This is from an email I sent to a friend in early July 2020 after treatment finished.

New tune, new dance steps to learn.

All of my treatments wrapped up about ten days ago. although the chemo dose was a little less this third and final time, nonetheless its effects have been felt. My throat as well continues to be sore and swollen, but that is diminishing slowly. I hope to be released in the next few days, so it will be good to get back home to family and to food I can prepare myself and eat!

As for prognosis, it will take at least a month before my body returns to normal and only then they will do some scans to check the effectiveness of the treatment. 

And while this sounds so very strange, I hold gratitude for the cancer experience. I don’t hold to the notion that things come along (suffering, tragedy, depravation, etc) in order to teach us something. Rather, things just arise, seemingly without cause, but if we are open enough, we can learn about ourselves and our place in life from these happenings. And so it has been with cancer.

I entered treatment with an interesting mind picture which I shared at the beginning one of standing on a cliff, ready to release my grip on whatever it has been which has hold of me thus far, as a voice beckoned to “let go, I’ll catch you.”  And that has been the experience so far. And much more so.

Trungpa has a saying: The bad news is you’ve jumped out of an airplane without a parachute. The good news is there is no ground.” That sums it up. Letting go, as it were, included a stripping away of everything during free fall. Imagine a vertical kind of car wash that one could fall through and be gently (at times) stripped clean. 

Or again, it was as if I was doing the same thought experiment as Rene Descartes, famous philosopher of the 16thC. Supposedly he shut himself into the oven one day (I’m pretty sure it would have been off!) and had the inspiration that “I think, therefore I am.” My stripping away in freefall led me to an even more succinct version of that, “I am.” I am alive. That is the sum total of what I can truly know in my experience as a human being on this planet. Aliveness. I cannot comprehend it nor explain it, but I know it in the experience of being alive. 

And I found that all questions which I had spent years pondering and struggling to grasp and comprehend came to a finish. Not that I now know the answer to who I am, why I am, etc. I now realize that those questions are most truly answered with “I don’t know.” In my aliveness, “I don’t know” rings true and clear like a bell’s crystal tone. “I don’t know” is sufficient because being alive tells me so.

Concepts like divinity, soul, etc, which I now see cannot be proven neither true nor false, are no longer on my radar. In my moment to moment experience of being alive, they don’t catch my thoughts. The sheer vulnerable nakedness of my moment to moment existence is oddly enough. If by some happenstance that in the moment of my dissolution from this life, those things become a “reality,” that would be a bonus, but they don’t impinge on my moment to moment experience of aliveness. 

In this place of aliveness I found that labels for people and things have also become very transparent. And that for myself (within and without), labels no longer apply. But if someone needed to put me into a box for their own understanding, I might, with tongue in cheek, say that I am now an agnostic atheist. 

Agnostic comes from Greek, a+gnosis. That is, means not-knowing, having no knowledge. And for atheism, I would offer its original meaning in Greek as one who does not honor the deities in the normal or customary ways. I seek a life where it is okay to answer “I don’t know” to the big questions and if there may be a deity or universal principle underlying this life, I will pay it tribute by living my life as if it  (god/universal principle) were not, which I think is the best rendered tribute there might be. If I had a need for god, then surely I would be creating a god (which is then my god) in the image of my own needs. If there is a god, then the only way to live is as if there were no god so that I can be me fully, and god can be god fully. But even to this speculation, I can only truly say, "I don’t know."