about March and spring and life for the past couple of weeks, but the threads won’t come together. I hate this. I want for things to make sense. Seasons, feelings, people. And sometimes they do. Right now, they don’t. Not to me, anyway.

2. One thing I’ve been trying to write about is how this isn’t really spring, yet. Vonnegut called it Unlocking Season, but to me it feels more like Birthing. It’s messy, exhausting, and painful. But also hopeful. Joyful. Miraculous.

3. Another thing is this quote from Suleika Jaoud. Well, not a quote, exactly—a word. In her memoir Between Two Kingdoms, she names her goal while experiencing cancer treatment ONGOINGNESS, not survival.

4. I have thought of the last two months—the last five or so years, honestly—as surviving. I’ve wanted more, of course I have, with an ache so broad and deep it sometimes eclipses everything else. And yet the limits of my body have continued to draw in closer, tighter.

5. I can’t live like this anymore, I say to my therapist, my spouse, my friends, myself. This is not living. I am thinking of limits as losses, and they are. I am forgetting that I have always struggled with what I want being different than what I have, because that’s part of being human. I feel like I’ve said all this a hundred times. I know I’ll say it a thousand times more. I know I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to re-learn this lesson, trying to remember that it’s turtles of acceptance all the way down.

6. I think about being, instead of doing. I think about ongoing instead of surviving. I think about something Jaoud said more recently, about the migration of monarch butterflies: “No single butterfly lives long enough to complete the round-trip journey. It takes generations to finish what the first one begins.” I think about my butterfly self, how I am only one infinitesimal part of an infinite whole.

7. For the first time in a long time, it feels a little easier to breathe.

8. I almost forgot to tell you about the sandhill cranes. For two days the sky was full of them, huge swoops that crashed together and came apart. They sparkled in the sun like schools of fish.

9. Oh, and the cairns. I spent a week or so filling my journal with them. I was feeling so lost, still just trying to survive, and it was all I could do. I thought of it as marking a path for myself. Then my mom reminded me that cairns are also burial markers, and I thought “Ok. That, too.”

10. Because it’s all tangled up in death, isn’t it? The flowers that grow out of the rotting leaves. The baby birds that will fall (or be pushed) from nests. The pile of squirrel fur I find underneath a stack of logs.

11. Lately I’ve been thinking: what if I change the way I sit? The way I breathe? The way I walk up stairs? What if I drink more water? What if I eat more greens? What if I try this new medication that worked for someone else? What if I try this old medication that didn’t work for me again? These questions are less frightening than the others. What if it isn’t something I’m doing or not doing? What if it’s nothing? What if it’s everything? What if it just is? And, scariest of all: what if it keeps getting worse?

12. See above re: death.

13. See above re: turtles of acceptance.

14. I’m having another surgery soon. There’s a good chance it will improve some of my symptoms. But of course, there’s also a chance it won’t. The things we can’t change take as long as they take. I will be away from home for a while. Unless they come early, I will miss the leaves unfurling, stretching out into the sunshine, ready once again to nourish the trees.

15. But they will be here when I return. Ongoing. Fervently greening. Waving me home.

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How are your threads lately? Are they coming together, or twisting loose in the Birthing Season wind? Either way, let’s go on being—okay?