Hey. I just got an email from a woman at Memorial Sloan Kettering who runs their patient publication, Bridges. Months ago I responded to a mass request for things that saw me through cancer.
Here’s what I wrote:
1) What song, book, movie, tv show got you through treatments?
Album: Spearhead’s “Everyone Deserves Music”
Book: Poem, “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
TV Show: Lots and lots of Gilmore Girls on DVD
2) What was your favorite food during chemo?
A “cocktail” I invented:
Valerie’s Magic No-Puke Juice
Ingredients:
Seltzer
Pomegranate juice
Fresh ginger
To Make:
Chop fresh ginger.
Place in boiling water for 10 minutes or so.
Strain and cool juice. Toss ginger chunks.
Pour half a glass of seltzer, add a shot of Pom (enough to sweeten a bit and color) and a shot of ginger juice (or more, depending on nausea level).
Add ice. Stir. Serve in fancy cup to feel fancy. Or a regular one just to get it down.
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The editor just wrote to ask me to elaborate a little on why Wild Geese helped. So I re-read the poem and got choked up and happy-sad all over again.
I think for me it’s about profound safety–it reminds us that we don’t have to be perfect. We don’t have to suffer and punish ourselves just to earn our right to exist. And then it literally zooms out from the desert to the high air, reminding us that we have a place within the natural world. It’s about love, really. The kind of love that’s everywhere; the birthright of every living thing. The kind of love we don’t have to strive for, aspire to, earn, or impress. The kind of love that just is. It’s both detached and present, here for us, here for all. Just here.
If you don’t know it:
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
You can buy a book of her wonderful poems with this one in it here.
