Just over a month ago, I started blogging with great enthusiasm. I was committed to this! I was going to blog religiously every week! I would respond to every comment the minute it was posted! No slipshod, slacking-off blogging for me. And I knew I could do it. For the first time, after a year and a half of dealing with serious illness and three major surgeries, I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I was back on track – getting healthier by the day and raring to go…
And then, to pinch an old joke, I realized the track I was on was a railway and that light at end of the tunnel was, in fact, a train….
And, tragically, this train looked like it was barreling down on someone I love much faster than it was barreling down on me: A few weeks ago one of my closest friends was – completely out of the blue – diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And, worse, it had already metastasized. Because my friend recently moved to a town in Ontario where he would be closer to his long-time, long-distance love in Detroit, he no longer had a home in Toronto. Since Toronto is where he needs to be for his treatment, he’s moved in with my family – and into a house that was already bursting at the seams…
This has been a time of huge adjustment for all of us. For him, of course, in ways most of us can’t even begin to imagine. But for all those who care about him, too. Right now our attitude is very positive. The statistics on pancreatic cancer, especially at this stage, are terrible – 96 to 98% succumb. But doesn’t that mean a few people out of every hundred do beat the odds? And is there any reason he can’t be one of them?
But thinking this way leaves us in a balancing act between staying positive and upbeat – believing in the power of prayer, meditation, and creative visualization – and facing the facts. What’s the difference, I ask myself, between absolute faith and complete denial?
And I find myself not thinking about him but about me. He is the person who has always been there for me. Last year, on days when my husband wasn’t available, he was the person who hauled me to doctors’ appointments and to the hospital for 6:00 am surgeries. He was the one who was there when I came out of anesthetic. He was the one whose car I barfed all over! I’ve know him for thirty-four years, and our lives are entwined in ways too numerous to mention….. But he isn’t just my friend. He is my techno-support. He is my webmaster. Without him, you wouldn’t be looking at this blog, my newsletter would never go out, my website would be a disaster….
What in the world would I do with out him?
And just how selfish and self-centered am I to be thinking about me when he is facing the greatest crisis of his life? Is this, I ask myself, also a matter of balance? A dance between thinking about “self” in a healthy way – really considering in necessary detail the difference between how our lives look and how they might look – and a blast of selfishness and self-obsession? All this also makes me wonder: What is being “negative” and what is being realistic? What is delusion? What is hope?
These are important questions. And even though they aren’t specifically related to the stated topics of this blog — like kundalini, consciousness, and the divine feminine – they are questions about life, so I invite you to respond to them. And, more importantly, I ask you to put the name David McMaster, 54, Toronto, on every prayer, meditation, chanting, white light hot-line you know…. And I thank you for it.