Celebrate and Create

This Saturday I burned my pathology report and "drank a toast to now". I searched for something to mark the end of all chemo and this idea of burning the document that started it all seemed natural. After reading it over and over for weeks I have let it go.

Now I am on to a new project, creating an original work to be auctioned off for the Jackson Domestic Violence Project's "Butterfly Ball". I have sketched out a rough "thumbnail" and set out the paints in hope that inspiration will hit me - I think I'll just have to start putting paint to canvas to get into the groove - like anything else you have to flex your muscles again before you are ready to really move. I love the act of creating but there is always the fear that whatever inspired, enabled you previously has been lost - nowhere to be found and you are alone with yourself and a white expanse of canvas with nothing to say. So I put out the thumbnail sketch for viewing and comment. Turn it around 4 ways, I am searching for something that can stand on its own however the viewer chooses to see the message. Thanks for listening!

No more drama

I learned today that one of the fabulous friends I made in chemo room is having challenges. It's what we all live with-the return of what once was ,we prayed,gone forever. Metastasis. That word was the great unsaid thing that loomed over me from the beginning and you find a way to deal with it. My lovely friend, teacher, mother, wife,daughter is waiting for the "m" confirmation on 2 fronts and is determined to work and get treatment at same time-to fight this thing again. I love her spirit and am sure of her success but it made me wonder about my reaction his late in our treatment (1 year). What I always thought of as my worst case scenario is now just another mile marker and there is a calm and a peace that I could not have conceived of having in the face of this news even 6 months ago but today I have a different reaction. I think maybe the drama (in the crazy,unknown fearful, raging obsession meaning of the term) is not in me any longer. Maybe it's less unknown and therefore more amenable to a plan but as I lay here ready for sleep I think it, like patience, is something that comes with the experience. So blog 2 of what now creates the happy lawyer is, I hope, a leveling out of experience-less drama and more peace. Or it could always be the drugs....