Weaving the Fabric Back Together

Our country has been diagnosed, and we are the antidote

I remember the day I got the news.

Monday.

I had gone in for a mammogram on Friday. And then, the radiologist wanted to do a follow-up ultrasound, based on what she was seeing.

When she came in to perform that ultrasound, she and the radiation tech were pretty quiet, as they looked at the images. And then they told me they wanted to biopsy what they were seeing.

I had plans later.

They told me I could schedule the biopsy for the following week.

But something told me to cancel those plans.

So I did.

Because my husband was involved in those plans, he just so happened to be with me at the hospital that day. The radiologist had suggested that the tech go out and get him, before they gave me the news that they wanted me to have a biopsy. So he and I made the decision together to stay, go down to the hospital cafeteria for lunch, and then come back up for the biopsy after lunch.

After the biopsy (a big, long needle inserted into your breast to draw out tissue, so that the tissue can be studied in the lab) was completed, the tech led me back to the changing room to put my clothes back on.

She looked at me meaningfully.

“I’m really glad you decided to stay,” she said.

Looking back, I can see that my subconscious was picking up little signs, all along the way. The demeanor of the tech and radiologist. The fact that they wanted to bring my husband in. The way that these experienced folks who do this every day were responding to what they were seeing. The fact that they were even seeing anything at all. A deep part of me knew that something was wrong.

And yet, another part of me thought no way.

I was young.

I was healthy.

Breast cancer didn’t happen to people like me.

After we left the hospital that Friday, there was nothing to do. Literally. All we could do was wait for the results of the biopsy to come back on Monday.

For a long time, I’ve been a person with a productivity impulse — forever feeling that familiar itch to “do something” and check things off my list.

I could have easily done that, over that weekend.

But for some reason, I swung in the opposite direction.

I started playing Sudoku. I had never played Sudoku before. But at some point, I had acquired a book of puzzles, and it had been sitting around in our house. So that weekend, I picked it up and started learning the game.

I did puzzle after puzzle.

I wasn’t distracting myself. Not really. I was consciously focusing on just being. Just being present. I mostly stayed quiet all weekend. I read a lot, too. And I waited.

So when the medical MyChart message came through on Monday afternoon, I was certainly ready for it. And I opened it right away.

I wasn’t exactly scared.

Yet, those stark words on the screen were a bit of a shock:

invasive ductal carcinoma.

My general practitioner called me almost right away. She seemed stressed. She said, “I saw that you saw the result.”

(Side note: this was the first time I had been aware that our health care providers knew when we accessed things in MyChart!)

“We usually want to be able to talk to you about it, to answer any questions, when you get the diagnosis. So I wanted to call,” she said.

She and I had talked about mammograms more than once, in our annual check-up visits. I have always been a “less is more” person, when it comes to allopathic healthcare. And I had always appreciated that she was supportive of that, seemingly coming from a similar place. We had always felt like annual mammograms weren’t a priority for me to start yet, given my age and health profile.

So I understand why some of the first words out of her mouth were these: “It’s just so hard to believe! You’re so young, and so healthy!”

I think she too was struggling to accept the news.

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We’ve All Received a Diagnosis

Here’s why I’m telling you this story today….

We’re all sitting together now, with some really tough news — news that for many of us feels (and could be) life-threatening.

Nearly seventy million people in the United States voted — and many also worked their butts off, volunteering, door-knocking, calling, writing letters and postcards, and more — for an outcome in our presidential election that felt less life-threatening.

But all of that effort was seemingly for naught.

The other guy was elected.

We learned the news upon awakening Wednesday.

The one who threatens fascism — to form the kind of authoritarian government we always learned about in school, as a thing that happened in far-off places, places far less evolved than we were — was being handed ultimate power in our country.

The one who assaults and disrespects women…

… who talks about immigrants like they’re vile and despicable…

… who has mocked people with disabilities…

… who always seems to find new ways to disrespect people with brown skin…

… who tries to tell members of the queer community, especially trans folks, that they don’t have the right to simply exist and live their lives…

… who is proud of stripping people of their bodily freedom…

… who violently threatens anyone who disagrees with him…

… who prioritizes those who are wealthy and already powerful…

… who clings to power himself…

… who is constantly looking for somebody else to blame for his problems…

… who is far more concerned with propping up his own ego than in helping or connecting or empathizing with us, his fellow citizens…

… was chosen as our collective governmental leader, by more than seventy-three million of our neighbors.

Some feel shock.

Some feel anger.

Some feel fear.

Some feel sadness.

Some feel grief.

Some feel every other kind of feeling…

… while some are just numb, still.

And all of those things are OK. All are valid. All are human.

And as human beings, all we need to do with our feelings right now is to acknowledge the experiences we’re having… and be present to them.

Because that is what it is to be human…

… and struggling.

With hard news. With acceptance. With threat. With seeming danger. With something that we know will likely completely change life as we know it…

… and with knowing that we are collectively sick.

I’m hearing echoes of my experience with a cancer diagnosis, right now. Only this time, we’re having a collective experience.

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Re-Defining Politics

I am not a partisan.

I don’t consider myself a member of any political party.

I have caucased and conventioned with one of the (ridiculously, only two) viable U.S. political parties in the past, because it seemed like the only place I could participate at all in our electoral politics with at least a bit of my integrity intact.

But I am not a “team player.”

And the existence of “teams” at all seems like such a travesty of what I believe “politics” should actually mean and embody in our country.

When you go to the root of what this word meant when it was first used, it was about the total complex network of relations between people living together.

We know this to a point, since we’ll regularly talk of the “politics” we encounter in the PTA… or at work… or even in our spiritual community.

But to a wide degree, “politics” has started to become synonymous with partisanship — and with elections of partisans into government positions.

You will often hear people say that they don’t want to get “political.”

And when I hear that from folks, I usually interpret what they’re saying to mean they don’t want to get partisan.

OK. I certainly get that. I’m down with that.

But not being “political” at all?

That’s not possible.

Us being humans, living with and around other humans, every single thing we do is political, in one way or another.

Who we are is political.

How we are is political.

Who we call friends is political.

How we dress is political.

Who we hire is political.

Where we shop is political.

Who we look to as experts is political.

What car we buy is political.

What food we eat is political.

Who we admire is political.

Where we live is political.

Who we give power to is political.

How we seek power is political.

How we exercise power is political.

And on and on….

So.

What does this mean for us now?

We all — and I mean all — need to start consciously exercising our inherent political power, when and where we can.

We live in a democracy, and democracy is not really a noun.

Democracy is more of a verb.

But most of us don’t live that way.

And democracy is much easier to kill when it’s merely a noun.

So.

Do we want to see our democracy continue to live?

If so, guess what?

Democracy needs to live through us.

I know it’s become such a cliche by now that your eyes may roll into the back of your head when you read the phrase I’m about to write, but please don’t let that happen — because there’s a reason why this is a cliche.

As most cliches do, this phrase really does hold truth.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

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Photo by Ilze Vanaga on Unsplash

Time to Start Weaving Together

To pick up the story thread from earlier, a breast cancer diagnosis is not really very straightforward or simple — it’s a process.

You get that first set of words that mean something… but that is only the beginning. You then have to have test after test, conversation after conversation, decision after decision. You must prepare for a very long and involved journey.

I went through the whole process.

We found out what kind of cancer it was.

We scheduled a surgery to have the cancer removed.

We had the surgery.

We waited for the final pathology results of the full sample of tissue — much more than the tiny biopsy could tell us.

We learned from that final pathology review and report that the cancer had started to spread to my lymph nodes.

And we also learned some other things that the doctors were discovering about the cancer that had been growing in my body…

… all of which lead to their recommendation that I complete chemotherapy.

Ugh.

Of all the things I faced with this diagnosis, chemotherapy was probably the one I dreaded the most. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. As a person who actively avoided toxic chemicals, ate almost exclusively organic food, filtered my water, chose natural cleaning and personal care products, etc… why would I purposely put highly toxic chemicals into my body?!

But they told me it was necessary.

I had a lot of life to live still, and they wanted to make sure that the cancer would be fully gone and not return. And this was the way to do it.

So.

I had a lot of emotional and spiritual work to do.

I really dug deep, helping myself get to a place where I could actively visualize those chemicals as not toxic, but as light that would pour through my body to cleanse it.

Still, the problem was that I didn’t know how bad it would get.

I knew, from all of the many stories I could find out there — whether on the internet or just turning around and talking to the nearest person in a crowd — that the experience of chemotherapy is often really hard and pretty dicey.

Moving towards it felt like moving towards a cliff.

So what did I do?

I sat down.

I got quiet with myself.

I asked myself what I needed to get through it as well as possible.

And I started to write everything that came up on a list.

And then I started to create a structure by which all the people who loved and cared about me could support me, while I went through this very difficult period — ways that they could provide me those very things I had put on the list.

I created a CaringBridge site, so I could write throughout my journey, and my people could follow along with my experiences there — while gathering around me and offering me ongoing support.

That site also offered the opportunity for people to sign up for walks with me. And hang-outs with my husband, to give him some enjoyable breaks from it all. And it linked to a MealTrain so people could drop off food for us. And it also linked to a GoFundMe, so that people could help me access holistic, integrative treatments like acupuncture, Healing Touch, massage, and more, while my body was going through one of its hardest experiences so far… and our own wallets were stretched thin by both my stepping away from work and, at the same time, my going through multiple surgeries and treatments that are some of the most costly in our medical system.

In other words, I started weaving.

I was weaving my community together — and drawing those dear ones around me, like a warm, soft, protective blanket.

That was what I knew I needed, in my deepest places of knowing.

And it was SO important, it turned out.

My acupuncturist Sarah, a lovely, wise elder who was one of my most significant supports for wellness during that time, would ask me about what was happening with my body, at every appointment. Of course.

But you know what else she asked every time?

She asked me if I was still feeling loved, cared for, connected to community. Because she knew, from many years of experience, and from her training as a doctor of holistic Traditional Chinese Medicine, how important that was to my wellness.

I hope you can see, by now, the parallels between my personal story…

… and our story.

We’ve gotten our diagnosis.

We’ve started to learn some of the data and information about the diagnosis. We’re processing and learning more about what it all means. And we are now starting to contemplate how we can best keep ourselves well, support ourselves, and heal through a period that promises to be quite challenging.

And I am here to tell you:

Our task is to start weaving.

Together.

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Photo by Robert Clark on Unsplash

The Fabric Can Be Restored

We have our work cut out for us.

Because, at least from my perspective, a big part of the disease we’re being diagnosed with is that the fabric of our shared lives is seriously torn apart, shredded, drawing more apart every day.

No wonder.

That fabric has been ripping apart for years.

We’ve stopped caring about each other, as a collective.

Put another way, the circle of people we Americans actively care for has gotten smaller and smaller, over the decades.

The circle who we think of as “us” has narrowed.

We’ve gotten further and further away from each other.

And the further away we’ve gotten, the more and more we’ve become suspicious of each other… and doubted each other… and seen each other as some kind of enemy combatant that we need to fight and vanquish.

This is not community.

This is not the politics we need.

A politics of community investment is what we need now.

Our body politic has been growing a cancer (a spreading tumor of hatred, distrust, disconnection, domination and supremacy, loneliness, sadness, poverty, marginalization)… and we need to start availing ourselves of the antidote.

We need to start living democracy…

… in order to heal our country of what ails it.

And what might that look like?

Like seeking togetherness.

Community.

Trust.

Connection.

Shared resources.

Mutuality.

Solidarity.

With all of our fellow citizens.

No exceptions.

And how do we see these realities arrive in our country?

We create them — by bringing them alive within our own bodies and experiences.

Daily.

Weekly.

Monthly.

There is no magic wand, dear ones.

There is no hero coming to save us.

This won’t be a grand, sweeping story of redemption.

This is putting one foot in front of the other.

Moment by moment.

And this slow, quiet, small, gradual journey — should we all commit to taking it together and staying in it for the long haul — is how we will restore a holistic health and wellness within our shared body politic.

Will you join me in this politics?

Community investment is what we all need now.

So let’s start creating it.

Together.

With Love,

Cecelia 💗