Coach Elliott

This afternoon I spoke to a loving family member about her talk with her daughter.  This talk that she needed to have with her daughter was about ether abiding by the rules, making her contribution or going elsewhere to live.  It seems that her kid turned from teen to adult quickly but the maturity did not necessarily follow.  She is still in a form of arrested development or as I like to put it, slowed down maturity meter.  She is simply not as mature as other kids her age.  Not surprisingly there are many others like her and we all know someone who is struggling with there ability to match their age with some form of accomplishment.  Some would connect their age with where they should be in life and others equate their age with what they should have done in life, the degrees they should have and the money they could of made. In every relationship there will be issues of balance and especially of equity.  That is what my dear friend is struggling with.  Each person in the household

Today I got some heat about my blog and as usual it prompted me to ask why I bother writing them.  I think it is because each topic elicits feelings and it also inspires me to go inside and dare to be different.  I cannot allow anything or anyone's interpretation to stop me from expressing what I deem and yet understand we are all quite different.  Life and people are funny that way are we not? Yesterday I realized that the person I had been with is such a good person and that he like all of us is simply injured.  I can see the injury and I can see the need for my healing and his.  I love him even though there are times when I see he has not loved himself and neither have I.  I know that if he asked me I would open my heart up once again for him.  I would love him back to health if he fell and needed me to do that.  We, I can talk all I want but the truth is that I can love him no matter what happens.  I can still love Elliott too and I can do that in equal increments. I love t

Today I am going to be assured once more that life is beginning anew because I slept well and I have seen the sunrise again.  As I listen to the meditation music I am grateful for the peace and quiet of the area where I live and the light filled home with the vegetation just outside my windows and sliding doors.  I am uncertain that I could ask for more really and I am not about to.  Just sitting here having my coffee and feeling my abdomen heal from a little something something is good enough for me. The next thing on the list is for my daughter to come back from taking her friend to the train and buying some things for the house that I was unable to get due to my health issue.  Thank goodness for goddess' timing my dear friends and family.  I am truly in a place of knowing that today I will need to once again force myself a little and go to a movie with my daughter and a friend who is visiting from out of state.  I know that I can do it and the other plan of getting a pair of g

Good morning world.  I have been up since about 6:30 in the morning.  I have washed clothes, cleaned house, washed some dishes, made breakfast, saved the laundry, swept, and more.  I am at the lunch time.  No cancer shit is going to stop me today man!  Oh hell to the NO!  I am functional bitch and can almost fry an egg in the car while I drive, although I've not tried it as yet.  But dammit I could if I set my mind to it.  My grandmother use to say that these women these days could drown in a glass of water.  I thought about that long and hard today and what it means to me is that we could get stressed and become immobile over the most minor stuff. And so my goal today is to go deeper inside my feelings not fearing my feelings and just seeking my refuge in the feelings.  Not allowing the feelings to take over me but rather for the feelings to pour over me.  There is a difference you know when you affirm that your feelings are pouring over you versus taking over you.  I have watch

I feel compelled and motivated to share my  new experience or my latest experience with my health.  Now more than before the radiation is taking it's toll on me and the burning is simple almost nearly unbearable.  I wish I had a video of this and how it feels physically and how taxing it is emotionally yet what comes up the most is that somewhere and sometime we end up enduring even those things we think we cannot.  That seems to be a theme for some of us, enduring and getting through all the things we think we would have not and coming out the other end. As I look out of my balcony doors I see a day that I have been given and another opportunity to heal and to get through to the other side of whatever is going on with me.  It really doesn't matter that much anymore what it is because each day presents me with a new challenge and even when I think I won't get through it inevitably I do get through it again and again.  Each of us faces that dilemma each day of being asked

I admit that at this point I am finding myself rather boring and so today I went to my doctor's appointment and was determined to do something other than be a cancer fucking patient.  Aside from noting that he asshole called me and left me a message early this morning, the day after the day after my birthday party.  I also noted that today I would show up differently for Elliott and went straight to the Walgreens to get my meds and to give thanks for the asshole's insurance.  Did I just say asshole twice.  I am so sorry.  I did say asshole and now I cannot seem to stop.  It is like they say everyone has one right? Determined as I said to show up in a rather different manner I went then to Trader Joe's and beamed to the orange colored tulips, so bright, so beautiful.  I picked them up and then I put them down.  I looked at them and saw they were only five bucks and hell where would I get those beauties for five dollars?  Oh yes, at Walmart.  Anyway I took a batch of them a

This morning I was thinking as usual about how to pray effectively and suddenly realized there is no way to pray effectively.  I try to do things efficiently that way and then I see how futile it is to be this way to myself.  It's the perfectionist in me just coming up screaming and that asks me to do things in a way that is almost impossible for anyone to do.  I am still styling my pick line and that alone requires a freaking awesome prayer right?  I laugh inside thinking about my lack of knowing how to and when to pray until I find myself in some crisis but for today I want to just send that prayer out right here and now: Mother, Father, God and Goddess of the universe give me the wisdom to know what I know and the wisdom to know that I am truly not that wise.  Give me the wisdom to stay still and listen when needed and to run and exercise when my body is saying "I love you".  Ask of me what you want because I am willing to do that and to serve others in a way that yo

Yesterday I had the privilege of celebrating my 60 years on this earth after what feels like a long battle with cancer and what has been a difficult journey.  I feel like I want to be at the end of it and yet it may not be so I must be prepared for the worse and best outcome.  I won't know that for a few months if not longer and while I heal from the burning of the radiation I am hopeful inside my soul and my spirit is still in tact.  I am grateful to celebrate the cancer and at the same time celebrate the years ahead that god has given me. We are all on such beautiful journeys and one such person in my life who lost his beloved pet shared that the last blog inspired him to heal and come to my party.  That blog was yesterday and it was about pain and how we hold on to it versus how we handle it.  He seemed to be anxious to tell me that the only reason he showed up for the party and for me was that he was inspired by the sharing dialog in the blog.  It was he and many others prese

Our pain center is the place where our pain is and where it is centered.  To find our pain center we sometimes have to experience a lot of pain.  To be in our pain center we have to admit that we are in pain and find out what we are in pain about.  To know and be in touch with our pain does not mean that we must worry 24 hours a day nor that we have to be depressed or sad all the time.  Some people interpret my saying this as a ticket to complaining to others and taking a negative stance all the time.  Everything turns into pain and everything is a terrible dilemma, but it does not have to be that way.  God says to us: "help thyself and I will help you" and he means it.  If we are in our pain center we are checking in with our pain and then we are navigating through our pain.  We are not taking our pain in and drowning in it no matter what others say. Pain is natural.  Pain is a part of life.  We have the physical pain and then we have the emotional pain.  Deeper inside is

Well today I get my chemo pump taken off and for now I am finished with the radiation.  I feel grateful, light filled and scared all at once.  I am clearly not completely out of the woods until it is official and the doctors do more follow ups which will likely be every month and then every 4 months and so on.  I know from the last battle that it returned after almost ten years and that was in comparison a walk in the park.  Still I feel very optimistic that God has this great plan for me even in the midst of the other things that are going on with me.  To speak of it too loudly would be to waste too much of my time and yours I think so I won't go into the ugly little details, preferring to focus on the positive. My pain is managed, I am comfortable and feeling lots of love from many people in my life.  I am here today and feeling like this is all as it should be, enjoying the moment just like Tolle taught me to do.  Live in the now.  Live this moment.  And boy does that feel goo

I for one am a curious george myself.  I ask questions of others that at times may be invasive and I too have felt like some of the questions about my cancer have been rather curious.  I love people and the fact is that we are all curious at times regardless of how rough it is for some of us to respond with love and compassion, knowing that others will make the mistake to ask us something we might not be comfortable answering.  Yet we are all curious like George and will will ask those questions.  I too attempt to respond to what others need to know about me, my health or my beliefs.  I do my best to answer the questions.  All be it difficult. Here is my inspiration for this blog because as you all know everyone and anything can inspire us to share our feelings in hope that what we share will be valued and maybe even be valuable.  Someone somewhere may be listening and may even need to hear what I have to say.  Consequently my inspiration for this blog is my own curiosity about mysel

I just decided to change the subject today and I am thinking on my toes hopefully, for your sake.  I would like this blog to be about life situations and overall handling things that come up and surprise us.  I have had so many surprises and I am thinking so have you.  Life deals us a lot of stuff we don't expect and it is up to us at each moment how we will react to it.  Will we stay on the path?  Will we get off the path?  Will we address it with fear or will we be courageous?  We won't know that until we actually have the experience.  We won't know that until we get to that place where we are having the new experience but there are some basic things we can be thinking about like how we normally react to life happenings.  How we respond to crisis and how we address those unexpected moments. There are a lot of people who seem to have it together, nothing frazzles them and nothing seems to get them upset.  We all know people like that and they simply seem not to be moved

Camille Claudel was one of many women who were institutionalized because of their voice and because they expressed a side of them that to men was strange and threatening.  Women are still dealing with the rath of men who simply think that women in power are bitches and they should take their pink pill.  I for one believe that if anyone needs the pink or blue one it would be the men who think with this limited palate of life. Camille lived in France and where she resided was in a nun's home.  There it was soon uncovered that she was not suppose to be there but of course no one decided to low her freedom.  The nuns knew beyond a doubt that she was becoming helpful to others and that her personalized love touch was healing to others, one of which was a young male who looked very much like a butch female who she adopted and who she went on walks with.  It became evident that Camille was not only sane she was more than sane. In one scenic where the scenery in France is impeccable by

Love the cancer for now so that it looks like something that is not going to actually harm you.  Believe that you will conquer the cancer and you will.  Maybe the love is not exactly like the love you have for a child but if you look at it with love it will not have the power that for some has taken them and led them to give up.  Decide that you are not going to give up and decide that this is not who you are but rather a simple incidental in your life, something that you will get through just like the course you took in college.  Cancer is love for as long as it takes to continue to visualize a body that is healthier than even the doctors might say is not possible. Now this is not rocket science nor a new prospective because if you have gotten to where you are now and still smiling some of the time then you have likely overcome plenty.  This can be viewed as one more thing to do, like a to do list that gets checked off and that you just know you will get to eventually with some grac

I think that today is going to be a great day.  It finally warmed up a little more so I can spend some time out on my deck.  Amen to that.  I am also in my place of meditation and prayer energy and will be all day.  My friends who are here are leaving to visit others from out of state and then returning later tonight.  I am so happy that the plan is later to have dinner with other friends coming in from the city: Susan and her partner.  They are bunches of love and are taking me to my favorite place, Francesca in West Dundee.  I will make a lovely reservation for all of us and in celebration of my birthday. Each day is another chance to place my hand over my heart and to begin to process my feelings and my needs.  I see where others have a limited focus and today was a great example for me.  Lots of chatter around me that I forgot about and that others have to have in their life in order to feel OK about them and me?  I am not sure but it feels better to be alone and in pain than wit

I like to think that I am somewhat original and then I realize that I am not.  I am just like everyone else with all the faults and all the gifts and all the flaws within.  This day I get to test my nerves because it is the last day of radiation before the last week of rad and chemo combined.  I think that cocktail will either kill me or make me a better man.  I am afraid of the latter of course.  My heart dances each time I think to dance and each time I forget that others gave up on me and that like Katy Perry said: "this is a part of me that you'll never ever take away from me".  One person leaves you and like me you are devastated and I certainly don't blame you.  I think that love is just what we hold onto to tight that it hurts us.  Life is hard and so is the pain of cancer but nothing is worse than one man who said he loved me who then abandoned me promptly and without seemingly giving it a second thought.  I am left to figure out why but honestly that alone