Trying to Drink Whiskey From a Bottle of Wine

An old tree at Boggs Mountain 

This is a line from an old Elton John song (or are all Elton John songs old?) that went through my head many times during the two weeks I spent alone at the SFBC Sugar Shack in Northern California.

I wrote a few draft blog posts, none of which survived, because I felt they were too whiney, they were trying to drink from the wrong kind of bottle.

My tumor, the primary and biggest cancer, is gone. I was told by the doctors and expected, and I suspect others expect, that my body would roughly go back to how it was before. Yet, I seem to be suffering, in one way or another, more than I was during treatment.

I spent the two weeks, among other things, getting to know my body as it is now, and not wanting to get to know my body as it is now. I had many dreams of frustration, trying to pack, trying to ascend a staircase, trying to take a shower...many efforts thwarted. (I also heard doorbells, and someone knocking at the door, while in the house, and smelled incense [in my car] when there was no one there!)

A place to ponder

The health section of The New York Times recommends that people with arthritis  avoid staying in one position for too long. Which is a big part of what meditation is, of course...at least the kind I have mostly been doing for 20 years. Dealing with this change is going to take a lot of getting used to and creativity. Of them all it is what makes me the saddest.

I do feel that in four months, my body has aged 10 years, in some ways. I've been doing yoga every day on retreat, and this helped my pelvic bones feel much better. I will do what I can to counteract the effects of the treatment, and who knows how things will be in a year, but for the moment it is, off and on, deeply depressing.

On another note, I just sent my email re-entering the consultation process to become a preceptor and ordain Dawn next year, the prospect of which makes me very happy.

On an even less obviously related note, it occurred to me that in addition to the gold that the Europeans found in California, they must have gotten boners as well seeing the trees here, how incredibly enormous they must have been. In Boggs Mountain park there was ONE old Douglas Fir, around 6 feet wide, huge. This area was full of Doug Firs possibly until the 50's. It's not that the trees here are small, or many of them are not, they just don't seem old, they don't have girth...I remembered that some part of the history of humankind is the history of deforestation, going back many thousands of years. It makes me sad, because I really really love big old trees.

While much of the densely populated areas of the world have probably been deforested many times, until relatively recently, Northern California was still jam packed with huge, beautiful old trees. The only place in the world with Redwoods, some like 20-story buildings, thousands of years old, with their own unique ecosystems in the sky. I do realize that I am staying in a house made of wood, and my home in San Francisco is made of wood. And we burn wood here to keep warm!...Still, I feel sorry for the millions of trees, and the millions of birds and other animals that depended on them to live.