maybe acres of flowerpots would help. . .

by bam

in which i tell the truth and let on that this is a bumpy road right in here…

my summer companion, a fellow named tedd, leapt into the passenger seat, as he is wont to do these days. he loves nothing more than wending his way through the city, curiosity propelling the route. we stopped along the way, biscuits with cheddar and honey, fuel for the road. he took notes of places he’d want to come back to, the romanian sausage shop, the honeybear pancake house where the windows were bursting with clouds of silk flowers.

we were headed to a chicago institution, a garden shop that’s sprawled across city blocks. a garden shop that upholstered my very first garden, long long ago. we were looking, allegedly, for a fountain whose splash would punctuate the summer sounds, whose soothing whoosh might lull us into that fugue state that comes when you plop in a chair and listen to all that the world has to offer.

i love my companion more than life, and i love our urban adventures. but truth is, there was yet another uninvited passenger in the old red wagon, and its name was fear. i am inhabited of late by runaway fears, and worries, that this cancer has let loose and is running amok in odd parts of me. it’s too scary to say aloud to the people i love, so i mostly hold it inside. except for here, where words tapped out on keys have always been my one certain release valve.

it seems that two months after the day i first heard the words “it was cancer,” i’ve been caught in what’s likely an inevitable gulch. it’s a lot to absorb. it’s a lot to have half your lung up and cut out, sent off to pathology, where science-y folk slice it apart and mark it with names, stamp it with numbers that scare and confuse you. even the oncologist the other day said as much, though i think her words were something along the lines of “it rocks your world, especially when it’s right there in your chest.”

i was listening to a podcast the other day, a podcast for people with cancer (i still gulp when i write phrases like that, realizing i’m now among them, the people with cancer), and they talked knowingly about “the middle-of-the-night questions,” the ones that basically all circle back to “am i going to die?” there is solace, much solace, in knowing how universally some of this hits us. we are all human beings, a motley collection of bones and flesh, of freckles and smiles that wrinkle our faces in particular ways. we all hope big, though my big is different from yours. and we’ve all suffered hurts we’ll never forget, even if we’ve pushed them off to the side. and a lot of us get scared. the thing about cancer –– or any one of the other life-altering diagnoses –– is that it strips away so very much of the pretense. it’s brass tacks, and un-glittered questions. it’s a swift dunk in the truth-telling end of the pool, where you dispense with roundabout thoughts and spit out the unedited ones. the ones you might not bring up in the produce aisle, sifting through the bunches of carrots, or reaching for the ripest avocado.

once you have cancer, and find out the one or two others in your life who are on the same road, it’s like you’re ushered in to a particular locker room, where everyone walks around with the same flimsy towels, and no questions are barred. where you can say out loud those things that keep you awake in the night. and, somehow, putting breath to the words, seeing the knowing in the eyes of the one to whom you are talking, reminds you, over and over, how very much we all want to cling to this life we have built, this life filled with people we love, and dreams we still hold.

i’m thinking i’m struggling because all of this is so new, and it still feels like it came out of the blue. and it knocked the breath right out of me. i keep thinking that once i get one of those scans under my belt, the ones that will come every six months, i might settle in to the notion that maybe the cancer is gone. or at least settled back to its indolent state, my couch potato of a cancer, as the doctors proclaimed it (after all, it had been lolligagging down at the bottom of my lung for eight long years before anyone realized what trouble it was).

i realize i can’t call my doctor every time there’s an odd sensation — say, like the lump i feel in my armpit — or maybe i should just get a diagnostician on retainer, one who wouldn’t hold it against me for all of my worries.

somehow or other i am going to find my way to the other side of this rather dark cloud.

i intend to get on my knees. with trowel at my side. and a big jug of pellets, the ones that give plant roots a boost. while i’m down there i intend to dig deep into my very own soul, open up a portal to the God who animates the whole of me, and the whole of this earth.

deep in the night i spend plenty of time asking “those” questions. but i also spend just as much time lying in silence, holy silence, channeling the God in whose palm i am trying to rest, aching to rest.

i tend to find God when i’m out in the garden, or lying in the impossible dark. i tend to find God, too, when i tell the whole truth, and the balm comes — Holy Balm comes — to settle deep in the cracks.

how do you find your way to the other side, when the dark clouds come, or the wall of fear feels too high to scale?

i did find a couple poems i was going to leave here today, but i will save them for another day. and simply close with this blessed thought from rabbi abraham joshua heschel, one of my great, great sages…

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.

Abraham Joshua Heschel
photos (here and above) by teddy

p.s. a delightfully joyful thing did happen this week when, lo and behold, i discovered that none other than richard rohr, the great modern-day mystic, had quoted from The Book of Nature in his daily meditation for tuesday. and i’m getting back in the saddle this weekend, for a nature walk with an oak park synagogue, a two-hour radio show with a pittsburgh priest i’ve come to love, and a trek to milwaukee tuesday night for a conversation with the journal sentinel’s book critic, jim higgins, at the boswell book company, an east side literary institution.

p.s.s. happy blessed father’s day to the brilliant fathers who sometimes gather here…