Gratitude with a Side of Turkey

I went to Sloan Kettering two weeks ago for my quarterly testing and got the all clear!  Now that I am about 2 years away from my last round of chemo my oncologist says my chance of recurrence is now less than 2% which sounds pretty low to me and, just as important, I feel great.  I still have a small amount of pain leftover from the surgeries but it usually doesn’t bother me unless I am trying to get especially twisty during yoga.  

The past year has been, hands down, the happiest and fullest of my life.  KR and I have just been l-i-v-i-n’ without any major health issues, house building, wedding or any big deal projects.  We’ve been taking time to slow down.  To try to meet our daughter on the smooth and slippery wave of the present moment (which is the only place an infant can really be met).  When Juniper was born last year it felt like the dawn at the end of a long and painful night and the months since then have been full of light and warmth and fruit and harvest.  And poop.  

I have been continuing some focus on healing.  This work has become (and perhaps always was) intertwined with more general personal growth and learning.  And it has moved beyond the physical into the emotional and spiritual realms.  I sense and hope that this reassembling and exploration will never quite end.  

One of the areas of growth for me has been trying to get better at being grateful.  These past few Thanksgiving days I have reflected on aspects of my life for which I am grateful: the very fact that I am alive, my wife’s love, our family, our community, my work, financial stability, the place where we live, the abundance of music and art and food and so many amazing people in our life, the prayers and care and thoughts and messages and gifts and hugs and tears and medicine I was given when I was sick, our cat and dog, the honey from the bees and the sap from the trees, the light in Juniper’s eyes when I open her door in the morning, the impossibly beautiful sunset last week, et cetera, et cetera.  The list is unending, unknowable, overwhelming and moves me to tears by itself.

But I have come to suspect that the art of gratitude is not simply taking inventory.  It is also recognizing and remembering how fleeting and impermanent that inventory is.  The plain fact is that all of us, and everything and everyone on our lists, will be gone one day.  And when you start to hold gratitude in this frame something shifts.  Grief shows up.  

You start to feel the inevitable loss and your heart begins to grieve.  Just a little bit.  It can be uncomfortable and scary. But that depth of feeling and those tears may be the highest praise and the most active form of gratitude. You are giving of your self, your heart in that moment or, as Martin Prechtel says, “Our tears are the food of the gods.”

It’s hard to always hold this level of conscious gratitude and at the same time function in the workaday world.  So perhaps another limb of the practice of gratitude is to give back in more concrete ways.  

I have been working on giving more of myself in a variety of ways and have been learning more about groups focused on young adult and testicular cancer.  

This year, I have joined forces with fellow TC survivor and friend, Tom Berenberg, to raise money for rare cancer research at Sloan Kettering as part of Cycle for Survival (the team has been renamed The Nutcrackers).  100% of the funds raised go directly to research including helping to fund two studies in which I am a subject! I would be honored and deeply appreciative if you would consider donating to the team (click here to give online).  And if you want to join the team and ride let me know. Additionally, all proceeds from the sale of my book, BLOOM, go to the same cause (here’s the link to Amazon) and, until midnight tonight, all proceeds from online sales at my sister-in-law’s store, The Foundry Home Goods, will go to The Nutcrackers.  

Thanksgiving has swiftly become my favorite holiday.  Despite somewhat controversial origins it now seems to simply be a relatively apolitical, non-religious time of slowing down, fellowship with friends and family, and an invitation to practice the art of gratitude.  This morning I walked into the woods carrying a plastic bag containing the carcass of a 32-pound turkey that we had feasted on for the last three days.  I clambered up the steep leaf-covered hill and found the flat rock that occasionally serves as a sort of altar.  I lit some sage, said a few words, cried, spread out the bones and scraps on the rock, walked down the hill, smiled, and felt great.

Gracias, gracias, gracias.

KR, Juniper and my oncologist, Dr. Feldman, congratulating each other on my health and a job well done :)