Dear Friends,
I was grateful to get away for a few days of a much needed reset last weekend. The ocean, the hills and time with my beloved and good friends filled me up to keep on going.
Yesterday I had the honor of sitting in a circle of cancer survivors completing a 12-week fitness class designed for people like us. It was created by Triumph Cancer Foundation to help cancer survivors build strength that enables us to expand our world again.
Cancer can shrink your world as you face side effects of treatment, need for isolation due to immunosuppression, lack of energy to interact, and physical changes and weakness that take you out of your former routine and abilities.
Two wonderful and specially certified trainers started us with the most basic of exercises such as how to stand. Class by class they demonstrated, watched, corrected our form, and encouraged us, modifying exercises as needed for individual limitations. Class by class they added a little more and a little more and I think we each watched amazed as we grew stronger. We even did this all virtually!
Yesterday we celebrated how far we’ve come. There was lots of emotion as we each told stories of overcoming physical and mental challenges to get stronger.
Over the course of the class, I remembered how good it feels to stretch and strengthen muscles I might have forgotten, and of how this kind of embodiment enables a fuller life. My body has muscle memory of workouts and yoga, and I think it’s happy to be moving again.
I live in a different body now that cancer and I reside in it together. But I am amazed that this body, with bones full of metastases from top to bottom, can still grow stronger. And this strength expands my world again to include gardening, lifting a heavy mixer to bake something delicious, dancing around the house, and last weekend, walking to tidepools and across sand dunes and the beach to trace the water’s edge. All of this feels like a small miracle.
Bless these bodies that house us for this life. Let’s tend them well.
When I came home from the ocean, I wrote this:
3 Days of Gratitude
Thank you to the abundant rains that have brought the greenest spring to the Valley.
Thank you for the undulating green hills that we drive through,
layered with so many greens and punctuated with vibrant orange poppies.
Thank you for bright yellow fields of mustard and blooming orchards,
and soft magenta red buds.
Thank you for this valley that feels like home,
with expanses of blue sky and brilliant white clouds.
Thank you for the Capays,
little mountains that mark the transition from the valley to the coast,
and that have always been special since I lived in their sight 40 years ago.
Thank you for the bracing ocean breeze that allows for the biggest exhale.
Thank you to whatever force or Creator that lifted
a granite plate 60 million years ago at the foot of the Sierras,
and then allowed it to migrate to form the Monterey Peninsula.
Thank you to the elder friend who explained that to me,
a naturalist who reminds me that nature does not operate in the moral world
when I tell him about how it was hard to watch a sea anemone
eating a still twitching anchovy in a tide pool.
Thank you to whatever process brought the beautiful cypress trees to this land,
so that now they tower like giants and remind me of the grandeur of the redwoods.
Thank you to the Ohlone peoples who tended this land long before it was colonized,
whose sites for cooking shellfish shine with shards of abalone shell
that say We.Were.Here.
like the most beautiful graffiti.
Thank you to the otters who saved the Monterey Bay,
slippery, playful, urchin-eating heroes.
Thank you to the ones who floated in the bay,
turning and diving while we watched.
Thank you to the whales who spouted and breached the water’s surface
reminding me of the whole world that lives under those waters.
Thank you for the trainers and the physical therapist that have worked me out,
pushing me to get stronger for exactly this moment
of walking out across dunes and sandy beach and along the water’s edge.
Thank you to whatever combination of light and water and magic
that paints that ocean in so many shades of blue,
to the waves that keep on rolling,
for the renewal that is always available.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
How do you find ways to live in your body that feel good and that get you out into the world in whatever way that fills you up? What has knocked your socks off with gratitude lately? I’d love to hear in the comments.
Thanks for being here. Please share this post with folks who might be interested.
Lots of love,
Maija
Song of the Week: Grateful by Hezekiah Walker and Love Fellowship Choir. I’m not really much of a “Lord” gal, but the chorus that this song builds to gets me every time.
Absolutely beautiful. Thank you for sharing!
What a glorious post!!! Thank You. How nice for you to enjoy your body again. I know I take mine for granted - so thank you for reminding me to appreciate mine so much more than I do.
Sending you hugs and sloppy kisses!!!