"It became a ritual: once a week. I would shave my head smooth of the nubs that had started to erupt, then carefully, with a wet washcloth, apply a circle of mammals, amphibians, butterflies, or sometimes flowers. The ring of flora and fauna lightened up the chemo for the kids and me, and took the bald edge off my life. Once, as I lifted a bag of groceries, a woman called out, "Hey, I like your fishies."
~Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, The Sky Begins at Your Feet
Please welcome my very special guest, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, a gifted author and one awakened woman! She is visiting us today through her WOW-Women on Writing blog tour.
She fits the bill for this blog—she is calm, clear, and wise—despite the fact that (or perhaps as a result of it) she has journeyed through a life-threatening illness, breast cancer. Her new book The Sky Begins at Your Feet is remarkable and has all the elements of a great read. Poetic, funny, gut-wrenching, and hope-filled. If you are someone who has traveled through cancer, has friends who have, or you just enjoy a marvelous memoir, this book is for you. I am truly loving this book.
Caryn's approach to her spiritual life and her healing journey is interspiritual, which, as you know is something I am passionate about. I hope you will enjoy this enlightening interview I did with her recently.
Make a comment on Friday or Saturday and you'll be eligible to win a copy of her book. Enjoy!
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Caryn, I must ask first of all, how are you feeling these days? Are you well?
CMG: I'm very healthy and well these days. Thanks for asking.
Your healing journey was truly an interspiritual one. Can you tell us more about that?
CMG: I think whenever life gives us challenges, and life surely will, the more we can face them and see what we have to learn from the challenges, the more we can follow our own spirit. For me, I found facing that old fear of death both a surprise and a relief. For the first time in my life, I didn't feel terrified of dying (at least not for a moment or two), and I also felt more freed up to live fully. I also found a kind of peripheral vision that opened up for me through cancer, and yet the kind of vision -- of seeing and feeling the beauty, wonder, mystery all around -- I've been cultivating as a writer for years. Often I would land on the question of how to live. What does it mean to live fully knowing the preciousness of life? Occasionally, I would find answers to that question in connecting with the land, sky, community, family and my husband (not to mention my cats), and just as often I would find, and still find, distractions from that feeling of being fully awake. This is all to say that my healing journey showed me so much more about opening my eyes, remembering what matters and aiming toward love, but that I'm very prone to make mistakes, forget about the big picture and drive myself crazy with little things.
At times, you are very lighthearted and use humor to tell your story about dealing with cancer. I especially loved how you used removable tattoos to decorate your head during chemotherapy! Can you tell our readers why humor was/is so important to you?
CMG: Humor has always been important to me, and it's a great way to move through some hard times. It was also very helpful to lighten up the intensity of it all for my children, who were pretty young during my chemotherapy. I know that sometimes humor can be used to deny what we're going through, and yet we all need to do that at times too, but often I find humor helps me just relax into living with what is.
As an environmental activist, you state in your book that you began to have an understanding of how your body was its own ecosystem. Can you say more about this?
CMG: I think all our bodies are their own ecosystems, and all our bodies are also our most local home on the earth. This is where we live: in our changing, aging, moving or sleeping, laughing or watching bodies. It's also clear to me, and becoming clearer in a great deal of research being done these days, that the rise of cancer is directly related to environmental toxins. Statistics now say one in three of us will be diagnosed with some form of cancer, which is crazy and unacceptable, but it's also what's happening. While I applaud all the funding going into research for how to treat cancer, I would like to see more research go into preventing cancer. All that said, what this reality shows us is that what we do the earth, we also do to our bodies. On the other hand, one of the biggest sources of my own healing was connecting more with the earth in simple ways: sitting in a chair on the deck and watching the birds, or talking a walk, or just remembering to look at the trees and sky. All of this also helped me make better friends with my own body. By seeing my body as a part of the earth, I saw how the changes I was experiencing were also pathway for me to come home to myself, to forgive my imperfections and learn to love being in this flawed but still amazing body (as all our bodies are flawed and still amazing).
It is evident throughout your book that you treat yourself with gentleness and compassion. Why is this important for our life (and healing) journeys?
CMG: There is no other path toward healing that I can imagine. If and when I blamed myself for cancer, I was stuck in hurting myself more, not moving toward healing. I try to continually meet myself with both curiosity and compassion, which tends to open up whatever I'm going through to show me greater possibilities for living with meaning. My work as a teacher and a facilitator of writing groups is all about this too: the whole creative process is dependent on meeting what you begin to create with curiosity and compassion. The more we can look at what we're thinking, or what we're creating, with an inquisitive attitude and also some tenderness, the more we can find peace in our lives and create art, writing, dance, music, etc. that enhances our lives.
Caryn, what do you think was the biggest lesson you gleaned from this time in your life?
CMG: I learned a lot about slowing down and making self-care a priority. In fact, many times, I think of my self-care as a part-time job: I need to take time to eat what helps and doesn't hurt my body (not that I don't fail at this often), walk and do yoga, relax and stare at the ceiling, watch movies with my kids and husband, read magazines with the cat on my lap. This is part of how I find health, and if I don't take this time, illness seems to come to me with a vengeance. Yet I also realized that what is self-care for one person may not be self-care for another, and what is an act of health one moment could be detrimental another. It's up to each of us to find the balance, and we can best find that balance by listening deeply to ourselves, especially what our bodies are telling us all the time.
In your view, how is writing connected to healing? And what role did writing play in YOUR healing journey?
CMG: Writing helped me two ways. First, it was enormously illuminating to simply put on paper what I was going through to better understand that it was just a story I was passing through, not a permanent state, and also to sort out what was happening and how I felt about it. Second, it's very powerful to share our stories with others. I gave my oncologist pages of my writing each time I went in for another chemo infusion. With my permission, he made this part of my medical chart and encouraged nurses and others to read these pages to see what a patient goes through, and how chemo affects one person's days, dreams, attitude, health and hope. Being witnessed -- seen as we truly are and in light of what we're really going through -- is always a healing act. It helps us feel whole. I've also found this is very true in all the writing workshops I do for people living with cancer and chronic illness. They find great strength in sharing their stories and poems, and in listening deeply to one another.
Can you explain the concept of "Tikkum Olam" to us and how your book can contribute to that?
CMG: Tikkum Olam is the Jewish tradition of putting back together the broken world. I see this as the calling for all of us. There's enormous and overwhelming pain, illness, heartbreak, poverty, war, injustice all around, and yet we can pick up some tiny piece and find a way to put it into place. For me, this comes through a lot of the teaching I do, especially at Goddard College where I founded Transformative Language Arts -- a master's program focused on using writing, storytelling, drama and more to build communities, cultivate health and healing, deepen spiritual journeys, and change the world. By creating possibilities for people to tell and hear their own stories -- aloud or on the page -- we weave back together the world just a little (
see www.goddard.edu for more information). I think of my students who lead writing workshops for at-risk teens, storytelling groups for elders in nursing homes, or collaborative theater projects for low-income people living in public housing, and I see the world being repaired in small and yet life-giving ways that keep on giving.
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is the Poet Laureate of Kansas and the author of ten books, including the recent memoir, THE SKY BEGINS AT YOUR FEET, and her fourth collection of poetry, LANDED. She founded Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College where she teaches, a master's program that educates people on social and personal transformation through the spoken, written and sung word. She facilitates writing workshops widely, and with singer Kelley Hunt, co-writes songs and co-leads writing and singing retreats.
www.CarynMirriamGoldberg.com. Her new book is available at
amazon.com. Visit Caryn's blog;
www.CarynMirriamGoldberg.wordpress.com.
