Part-way to the ground and a spider story

Thanks for your appreciative posts, everyone! I did feel a little more vulnerable sharing that poetic entry with you than some of my other writing, which I hadn’t realized exactly, until I got the positive feedback. I do occasionally write poetry, when the mood strikes me, which is rare (but more common during a meditation retreat).

Last year at Pearlstone, I spent many periods of outdoor walking meditation watching leaves blowing off the trees at the edge of a field behind the lodge. I was enthralled by their dying dance, each one unique. Here’s the poem I wrote about it.

In a Windy Field by Becca Krantz, October, 2014

Cascading off the trees at the edge of the field

Soaring                        dancing              

                    waving

     twirling                          pirhouetting

                           diving

      spiraling            floating             sailing

                tumbling                  

  easing                           plummeting

I watch and try to grasp each individual descent.

I wonder, do they wait until just the right moment to let go?

A whole life lived in synchrony with others, in service to the whole.

Do they anticipate this brief moment of freedom?

Do they plot their route, practice their moves imaginally?

Do some wait for a large gust, hoping for the anonymity of the crowd?

Do some choose to fall with a close companion, or one admired from afar?

Do some sing gleefully as they fall, “look at me, look at me!” and hope someone is Watching?

Or do they know it’s random luck what currents will inform their dance?

And do they know this brief descent – even if they should catch the wind and fly past the others, over the treeline, into the neighboring field – ends all too soon in another long and drab collective task, decomposition and decay?

One taps me on the shoulder as it flies past, as if to say, “you’re next!”

Fleetingly, I contemplate plunging after it with

all the youthful abandon I can muster.

And then it occurs to me

that I might already be

part-way to the

ground.

---------------------------------------------------

Now, that was before my diagnosis, mind you. As I said, I’d been practicing awareness of mortality. This year’s retreat was a couple weeks earlier than last year’s, and the leaves weren’t as far along. When we got there, I was a little disappointed by this, thinking I wouldn’t get to watch the leaves falling. But, half-way through the retreat, the wind picked up and they started to fall, and I was once again in awe, my heart soaring as the leaves did, and trying not to cling to the brief moments of their dance.

And more than ever, I was cognizant of death; theirs, my own. I spent some parts of the retreat in a lot of emotional difficulty, because I started paying more attention to a bony bump on my chest that I’d noticed after the surgery, but had dismissed at the time. When I first noticed it, I thought it only seemed to be sticking out because it was just above where my chemotherapy port used to be, and when they removed the port there was a concave area left behind. Weeks after surgery, however, when all the various sources of swelling had gone away, I started to wonder more about the protrusion. And, suddenly, during the retreat, I started to think maybe it was metastatic cancer.

This plunged me into something like depression – where everything seemed kind of dark and sad and hopeless and dim. I tried to befriend this fear, and did have some insights, about how “little” fears and “big” ones are different for me. I let this one be big, and tried to have its presence help me appreciate each moment more, but I think I was trying too hard.

I spent a long while one morning lying in the field watching the leaves, and also a willowy stem that was caught in a spider web, dancing and shimmying and cavorting in mid-air as the wind blew it around. I wrote, “If I am to die, I want to be like a leaf that catches the wind and dances and twirls in the sunlight on its way down.”

Later, that day, I walked the trail loop, and as I started heading back from the furthest point, I felt a tickle in my ear. Immediately I poked at it, trying to get the bug or whatever it was out. It stopped, but started up again soon. I thought of the time I’d spent lying on the ground that morning, and of the gajillions of tiny spiders I knew were “spinseling” the woods. And I pictured a tiny spider retreating further into my ear every time I poked my finger in to scratch or try to dislodge it. It would lie still and quiet for a while, then when I was sitting or standing still and it judged it to be safe, it would start to wriggle around again. Maddening!

I was trying to have equanimity about this – after all, it wasn’t hurting me, just tickling. But I found it more and more (and more) distracting as I hiked back. I passed through the odd section of pine trees, which a trail sign explains were planted many years ago for Christmas trees and then forgotten. I picked up a pine needle and decided to try strategically placing one end of it in my ear, with the other end extending down to my shoulder, so the poor tormented spider could crawl out.

I walked along that way for a while, but decided it wasn’t working. I stashed another pine needle to use when I got back to the lodge, and picked up my pace a bit, wanting to be out of the woods and back with people and mirrors so I could get this annoying thing taken care of. And, on some level, I was a little creeped out or scared, though I don’t tend to be afraid of spiders. As I neared the lodge, I saw one of the Pearlstone staff working a compost pile, and nearly went up to him to ask for help with the spider, figuring, at least I wouldn’t disturb his retreat by talking to him. But I was too embarrassed to ask a strange man to help me remove a spider from my ear, so I went back to the room I was sharing, mostly in silence, with Don.

He saw me and, as he had two days before when I had been crying a bunch, asked me if I was okay. I said yes, but there was something I could use his help with. He agreed, and we took a flashlight to my ear. “There’s nothing there,” he pronounced. I didn’t believe him, figuring the critter had just retreated from his poking and the light. He looked and probed some more, and asked me whether I felt the sensation now? And how about now? I actually did feel it, and he verified that there was nothing crawling in my ear.

I felt somewhat foolish as I began to believe him, and grateful I hadn’t asked the guy on the compost heap. I thought of the teaching from earlier in the week, that when we are suffering, we might try asking, “what am I believing?” As I gradually let go of the story that there was a spider in my ear, I began to be amused by it. However, I needed another story to replace it with, to explain the tickling sensation. What I came up with was that maybe the little hairs on the inside of my ear, which must have fallen out with chemotherapy, might have just grown back enough that I could feel them when the wind blew.

Later still, I realized that I had on some level begun believing, and “living in,” the story that I already had metastatic cancer. I remembered the story that I believed earlier about the bump on my chest – that it was due to where they had removed the port. And thought of one or two other plausible stories too (e.g. maybe it’s always been there and I’m just now noticing it because my breasts are gone, and I’m spending so much time with my hand on my naked chest). I felt an enormous sense of relief as I felt the “I’m going to die soon” story relax its grip. And gratitude to the non-spider in my ear.