How Do You Fight Cancer?

                   I recently asked a friend how she sustained her creative output while living with her husband’s terminal lung cancer.

                  We were meeting on Zoom as we do regularly, she in her Cape Cod studio; me in mine, listening for any signs that my husband, recovering from surgery, might need me.

                  At my question, she paused.

                  “Looking back,” she finally answered, “I honestly don’t know how I did it.  I was still working because we needed the income, so there was that added stress.  I think I just put one foot ahead of the other.  Every day.”

Then she quickly added, “And we had a large circle of supportive friends.  I couldn’t have done it without them.”

                  The figures who appear in my collection of poems, Mending Prayer Rugs, are mostly women like my friend, Susan:  women who know that “creating” often means re-creating, adapting, making the most of scraps and torn pillow cases.

                  It means perseverance when there is no turning away, discerning what is essential and what is mere surface glitter.  It takes the kind of courage no one else can see, much less applaud you for.  It demands that we be truthful with ourselves, and honest with one another.  It entails being witnesses to what is real.

                  Susan persevered, and today, at the age of 80, she is one of the most accomplished book artists in New England.  Her “Vivid Journals” – collaged, calligraphed, colorful and exuberant art objects – are breathtaking in their expressions of the manifold joys, griefs, dreams, and emotional landscape of one woman’s journey.

                  In the process of writing these poems and thinking a great deal about the meaning of creativity (as well as the nature of mending), I have discovered that fruitfulness – creativity, healing, rejoining, innovating, enduring – is a project of many, many seasons, regardless of one’s age, class, and race.  To be fruitful, to know purpose and to touch down in the sources of our own gifts, only “ends” when we are no longer willing to put one foot ahead of the other.

                  Change, illness, loss, challenge us in every season.  As I look at my older women friends who have not only survived, but thrive, I see that they came to a point in their personal challenges when they realized that they needed their creative energies as never before.  Digging in and doing the creative work of life in the dark times is the bedrock work.

                  Today, as I prepare for my poems to enter the slip stream of the present moment, out in the world, I am keenly aware that we all have been thrust into a time of dis-ease, of circumstances that demand our best creativity.

                   Our dreams, visions and memory are essential now – they are not indulgences.  We must use our hands, our intelligence, our hearts, to dig deep into the bedrock of our ideals, our values, our faith, our strength, and advance the work that matters most.  Much of this will entail repair, mending, and healing the life around us.

                  I hope you will find others with whom to chart and stay the course, adapt when needed, start again.

                  I will be writing about this in the months to come – the call to creative presence, stories of courage, the wisdom of women from the past.  And I will be encouraging you to speak, and write your truths, putting one foot ahead of the other.  I hope you’ll join me.  Bring others.

                  We are in this together.