DEEP REST

Sitting here in the living room, shades drawn, I feel calm – the calm before the storm of my next chemo treatment. Perhaps it will be kinder this time and keep me from the edges of joylessness and steel grey fatigue – as it did that first treatment cycle. Perhaps, by surrendering to my cancer and making peace with her, I can be carried by her flow.  For I know that the more I resist, the more I fight against this journey, the harder it will be to heal. I must meet it not with averted gaze or even fear, but stare into the eyes of cancer and learn to befriend her.

This feels brave and vulnerable.

I am now walking on my fire path. This is my initiation into healing. I am ready to disengage from the world and retreat into my cave. Caves can be dark, scary, lonely, ominous places. Caves can also be sacred spaces of lucid silence, solitude, secrecy. For here, within the walls of my cave, I arrive to lay myself bare, to see myself in the mirror of fierce honesty and to reckon with my shadows. Here it is I come to rest. And drink at the Well of wellbeing and sow seeds of radiant health and vitality. Here I come to meet my Cancer and ask her what she has come to reveal to me.

Even as I enter this time of inquiry and intimate silence, a gnawing sense of worry and anxiety seize me. It is not easy to seek retreat and rest in a world in which productivity and the act of constant doing are so deeply valued and celebrated. We are enslaved to the clock and clock time is a relentless resistor of rest, voracious in its demand that we use our days to race, pace, push, pursue. And yet, here in the cave, I am being called into a different rhythm. There is nowhere to go. Nothing to do. I am outside of time. My body, not the clock, will now determine the rhythms of my day. “Come, come”, she says, “let yourself rest. Let yourself be. Remember, you can’t receive healing if you are always in motion. And this is a time to receive”. 

How hard to befriend radical rest in our world.  And yet because it is vital to my healing, I have to surrender to her call. I now find myself softening at the edges, leaving behind the mind’s virulent demands and prepare to enter into this timeless portal of radical quiet. This is a sweet, prayerful kind of rest, one that offers tender refuge to my tired body. Like a base note for our life, this rest is always there, ready to receive us. If only we can open to her and befriend her. If only we can know we deserve her.

There are many treasures to discover in the Cave. Deep rest is one of them.

Painting: The Cave (acrylic on paper)