Floatingswimming

I'm in the midstream between two chemopoison sessions and it feels pretty good here in the middle. Here I am at our local HEB with the usual suspects, shopping for the middle school holiday party/madhouse tomorrow. I'm doing and will be doing the regular - schlepping crappy pizzas to eager untrained palates, baking homemade brownies to be wolfed by shiny faced and braced boy/girls who'll never notice the baker or carrier, finishing up my cards and gifts to teachers who I can never thank enough for holding the weight of teen angst all day every day while imparting knowledge, feeding three kids ravioli, and hanging out in my past sell date bathrobe. 

Right now I can pretend I'm not a cancer patient who looks freaky from behind cuz you can totally tell there's no hair under the hat. I avoid mirrors other than when I carefully sketch in missing brow hairs. With this coldish weather I can almost pretend that I chose to wear a cute hat, but when I get a compliment on my cute hat - like today at Starbuck's - I have a swift desire to scream at the complimenter SHUT UP DON'T HURT ME because it does hurt. I despise the victim feeling and yet I am sort of helplessly pinned onto this bug chart of "cancer person" - oh look at the poor cancer lady. Mostly I don't think this but sometimes it stabs in. 

Anyway I'm floating in the middle . This middle water floating idea is a recurring theme for me in dreams. I'm a cancer - water sign (????). Anyway I often dream that I've come to a shore, often in moonlight (moon child!), and I've waded in, then I'm swimming swimming swimming. More swimming swimming swimming, at which point I am no longer me or a girl or a boy. Maybe more of a boy than a girl, but at any rate I have transformed and changed. At this point I begin to think about breathing under the water as well as above the water, and so I try to, first in little fits and starts to just test it. The first little breath in is a little bit scary, but it works. I breathe in a slow lungful of warm salty water - life. I'm changing into a dolphin, a boy, a pearl, I sea creature, an evolutionary throwback, or as Bjork says - a lynx. I begin to breathe in the water very naturally and calmly, and at some point I stop swimming and just sink, sink, sink, sink, sink. I turn in. 

My dreams change, sometimes I end up on another shore in another time. Far in the future and in fact on another planet. In other dreams I begin floating not down down down toward the bottom of the ocean but out out out into black space, fast and cold. No matter how the dream takes shape, I always become one with the water and it transforms me, either literally into another kind of creature, or metaphorically into another place or time or space. It's a memory of the future.

Right now I'm still swming slowly, considering that first water breath.

I Can't Swim

BY HEATHER CHRISTLE

I can’t swim because I can’t fit

into the water

                         I am

two million feet tall

but thank you for inviting me

I am standing in line

inside my giant shirt

If someone wanted to weaponize me

they would tell me to lie down on New York

and the city I destroyed

would hurt me back

I eat stars

                        It’s a riot

I know

                        my big mouth

full of  their light

Source: Poetry (October 2013)

There is a Community of Spirit

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field.  I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn't make any sense.

- Rumi

Goodnight for now and thank you for reading.