A Question of Balance

"IT'S A NEW PROCEDURE pioneered in Europe. I think you're a good candidate for it."

Peter Richards looked pained. He obviously had a great deal of affection for Treya; how hard, I thought, to treat cancer patients. Peter outlined the options: mastectomy with removal of all the lymph nodes; leaving the breast but removing the lymph nodes, then treating the breast with radiation implants; segmental or partial mastectomy (removing about one-quarter of the breast tissue), removal of about half the lymph nodes, then five or six weeks of radiation to the breast area; segmental mastectomy with removal of all lymph nodes. It was hard to escape the impression that we were all calmly discussing medieval torture techniques. "Oh, yes ma'am, we have something lovely in a size eight Iron Maiden."

Treya had already hit upon a general plan of action. Although we were both great fans of alternative and holistic medicine, a careful scrutiny showed that none of the alternatives – including Simonton visualization, Gerson diet, and Burton in the Bahajnas – had any substantial success against grade four tumors. These tumors are the Nazis of the cancer crowd, and they are not terribly impressed with wheat grass juice and sweet thoughts. You have to nuke these bastards if you're going to have any chance at all-and that's where white man's medicine comes in.

Treya decided, after carefully looking at all the options, that the most sensible course of action was to use orthodox treatments for the first step, and then combine them with a full spectrum of holistic auxiliary treatments. Holistic practitioners, of course, usually discourage the use of any orthodox treatments, like radiation or chemotherapy, because, it is said, they permanently compromise the immune system, thus making the holistic treatments less likely to succeed.

There is some truth to that, but the situation is much more subtle and complex than most holistic practitioners seem to realize. First of all, it is true that radiation, for example, will lower the number of white blood cells, one of the body's front lines of immunity. Most of this is temporary, however, and the slight long-term reduction has not been correlated with immune deficiency, simply because there is no direct link between the quantity of white blood cells and the quality of immune protection. For example, people who receive chemotherapy have on average no long-term higher incidence of colds, flu, general infections, or secondary cancers, even though portions of their white blood count might be lower. It is not obvious at all that these people have an "impaired" immune system. The hard fact is, many people who use holistic treatments die, and the most convenient excuse is, "You should have come to us first."

Treya decided that, given the present state of medical knowledge, the only prudent course was to aggressively combine orthodox and alternative methods. As for the orthodox, studies in Europe had demonstrated that the segmental mastectomy followed by radiation was as effective as the gruesome modified radical mastectomy. All three of us-Peter, Treya, and myself-felt that the segmental mastectomy was the reasonable course. (Treya had little vanity; she chose the procedure not because it saved most of the breast but because it saved a lot of the lymph nodes.)

And so, on December 15, 1983, Treya and I spent our honeymoon in room 203, second floor, Children's Hospital, San Francisco.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm having them send up a cot. I'm sleeping in the room."

"They won't let you."

Ken made his eyes-rolled-up-you've-got-to-be-kidding look. "Kid, a hospital is a terrible place to be if you're a sick person. There are germs in a hospital that you can get nowhere else in the world. If the germs don't get you, the food will. I'm staying. Besides, this is our honeymoon; I'm not going to leave you." He got a cot and spent the entire time with me in my room, a large part of his six-foot-four frame dangling off the very small cot they put in. Right before surgery he brought in beautiful flowers. The note said, "For the other half of my soul."

Treya seemed to have rapidly regained her footing. Her natural and enormous courage resurfaced, and she literally breezed through the whole ordeal.

12/11 – All three of us [Peter Richards, Treya, and Ken] came to the same decision – segmental, partial axillary [removal of about half the lymph nodes], radiation. That felt good. Feeling fine, joking about it, doing great. Lunch at Max's, Xmas shopping with Ken. Home late and exhausted, but with more of those endless errands done. Outpouring of my love for Ken, then wanting to forgive and send my love to everybody in my life, especially my family.

12/14 – First acupuncture treatment, Nap, packed. To hotel, dinner Mom and Dad, more wedding presents. Called Kati [a sister] to come. Snuggle with Ken.

12/15 – Nine o'clock to hospital – prepped – waiting room – to my room – two hr. delay. Felt fine going into surgery-fine coming out, not too dopey. Woke at five – Ken, Dad, Mom, Kati there. Ken got a cot – "other half of my soul." Morphine that night. Interesting sensations – drifty, dreamy, similar to meditation sometimes. Woke me practically every hour for temp, and blood pressure. My b.p. is naturally so low, Ken had to wake up each hour and assure the nurse, who couldn't even find a pulse, that I was alive.

12/16 – Slept all day – walked down hall with Ken slowly. Mom, Dad, Kati, Joan [a friend]. Dr. R. in, twenty nodes out, all negative [no cancer in her lymph nodes, extremely good news]. Walked with Suzannah. Couldn't sleep that night, called for med. at four, morphine and Tylenol. Great to have Ken there all the time; glad he insisted.

12/17 – Called various people – read a lot – Dr. R. by – family left – Ken Xmas shopping – feeling very good.

12/18 – Lots of visitors – Ken on errands – walked a lot – reading The Color Purple. Am still sore, fluid still draining.

12/19 – Checked out – lunch at Max's – Xmas shopping with Ken-home. Sort of wish I'd written more about all this – am feeling fine, confident – some pain the first day, esp. where the [drainage] tubes were – feeling so good I sometimes worry I'm overconfident!

The immediate impact of the surgery was psychological: Treya took the time to begin an almost complete reassessment of what she always called her "life's work" – namely, what was her life's work supposed to be? As she explained it to me, this question centered around issues of doing versus being, which in this culture also means issues of masculine versus feminine roles. Treya, by her account, had always valued doing, which is often (but not necessarily) associated with the masculine, and she devalued being, which is often (but not necessarily) associated with the feminine.[iv] Doing values are values of producing something, making something, achieving something; they are often aggressive, competitive, and hierarchical; they are oriented toward the future; and they depend upon rules and judgment. Basically, doing values attempt to change the present into something "better." Being values, on the other hand, are values of embracing the present; values of accepting a person for what they are, not for what they can do; values of relationship, inclusion, acceptance, compassion, and care.

Both of these values – doing and being – are equally important, I think. But the point is that, since being values are often associated with the feminine, Treya felt that in overvaluing the doing/masculine, she had actually repressed in herself a whole range of being/feminine.

This was not just a passing curiosity for Treya. Rather, I would say that, in its various forms, it was the major psychological issue in Treya's life. Among many other things, it was directly responsible for her eventually changing her name from "Terry" to "Treya" – Terry, she felt, was a man's name.

A lot of issues are becoming clearer to me. For as long as I can remember I have beat myself up with the question "What is my life's work?" I think that perhaps I put too much emphasis on doing, not enough on being. I was the oldest of four children, and as I grew up I wanted to be my father's eldest son. After all, in Texas at that time the really important "jobs" were men's jobs – men did all the really productive work. I valued men's values, and I did not want to be a Texas wife – so I threw over many feminine values, and fought them in myself, fought them any time they came up in me. A denial, I believe, of my feminine side, my body, my nurturing, my sexuality, while I aligned myself with my head, my father, my logic, my society's values.

In facing this cancer, I now think the answer to that burning question – what is my work? – comes in two parts.

1. Ironically – in light of my constant resistance to finding myself through a man – part of my work is definitely taking care of Ken, supporting his work in whatever way I can, learning how to do that without losing my autonomy, how to let that old fear die away slowly as I grow into this work – which begins first by simply being his wife and support and keeping a nice house, a nice place for him to work (hire a maid!) and seeing what else that might grow into. But it begins by supporting him and his work in all those invisible ways a wife does that my ego always revolted against. But now it's no longer an idea, the situation is nothing like the Texas model my ego rebelled against; my ego's not in the same state it was then. His work is, I believe, incredibly important and on a level of contribution to the whole way beyond what I could get up to (not meant to be self-denigrating, just honest), and besides, it's Ken I'm talking about, and I absolutely love him. He is clearly, absolutely, at the center of my work. I don't think I could come to this place at all if Ken actually wanted me to do this, if he wanted me to be the good "wife." He puts no demands on me at all. If anything, he's been the wife, taking care of me!

2. The second element that seems to be coming up, and connected with the counseling and group work I've done, is cancer work. That feels more and more what I might do. Start by doing a book on my experience with cancer; various theories of healing; interview therapists on body-mind connection; interview other cancer patients. Then maybe a video – we'll see. But definitely this feels like something central to my work.

I see that both of these are forms of "selfless service," ways to get my ego out of the way and serve others. So both of them directly tie into my lifelong desire to pursue a spiritual discipline. Everything is starting to come together!

I am feeling an opening in my being
Feeling an opening between my head and my heart,
my father and mother, my mind and my body,
My male and female, my scientist and my artist.
One the feature writer, the other the poet.
One the responsible eldest child, taking after her father
Who kept his family together;
The other the playful, explorer, adventurer, mystic

This was by no means the solution or the final version of Treya's search for her vocation, for her "true work," but it was a start. I could sense a shift in her, an inner healing of sorts, an integrating, a balancing.

We came to refer to her search for her "work" as a search for her "daemon" – the Greek word that in classical mythology refers to "a god within," one's inner deity or guiding spirit, also known as a genii or jinn, the tutelary deity or genius of a person; one's daemon or genii is also said to be synonymous with one's fate or fortune. Treya had not yet found her fate, her genius, her destiny, her daemon, not in its final form, anyway. I was to be a part of that fate, but not quite the main focus that Treya thought; I was more of a catalyst. Her daemon, really, was her own higher Self, and it would soon be expressed, not in work, but in art.

I, on the other hand, had found my fate, my daemon, and it was my writing. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, why I wanted to do it; I knew why I was put here, and what I was supposed to accomplish. When I was writing I was expressing my own higher Self; I had no doubt or hesitation about that at all. Two paragraphs into the writing of my first book, when I was twenty-three years old, I knew I had come home, found myself, found my purpose, found my god. I have since never doubted it once.

But there is a strange and horrible thing about one's daemon: When honored and acted upon, it is indeed one's guiding spirit; those who bear a god within bring genius to their work. When, however, one's daemon is heard but unheeded, it is said that the daemon becomes a demon, or evil spirit – divine energy and talent degenerates into self-destructive activity. The Christian mystics, for example, say that the flames of Hell are but God's love denied, angels reduced to demons.

Got a little edgy when Ken and Janice [a friend] were talking about how much alike they are because if they don't work they get weird. Ken handles his not working with drink and other relaxations; Janice says she works to keep from being suicidal. Seems to me they are different motivations – Ken has a daemon that makes him work to fulfill it; Janice has a demon that she works to avoid. But the point is Ken was trying to make a connection, understandable, and I got a bit weird about it because of my insecurity about what I'm doing now. Same old story – don't have to work because of some inner demon (Janice), and I haven't found my daemon (Ken), the work I deeply want to do. Sometimes I think my real problem is that I just don't believe I could ever get really good at something, that I have an inflated idea of how good others are, and that maybe by the time I'm fifty that will have been cut down by experience to match reality and I'll then know I could be good enough. And sometimes I think I just have to stop chasing my daemon long enough to let some space in my life for it to begin to show itself and grow. I want a full-blown plant right away and have been too impatient to nourish the small shoots enough to see which one I choose or chooses me.

I need to learn how to read the depths of my being, find my own "guidance" and daemon. I don't want to live without some kind of faith in a greater purpose, even if it is only evolution! So I don't want to let any anger on my part [about getting cancer] diminish mystical experiences and their power to change people in any way. I don't want to let any bitterness erode my sense of the sacred and the meaningful in life, but use it instead to deepen the need for those explorations and understandings. Even anger can be the "stuff" through which God or this evolutionary force manifests and works. I'm still interested in how people change, how they find meaning and purpose in their lives. I definitely recognize in myself a need for a work, a kind of foundation for the more amorphous work of the Findhorns and Windstars. I feel Ken and cancer work are a big part of that foundation. But I need in myself the counterpart of Ken's writing, Steven's architecture, Cathy's dance. I recognize in me [what Haridas Chaudhuri calls] "the need for self-creation and creative accomplishment," my "will to self-unfoldment."

To continue on that path I need to find ways to get in better touch with my deep psyche, the inner principle of ongoing personal growth. That is as close as I can get to God within me; learning to understand and follow that is the same as hearing and obeying God's will. Going within and getting in touch with the deepest, most true part of oneself... getting to know it, nourish it, let it grow more mature... invest it with power (recognizing it as the inner God)... and develop the will to follow that inner direction... the ability to test its truth and the faith and courage to follow it even when it contradicts the rational mind of our consensus reality. So that's my task now....

In the coming nightmare that Treya and I endured, part of her torment was that she had not yet found her daemon; my torment was that, once having had mine, I watched it slip away. My angels starved into demons, and I was very nearly destroyed by that particular variety of hell.

We spent Christmas in Laredo with the family (after a brief stop in Houston at M. D. Anderson Hospital), and then returned to Muir Beach for Treya to begin her radiation treatments with Dr. Simeon Cantril, "Sim" to his friends. Sim was a brilliant, very likable man, who had lost a wife to cancer; but his intellectual intensity sometimes came across as a personal brusqueness, or even coldness, which, although a false impression, was nonetheless intimidating. Thus, in addition to giving Treya topnotch radiotherapy, he gave her the chance to polish her assertiveness training with doctors, a training she brought to the brink of perfection.

They don't give you the whip. You have to push, and ask, and push, and above all, don't feel foolish. And especially don't be put off by their air of busyness, the feeling that their time is so valuable they can hardly answer questions. It's your life that's at stake. Ask your questions.

This assertiveness was simply part of a "take-charge" attitude that Treya increasingly brought to her illness. During the five and one-half weeks of daily radiation treatment – itself a painless procedure whose only major side effect was a mild but growing fatigue, with occasional flulike symptoms – during this period, Treya began to implement her main agenda: change those things in your life that need changing anyway.

Started radiation treatment today. I'm feeling very excited over the discipline/regularity of the process, doing it on a daily basis, helping with my discipline in other areas. I've started taking long daily walks. I feel I need a project, some work focus to see me through this time – I need to express my energy outward rather than turning it in on myself, so I'm working on my book on cancer. Ken is doing the megavitamin therapy for me – he's a trained biochemist, after all! He buys huge batches of over fifty nutrients and mixes them up in the kitchen sink, while he makes funny mad scientist sounds. He's also taken over most of the cooking, becoming my dietician as well. He is a fabulous cook! And his unofficial job is to keep me laughing. I came home yesterday, and asked him how he was doing. He said, "Oh Christ, horrible day. Smashed the car, burnt the dinner, beat my wife. Oh, hell, forgot to beat my wife..." and started chasing me around the kitchen table.

In addition to meditation, exercise, acupuncture, vitamins, diet, and my book, I've started visualization, I'm seeing two holistic doctors, and I'm putting more energy into this journal! Keeping this journal is part of the cure. Only regret over Xmas is that I was lazy about all this, ate what was there, didn't meditate or exercise, let it all get pretty murky, slip away from me.

Now feel I'm taking charge, asking questions, taking responsibility. In only two days the pain [from surgery] went away, is there a causal connection? It's important to feel I can do something to help, to get better, not just throw myself over to the doctors.

Reading [Norman] Cousins's The Healing Heart – says he never got depressed, always focused on what he could do to recover. That's great, but I get depressed – feel part of it is the uncertainty around what caused the cancer, why I got it. It's much clearer with heart disease – stress and diet. But I do know what I need to change, so I'm focusing on that! I know that as long as I'm reading and thinking and working at it, my spirits stay high. When I feel like a victim or leave it up to the doctor or want Ken to do it, I get depressed. Lesson in will to live.

As important as this "take-charge" attitude was, it was still only half the equation. In addition to learning how to take control and assume responsibility, a person also needs to learn when and how to let go, to surrender, to go with the flow and not resist or fight it. Letting go versus taking control – this is, of course, just another version of being versus doing, that primordial polarity of yin and yang that assumes a thousand different forms and is never exhausted. It is not that yin or yang is right, that being is better than doing – it's a question of finding the right balance, finding the natural harmony between yin and yang that the ancient Chinese called the Tao. Finding that balance – between doing and being, controlling and allowing, resisting and opening, fighting and surrendering, willing and accepting – finding that balance became the central issue in Treya's confrontation with cancer (just as it was her main psychological issue as well). We would both come back to this question of balance again and again and again, each time with a slightly different perspective.

Balance the will to live with the acceptance of death. Both needed. I need to learn that balance. I feel that I already accept death; I'm worried that I am not afraid to die, worried that means I might want to die. But I don't want to die; I'm just not afraid of it. I don't want to leave Ken! So I'm going to fight!

But I also know, from recently spending time with Jerry Jampolsky [who wrote several books based on A Course in Miracles, most notably Love Is Letting Go of Fear] that I need to learn to let go – as Jerry says, "Let go and let God." He really shook me out of my stuff. Instead of trying to change myself or others, try forgiveness, forgiving myself and forgiving others. And if I can't forgive somebody (if my ego won't let me forgive somebody), then ask the Holy Spirit in me to forgive. It's like asking my higher Self to forgive others, and forgive me. "God is the love in which I forgive," as the Course says.

Forgiving myself means accepting myself. Gulp! This means giving up an old friend of mine – self-criticism. My scorpion companion. When I visualize all the things that keep me from feeling right about myself, then, up higher than the rest, as a kind of backdrop to all my other "problems," is a figure of a scorpion with its tail arched over its back. On the verge of stinging itself. This is my self-criticism, cutting myself down relentlessly, feeling unlovable, the background feeling behind all the other problems, the grievances against myself that keep me from seeing the light and the miracles that can only be seen in that light. Hmmm. The big one. Getting better, but still the big one. A touch of an acid feeling in my stomach when I think of it. What the poison I give myself feels like when I swallow it.

I used to write down nice things people would say about me because I couldn't quite believe someone felt that way about me. I sometimes seem to have trouble believing that someone could really love me – like there's a gap between my knowing I'm a good person, people really like being around me, I'm intelligent, pretty, etc. – and yet sometimes I don't see why anyone (a man, especially) could/would really love me.

It wasn't that Treya hadn't "accomplished" a lot, "done" a lot, for she had. She had graduated with distinction from Mount Holyoke, and taught English literature before returning to Boston University for a master's degree; had helped found Windstar and served as its director of education for three years; had received a master's in psychological counseling from the California Institute of Integral Studies; had worked at Findhorn for three years; was on the board of the Rocky Mountain Institute; a member of the Threshold Foundation; facilitator in the U.S. – U.S.S.R. Youth Exchange Program. And her "list of doing," as she called it, would continue to grow to incredibly impressive dimensions – among other things, her writings on cancer and illness alone would reach an estimated one million people around the world.

And yet, particularly at this point in time, because Treya didn't very much acknowledge or value the being aspects of herself, she honestly could not figure out why people liked her so much, loved her so much, wanted to be around her so much. It was her extraordinary being they were attracted to, not some list of doing, as important as all that is, and Treya seemed to be overlooking this, devaluing this, entirely.

There were times that she was totally flabbergasted that I loved her, which totally flabbergasted me. During that first year, we had this conversation a dozen times: "You don't see why I love you? Are you kidding me? You're serious, aren't you? I love you totally, sweetie, and you know it. I'm here for you twenty-four hours a day because I'm crazy about you! You think that because you haven't found your ultimate vocation – you think you are worthless. You'll find it, I'm sure, but in the meantime you completely overlook your being, your presence, your energy, your integrity. Are you kidding? People are absolutely nuts about you, you know that. I have never seen anybody with the number of amazing and totally dedicated friends that you have. We all love you for what you are, not what you do."

That message is slowly but definitely sinking in. Jerry went over the same point. "You are lovable as you are, right now, and you don't need anything else added. If you can't think of any reason that you're lovable, then think this: you are God's creation, you are as God created you." I can feel that in the present moment – right now I feel lovable – but when I add past and future I still feel I need to do something.

With Ken it's still so new. I trust him completely, but there's still that little girl who's afraid someday he won't be there. And I don't know how to satisfy that little girl, that hole at the center. Will only time prove her otherwise, Ken being there year after year, or will that hole never be filled? He's been so fantastic I have to let that in! When I ask him if he's going to be around, he always says, "Hell, kid, I don't know; ask me in twenty years." What clearer proof do I need that God loves me than to have Ken by my side?

My fear of dependence, depending on somebody, a determination to do it all myself – part of not wanting others to do anything for me is a fear of depending on them and then being let down. Last night I dreamt that an earthquake was coming – I and others were preparing for it. At the last minute I doubted that my preparations were enough (enough food, etc.) and asked another woman if I could go with her to her shelter. A sense of trying to do it on my own first and then asking for help?

I felt I turned a corner with Jerry – a sense of how I don't need to be in charge of everything! I can just be, not have to do all the time. And so I have let go into the radiation, am no longer resisting it. I visualize healthy tissue growing back in. My initial resistance to radiation is similar to other resistances to letting go. So just: Let go and let God.

On the whole this experience [of cancer and the radiation treatment] has felt like an invitation to live more fully, less tentatively. I figure it's also an invitation to be kinder to myself – to let up on myself, to just drop the constant scorpion of self-criticism and "unlovability." I can put it very simply: I live life easier these days.

And so the lesson for both of us was very clear, if tricky to implement: balance being and doing, balance an acceptance of yourself, just as you, with a determination to change those things about yourself that need to be changed. Being meant: letting go and letting God, accepting, trusting, faith, forgiving. Doing meant: assuming responsibility for those things, and only those things, that can be changed, and then working as hard as you can toward changing them. This is the time-honored wisdom in the simple and profound prayer:

God grant me the serenity to accept
the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

Treya and I spent the summer in Aspen. Treya had lived there on and off for ten years; she considered it in many ways her home. After leaving Findhorn, Treya had returned to Aspen, where she helped found Windstar with John Denver, Thomas Crum, Steven Conger, and several others (it became the favorite haunt of Bucky Fuller). She also joined the board of the Rocky Mountain Institute, which is run by her friends Amory and Hunter Lovins and is generally regarded as the finest alternative energy think tank in the world. So many good friends – Stuart Mace, the original pioneer (technical consultant on "Sergeant Yukon of the Royal Mounties"), best friend Linda Conger, Cathy Crum, Annie Denver, Bruce Gordon; Father Michael Abdo (who presided at our wedding) and Father Thomas Keating, who run the Cistercian monastery at Old Snowmass. It was these friends and centers, along with the stunning natural beauty of the trails and mountains – and not the rather disquieting glitterati that even then was beginning to ooze over Aspen – that made Treya consider it home.

What a summer it was. Treya had so many wonderful friends, all of whom I liked immediately. I myself honestly had never known anybody who generated such open love and devotion in people; the energy and integrity that seemed to radiate from Treya attracted both men and women like a benevolent Siren. People just wanted to be around her, be in her presence, and she always responded, never turned away.

I, of course, was writing a book, Transformations of Consciousness: Contemplative and Conventional Perspectives on Development, which I coauthored with Jack Engler and Daniel P. Brown, two Harvard professors who specialized in East/West psychology. The essence of this book was that if we take the various psychological models offered by the West (Freudian, cognitive, linguistic, object relational, etc.) and combine them with the spiritual models of the East (and Western mystics), then we arrive at a full-spectrum model of human growth and development, a model that traces human growth from body to mind to soul to spirit. What's more, using this overall map of human development, we can rather easily pinpoint the various types of "neuroses" that men and women may develop, and consequently choose more accurately the type of treatment or therapy that would be most appropriate and effective for each problem. The New York Times called it "the most important and sophisticated synthesis of psychologies East and West to emerge yet."

As for Treya and me, our favorite activity was still very simple: sitting on the sofa, our arms around each other, feeling the dancing energies in our body. So often we were taken beyond ourselves to that place where death is a stranger and love alone shines, where souls unite for all eternity and a single embrace lights up the spheres – the simplest way to discover that God most definitely is embodied, love of the two-armed form.

And yet this brought its own dilemma for me: the more I loved Treya, the more I feared and was obsessed with her death. This was a constant reminder of one of the central tenets of Buddhism (and mysticism in general): everything is impermanent, everything passes, nothing remains, nothing lasts. Only the whole endures eternally; all parts are doomed to death and decay. In meditative or mystical awareness, beyond the prison of individuality, one can taste the whole and escape the fate of a part; one is released from suffering and from the terror of mortality. But in my meditation I could not sustain that awareness for very long; I was still a novice in mystical practice. And although Treya and I could often enter the whole by a simple embrace, that too would soon fade, as if both of our souls had not yet grown enough to contain the largess offered.

And so I would return to the ordinary world of manyness, not where Ken and Treya were one beyond time, but where this part Ken loved that part Treya, and that part Treya might die. The thought of losing her was unbearable. The only recourse I had was to try to stay in the awareness of impermanence, where you love things precisely because they are fleeting. I was slowly learning that love did not mean holding on, which I had always thought, but rather letting go.

It was during this otherwise beautiful summer that Treya and I realized one of the real nightmares of being a cancer patient. If I wake up in the morning and I have a headache, or my joints hurt, or I have a sore throat, I will probably just shrug it off and go about my day. If a cancer patient wakes up with any of those symptoms, however, they mean: possible brain tumor, possible bone metastases, possible throat cancer. Every little twitch and twinge assumes ominous and threatening proportions. In the weeks, months, even years after a brush with cancer, your body's sensations conspire to inflict a kind of emotional Chinese water torture on you.

Toward the end of the summer in Aspen, this subtle torture was having its cumulative effect on both of us, and especially, of course, on Treya.

I had been feeling badly for some time, sleeping late, sometimes till noon, always till nine, and worrying. What does this mean? Could it be a return of cancer? Then the voice of reason on the other side. Don't be foolish, you're overreacting. You're turning into a hypochondriac. Just wait till you get back to California for your blood test. Maybe you're just depressed with nothing challenging to do right now.

But I'd long ago promised myself to follow up on these feelings. Even if most of the time I'm scaring myself with false cries of "the wolf is coming," I want to be sure not to miss a real wolf, a real symptom, by calling myself a hypochondriac. Maybe I am, but there is nothing better than early detection if something is really happening. So I called my old doctor in Aspen.

As I walked into the building, the tears began to well up inside. A strange mixture of fear, feeling sorry for myself, and simply needing to cry about the whole thing. The worry about possible recurrence, the fear I might not have that much longer with Ken, the wrenching inner adjustments of facing life and death in a new way... all that builds up and every so often tears are the best way to release the tension. Almost like lancing a wound so it can heal more quickly.

Once in the doctor's office I told the nurse what I'd come for. And all the while the tears were so, so close to the surface. I used to have such good control, I remember thinking. That's been swept away by all this. I never thought I'd be unable to call on that control when I really needed it. When the nurse left, I grabbed a kleenex and stared at a People magazine and struggled with my thoughts while the tears leaked slowly out of my eyes. So what, if I cry, I cry, I decided. And it'll probably feel good, too. Wonder why I'm still embarrassed by crying.

My doctor came in. Dr. Whitcomb. He's a sweetheart of a man; I've always really trusted him, both as a person and as a doctor. He was wonderful. He assured me that the trauma my immune system had suffered under general anaesthetic and radiation, combined with the hay fever and allergies I always suffer from during my beloved Colorado summers, was enough to account for my tiredness. He also lectured me – I need to hear this lecture every year or so – about my diet. Eat only vegetables, fruit, and whole grains; be sure to wash everything well to get the pesticides off; don't drink chlorinated water; don't eat meat because of the hormones and antibiotics animals are fed, though white fish every so often is fine; and start exercising again. Take as much buffered vitamin C as your body can handle to help your allergies. Don't take antihistamines unless you really need to; they only mask your symptoms. Be careful of yeast-based vitamins, especially the B vitamins, since people with allergies usually react to yeast. Use hypo-allergenic vitamins. Take acidophilus.

There was more. I cried. I felt it was OK, he empathized with what I'd been through and what might lie ahead. I felt understood. And I felt much better when I walked out of there, armed with my hypoallergenic vitamins. Certainly a high percentage of a doctor's work involves emotional and psychological healing.

One of Ken's books turned out to be surprisingly healing too. Reading Up from Eden gave me a deeper understanding of how and why people repress death, or deny and hide from their own mortality. Ken traced four major historical epochs – archaic, magic, mythic, and mental – and showed how human beings at each stage tried to avoid death by constructing "immortality symbols." The great repression is of death, not sex. Death is the last and great taboo. Seeing the almost infinite number of ways that mankind has tried to deny death, repress it, avoid it, helped me look at death more openly and not try to deny it or push it away. And besides, Ken's whole point was that coming to terms with death, accepting death, was necessary in order for spiritual growth to occur at all. You have to die to the ego in order to awaken as Spirit. The message of the book was that the denial of death is the denial of God.

I remember very well my attitude when I first discovered I had breast cancer. It went something like well, if I'm going to die, I'm going to die. It's bound to happen sometime. I didn't feel terribly afraid of death itself, though the prospect of a long and painful process of dying was frightening. I felt quite accepting, even resigned, all intermixed with the fear of not knowing and grief at the shock of this discovery. But the main feeling was, if this is the way it was going to be, so be it.

But then that feeling began to change. As I read more and talked to more people I decided this accepting posture might be dangerous. I became afraid that if I didn't will to live more strongly I might bring upon myself an earlier death. I decided that I have to choose, very specifically and definitely, to live, that I had to force myself to choose to live.

Well, that was all fine. It led to some quick decisions about making changes. But I also began to worry more. The easiest way to recognize that worry was my reaction to the odd aches and pains we all have. It might be a recurrence, I would think. Oh no, better call the doctor. Etc., etc. Not a fun way to live each day, to be sure. But it crept up on me so gradually over the months I both did and didn't see it.

Reading Up from Eden tore away the last veil of self-deception about what I was doing to myself, because it helped me see how and why I was doing it. Our culture had evolved to the point where death is perceived more keenly than before. So we develop ever stronger and more subtle ways to deny death, to avoid both its imminence and its necessity. Existential philosophers have pointed out, in numerous ways, how this denial of death results in a less active life. Indeed, it's a kind of denial of life since life and death go hand in hand. If I'm afraid of death, then I will become extremely cautious and worried in life, since something might happen to me. So the more I fear death the more I fear life, and the less I live.

I realized that I had become gradually more and more indoctrinated with a fear of death. That's why I'd begun to worry about my symptoms. I hadn't seen that the other side of willing to live, the inevitable shadow side, is fear of not living, fear of dying. Holding on to life comes to mean fear of letting go.

So now I try to hold everything a bit more lightly, not so tightly. It's the tight grasp that leads me into thinking in an either/or kind of way; either I want to live or I will die. A light touch, it seems to me, lets me think in a both/and kind of way: I can both desire to live and be willing to let go when the time comes.

It's a new feeling and I haven't quite got the hang of it yet. I still worry some when I feel tired or my eyes hurt. But I feel more accepting, more willing to go through with whatever happens. It's easier now to just note the symptom and resolve to see the doctor when I can, whereas before I kind of hung on to the symptom and worried at it in the days before I could get to the doctor.

Like balancing on the edge of a razor, trying / efforting / concentrating / disciplining while at the same time remaining open / allowing / relaxing / just being. Back and forth, back and forth. I know I'm out of balance – which is most of the time – when I become aware of the effort or when I slide into laziness. And I use my worry as a clue that I'm out of balance, that I'm hanging on to life too tightly. The balance between will to live and acceptance of what is. Tricky. But it all feels much better this way. Worry is a bummer, plain and simple.

This also meant that Treya relaxed a bit about the strictness of her "healing agenda": She would still work on herself (and with a discipline that most people found astonishing), and yet, in her own awareness, she was holding it all much more lightly, much less obsessively.

Dinner with Nathaniel Branden and his wife, Devers. Nathaniel's an old friend of Ken's; I really like them both. He asked if I'd been doing much visualization and I told him I had during the radiation treatment. I said I found it helpful then, visualizing the radiation killing bad cells and the good cells repairing themselves quickly; it gave me some feeling of participation in the process, some sense of partial control or containment. But afterwards I kept it up for a while then stopped, because it seemed I had to postulate an enemy to continue – you are supposed to visualize the cancer cells being attacked, and I saw no reason to visualize cancer cells at all. The only "healthy" thing I could have continued with was imaging the breast cells continuing to repair themselves. Every now and then I imagine the immune system active and on guard. But if I obsessively do that, in a type of panic, I'm just buying into fear of death.

Nathaniel had picked up too on the possibility of blaming oneself as a negative side result of Simonton's approach. If I can make myself well, then I must have made myself sick. Ken's approach seems best there... perhaps 10% to 20% of getting sick is due to psychological factors (varies with the disease), but a higher percentage, say 40%, of getting well can be attributed in part to psychological factors.

Nathaniel and Ken had the same friendly argument they always have. I don't think either of them will ever give up! Nathaniel: "I think you are the clearest writer on mysticism around, and yet your whole position is self-contradictory. You say that mysticism is becoming one with the whole. But if I become one with the whole, there would be no motivation left to me as an individual. I might as well just roll over and die. Human beings are individuals, not amorphous wholes, so if I succeed in becoming one with all, there wouldn't even be any reason left for me to eat, let alone do anything else."

Ken: "Whole and part are not mutually exclusive. Mystics still feel pain, and hunger, and laughter, and joy. To be part of a larger whole doesn't mean that the part evaporates, just that the part finds its ground or its meaning. You are an individual, yet you also feel that you are a part of the larger unit of a family, which is part of the larger unit of a society. You already feel that, you already feel that you are a part of several larger wholes, and those wholes – like your life with Devers – give your life much value and meaning. Mysticism is just the even larger identity of also feeling part of the cosmos at large, and thus finding even greater meaning and value. Nothing contradictory about that. It's a direct experience of a larger identity, it doesn't mean your arms fall off."

And so it went!

Driving home I kept telling Ken little things he does that I love. He said he has dozens of things that are proof of how much he loves me but he's only going to tell me them one at a time, one a year. I badgered him to at least tell me one every six months, come on honey. Turns out this is one of his ways to keep me around... he figures I'll want to hear these things enough for it to be an extra little incentive for me to live longer and not leave him. He says he doesn't know what he'll do if I leave him. Reminded me of his earlier little allegory about if I die he'll come get me in the bardo. He's always promised to find me again, whatever happens.

That summer an event occurred that had an enormous impact on our lives and on our future plans. Treya got pregnant. This came as a shock to her, because she had never gotten pregnant before and had assumed that she probably couldn't. Treya was elated, I was stunned – and then the cruel reality of the situation settled in on us. Treya's doctors were unanimous: abort the pregnancy. The hormonal shifts concomitant with being pregnant would act like fertilizer for any remaining cancer cells in Treya's body (her tumor was estrogen positive).

I was ambivalent about fathering a child (a situation that eventually changed), and my lukewarm response to Treya's pregnancy – before we knew it had to be aborted – was a big disappointment to her. In my defense I rather lamely tried to point out that most of my friends who were fathers didn't get really excited about the child until it was born and actually placed in their arms; prior to that point, most guys are just various degrees of panic-stricken. But place the babe in their arms and they become slobbering drooling fathering fools, whereas mothers seem to beam from the minute of conception. Treya found none of it convincing; she experienced my lack of enthusiasm as an abandonment. It was the first time I had deeply disappointed her in the year we had been together; it hung over us like an ominous portent. And it was the nature of the thing itself that made it so difficult: pregnancy and abortion, life and death... as if we needed more of that.

I finally came to the point that, although I was still somewhat ambivalent, I was at least game: Let's go for it; let's get Treya better and then start a family. Definitely.

This unleashed the nesting instincts in both of us, and we began to make rather radical life changes. Up to that point both Treya and I had lived fairly monkish lives. Treya was practicing voluntary simplicity, and I was in effect a Zen monk. When I met Treya I owned one desk chair, a typewriter, and four thousand books; Treya had not much more.

All of this would change, and change dramatically, once we decided that we were going to raise a family. First, we needed a house... a big, big house, ready to hold a family...

September 16, 1984
Muir Beach

Dear Martha,

Can't thank you enough for the atlas – an original and really great wedding present. As you know, I once studied geography, was in fact two courses shy of an M.A. in the field, so I love maps. One of my favorite courses in grad school was cartography! Many thanks from us both.

The big news in our lives is that we're moving to Lake Tahoe (Incline Village, northeast shore, to be exact). All came about because I accidentally got pregnant – first time in my life. Ironically I discovered this one week after I'd gone to a doctor to see whether or not we could eventually have a child, my having had cancer and all. The gynecologist said I should never get pregnant, because of the kind of tumor I'd had. I was devastated. Ken is wonderful, but I don't think he really understood what it meant to me. He was ambivalent and sometimes distant. He later apologized. But I cried for a week over this, his response was very upsetting – it made me realize how much I really wanted his child.

Then the discovery that I actually was pregnant! First time in my life. (Guess my body knows who the father's meant to be!) Absolute devastation. So we had to have it aborted. A very traumatic experience, but it was the right decision. I'm enough of a hypochondriac as it is now, checking out every pain or symptom with the doctor. I can't imagine how unnerving it would be to be pregnant now, not knowing how it was affecting any possible remnant of cancer or precancerous area, dealing with all the odd symptoms of pregnancy itself. So it feels right, though a lot of tears were shed over it and still are at times. So much for my righteous sense I'd get through this lifetime without having had an abortion!

The doctors did agree, however, that if I'm free of cancer in two years, then I can get pregnant again. Even though Ken is still a little ambivalent, he'll make a great father. Kids love him. He quips that's because he's the same emotional age as they are. Anyway, this stirred up our nesting instinct, which eventually led to our buying a beautiful house in Lake Tahoe!

We'd thought about Lake Tahoe before – in the mountains, which I love, and close to San Francisco (only four hours away). Our first trip up here we drove in through South Lake Tahoe, which was awful. But the north shore was really nice, especially Incline Village. It's a fairly recent planned town, maybe fifteen years old, with a small ski area, two golf courses, and two private beaches for people in the town. Ken thinks that's all a "bit much," as he says. "My God, we're moving into a country club. I need this like I need another satori." But he loves the lake, especially the kind of aqua color around the edges where there are white sandy beaches, and he's as anxious to get out of San Francisco as I am (he wants some quiet time to write). We looked at a bunch of houses on a few different trips and again on our way to Aspen for the summer, and finally found the right one.

We're extremely excited about it.... Easy access, a fantastic view, best of any we saw, and a layout that works really well for Ken's office. The house is still under construction, so we can specify all the interior details – carpets, wallpaper, paint colors, etc. I know you'll be out of the country for two more years, but then you must come and see us. Maybe we'll have a kid by then!

Thanks again so much for the atlas.

Love,
Terry

"Where are you going?" I ask her.

"I'll he right back. I'm just going to make a cup of tea. You're not afraid, are you?"

"Me? Oh, no. Fine, just fine." The fire has died down to a few glowing coals. Treya seems to be gone for minutes, but then the minutes seem to run into hours. It is very cold.

"Treya? Honey? Treya?"

Treya and I eagerly, almost desperately, looked forward to settling down in Tahoe. It took on the aura of refuge, of safety, of time out from turmoil. We were ready to raise a family; I was ready to get back to writing; life was starting to look very good.

For the first time in a year, Treya and I relaxed.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28