..before Maya was diagnosed with Leukemia, I thought I knew manic depression like a brother, or a father or mother, or a lover, or at least a mischievous friend in need.

Then, out of the blue---after months of asking, “Why?” walking a favorite hillside beside a favorite body of moving water beneath the bows of long seeded trees in the rain and the sunshine, beside river sounds, I found that I was in the happiest time of my life. So I knelt near a stand of hemlock and beech trees, …set pouch tobacco beside the ferns as a tribute and respect to the elements around me, and counted every blessing I could summon in the pleated rays of sunshine late afternoon. I welled, ..and then smiled and breathed in the day,

. . . drove home to my best friend and lover and we went to play tennis---a favorite.

It was a very good evening, night, morning wake-up beside our favorite southern facing window, early afternoon, and one very long, very competitive, very perfect sweaty set of tennis at the park, before returning home, chatting in the car about, “Perhaps we have it too much better than so many others; this love of ours, this simple bliss, this proactive time.”

First thing upon arrival home, lovely she pushed the button on the answering machine and the voice of kind midwife beckoned with forebodings of blood deficiencies & urgency.

A few days later, chemotherapy for my best friend and love ..and sorrow, woe, prayer energies, fear, attempts at faith in body, mind, spirit, science, will, the cosmos, the lotus, the V, the pointlessness of failure to visit two as one as two upon the day and the next day and the next, I set up camp and sentry beside the only home in the world I know: Maya.

& we are going on two years now, still on the protocol, still in treatment; not tennis ..but physical therapy and tantric touch together, no cycling the trails ..but the blessing of an in-house stationary spinning cycle, kinship with pain daily, hours upon hours of IVs and long drives to offer up most of our dignities in payment for the world’s finest medicine.

During Maya’s second bone marrow transplant, two Zen Buddhist friends, life mates, lovers for 20 years unmarried but connected at the hip and spirits, both in treatment for different cancers, both filled with light, asked me to their room @ The Lodge and shared the following meditation chant (on a loop) with me ..until it got into my being and helped to raise me up. Then we took it together to the hospital and sat with Maya and meditated to it again...while her precious eyes smiled with ours and we let the lotus bloom best it would all around our little bubble of perseverant bliss ..under fire.

(It is not the Dalai Lama. & not a Buddhist chant, but more probably a Hindu healing meditation, as sung by Hein Braat …but perhaps it may help provide ambiance in a space for health & wellness for you during trying times for most everyone. …....This woe; this weariness; this wonder if hope still remains; this aching humanness ..at the dawn of what? Please know.. you are not alone in this.)

embed disabled, here’s a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kIlYTP2QIU