Ah, summer vacation. Even with this year, with my sleeping excessively and crazy schedule, I still both recognize and appreciate summer vacation. It is a time to relax, a time to be slow, a time to be still even.
I have started this summer with a series of spa appointments. It is my version of alternative medicine. Often while I get my facials and massages, Eastern music plays and my therapist uses lotions and potions that smell of eucalyptus and lavender and for me, this is as close to organic healing as it gets. I am not only comfortable with the human touch; I welcome it as long as it is in that little spa room. Oh sweet spa lady, please charm those toxins out of my body. Hydrate my skin with love and sweet smelling goodness. Even my pedicures and manicures have turned into necessary medical appointments, especially now that my nails have gone all funky with the chemo. I have weird rings on my nails. My oncologist threatens that some nails may just come off the nail bed…to not be alarmed. Oh hell, I think. So I go to my spa and have them painted bright corals and think I’ll appreciate these nails while I have them.
I also started going to a yoga class, too…yoga for relaxation. I have only been to two classes, but I know I am hooked. I love the poses. I love feeling the muscles in my body come to life. I love the slowness, the deliberateness of it. I feel so calm, so in control. When I am done with the class, I have the same feeling as after a massage, only I paid like $10 verses $100 and no one touched me. Well, that isn’t true. The yoga teacher has to touch me often to get my body in the right pose and sometimes there is partner stuff, but I don’t count that. I feel very isolated in yoga but in a good way. I feel like I am on my own little yoga mat island, where my body is a machine and not some defective effed up vessel. I feel so present, and I get to talk to God with my breathe and my consciousness and my spirit…and that bad mojo is just dissipating off of me AND it is dark so even though there is a mirror right in front of me reflecting my bald, uncoordinated self, I can barely see myself and in the low light and my all black outfit, I look strong. Plus, maybe, just maybe, this alternative Eastern medicine thing works, and I am cured!
Being a wanna be hippy myself, I have lots of friends and acquaintances recommend alternative medicine to me. Have I tried acupuncture/herbs/juicing/vegan diet/eating seaweed?...You get the picture. It isn’t that I am against it. I just trust Western conventional medicine as well. I goggled the latest chemo drug they are giving me, Taxol, and guess what? Taxol is a natural product, comes from the tree bark of the Pacific Yew. I think it must be synthetically manufactured by now. There are only so many Pacific Yews out there, after all. The thing is that it doesn’t get more natural than tree bark. So even my Western medicine is pretty alternative. Now who decided to go get tree bark and put it in a solution and inject it into my body twelve times is another story…and why this is seen as a good profitable idea (even though it is) and smoking marijuana is illegal is also weird to me. None the less, tree bark has bought me more time and now chemo doesn’t seem so brutal to me. It is just nature helping nature in a really weird, insane way.
Just like spa visits and yoga and chemo, good old Sunday morning church is also a part of my medicine. I really go almost solely for the Eucharist, truly believing that the little wafer and drop of wine are healing me. I figured I have covered all the bases. Meditation, reflexology, tree bark, and Christ’s body and blood. That should pretty much cover it. And as I lay silent and relaxed on my yoga mat, I hear the voice of the divine. “Be still and know that I am God.” I know, and now is a good moment. It is the best moment.
OM.
