HOW BEEBALM CALMS AND EXCITES ME

A few minutes ago when I didn’t know what else to do with myself

I stepped outside the back door and just stood in front of the billowing

beebalm,

as red as the plump raspberries that I had just popped into my mouth for breakfast.

Oh but the flowers were surely nutrition too:

with their bouncy spirit and shaggy petals

they look like tiny shafts of scarlet lightning exploding out of a towering stem.

What an excellent reminder to

STAY PRESENT

every moment today.

Flowers, says Eckert Tolle, are ready gateways to our spiritual life.

So fragile and fleeting, only lasting for a few brief days (oh but the beebalm stay for weeks!)

these docile blossoms remind us of the 

cosmic majesty of every living thing

that comes to BE and

disappears in no time at all.

Like all of nature, BEebalm call to us with their audacious PRESENCE!

At times like these, my head spins when I try to take in

the enormity of life forms that cover our mysterious planet.

I get the same kind of breathtaking headwhirl when I glance down at a butterfly landing on a flower.

And then too, my heart flutters when I stare at the hummers dancing and divebombing at the feeders.

Or gazing up  at the night sky at the stars. How do we wrap our

minds around the power and beauty and the wonder of Mother Nature and the Universe?

By closing our eyes and going inside ourselves to witness that very same STILLNESS that fills the world.

Back to the beebalm.

Thank you God for giving us these blossoms that are so jazzy and yet so calming too.

Thanks for kissing these shaggy flowers into existence and for all YOU do!

And especially, for letting Tuesday be another day of magic.

God In My Body Writing

 She’s not exactly sure what’s causing the anxiety that hit a few weeks ago, but she finally has come up with one way she can deal with it.

Write. But not just any kind of writing.  She’s got to write very, very slowly reaching deep into her body for feelings and sensations, letting them bubble up in whatever form -- sketches and scribbles -- that they happen to appear on her journal pages. Like yesterday, when she found herself cupping her open palms on either side of her neck. Then she caressed her breasts by resting them in the inside crease of her elbows.

What emerged from this writing surprised her. She wrote as though she was being nursed by her mother.

In other journal entries, she writes about feelings in her belly, her arms and thighs and hands.

Mary says this body-centered writing is teaching Claudia to comfort herself. Which is a good thing, except sometimes the writing takes her to very strange places she isn’t expecting to go. Yesterday she wrote:

“Count breaths. Count veins and capillaries. Be happy. Feather your fingertips up and down your thighs. Let warmish blood swell and rise and wash into arms and fingertips. Smell the sweat in your armpits. Linger in lower blood pressure, let your legs go limp. Let your lips sag and feel yourself drooling.” 

One journal page was devoted to the words written in giant letters: “BE IN GOD.” The next page read: “BE NOW.” And “FEEL PRESENCE NOW.” The word GOD appears between the letters, as do the words ART and TOUCH!

Sometimes the writing gets too intense. That happened yesterday when she wrote: “Now gently rub your thighs and realize that GOD is inside you always touching your body.” And then: “Dear God, time is erasing and maybe I am disappearing too. How can I learn to stay in God forever?”

At that point, she needed a break. She closed her journal and got up from the meditation bench. She needed fresh air so she put on her white cotton summer bathrobe. She picked up Poco and carried her outside. Together she and the dog – God spelled backwards -- walked through the sunny yard, smelling the grass and the flowers and listening to the birds. 

When she came back into the house, she wrote one more page in her journal: “Don’t be SCARED, BE SACRED!” She made note of the fact that her initials, CR, sit right in the center of the word sacred. “CR BE SACRED!” she concluded.

All this writing makes her feel like she’s melting. She thinks about Leah so many months ago, walking around the yard in February in her pale blue bathrobe, tramping through the snow. Leah – who was frozen – has given way to Claudia, who is anything but frozen. She is spilling over every which way, melting with words, with sensations, and sometimes with tears. The anxiety can be so incredibly painful.

Claudia wrote to Peg a week ago and asked her, “Do you think God in My Body Writing is connected to the book, Angels Keep Whispering in My Ears?” Peg said she was pretty certain that there’s a connection.

It doesn’t hurt to explore that connection, Peg says. Claudia agrees. Her challenge, though, is to make sure that every time she gets scared she will flip the word into SACRED!

Letting My Body Steer My Writing is Helping Me to Heal!!!

Thunder roared through the meadow a few minutes ago. A drenching downpour followed. 

I don’t know if there is a connection but somehow 

SOMETHING WONDROUS JUST HAPPENED. 

I breathed in the cool, rain-drenched air. I stared at the 

blazing red BEEBALM

and the dazzling purple CONEFLOWER.

I breathed in again.  I decided to hold THAT breath

for four or five moments.

Then I breathed out. 

And with no warning, no preparation

Something rather monumental shifted inside me. 

I went to the handsome oak desk that used to be my Mom’s.

I sat down on the beautifully embroidered chair seat and I opened this laptop.

AND THEN I OPENED MY PURPLE DECOMPOSITION NOTEBOOK AND 

BEGAN TRANSCRIBING ALL KINDS OF CRAZY THINGS THAT I’VE WRITTEN INSIDE.

It was the entire month of June that I confined myself to journaling. I actually filled the whole damn purple journal and then spilled into a new one.

(My body can tell that I’ve been away from the computer.  KEY difference. That is, my fingers are actually having some trouble locating which keys are where. )

The computer. So much a part of my writing life. But it’s a cold and mechanical thing when you’re hurting as badly as I was last month. I spent weeks wracked with anxiety. I filled a journal with sentences like this one:

“Dear God, Dear Mary, I am pleading with you for relief from this pain. Please help me figure this stuff out because it’s killing me.”

At one point last month, I was suffering so badly and writing so much that I came up with what feels to me like a new kind of writing. At least it’s new to me. 

I’m calling it “GOD IN MY BODY WRITING.”  I’ll explain and then give you a sample.

OK, so you all know what freewriting is, right?

That’s when you just sit down and write anything at all that comes into your head but the rule is you just keep writing you don’t lift up your pen and you don’t stop.

Well so MY NEW WRITING is like that, except I’ve prescribed another rule:

THE GOAL IS TO WRITE DOWN IN PRECISE AND SOMETIMES GORY DETAIL EXACTLY WHAT IS GOING ON IN MY BREATHING ACHING SUFFERING EXHAUSTED BODY AS I AM WRITING.

Here is a bit of what I wrote on the Fourth of July. In a way, what I wrote was about finding A KIND OF INDEPENDENCE. I’m searching for a way to soothe and nurture myself.

Here goes:

9:17 a.m. “Flesh in my breasts, I’m a baby again only this time my mother bares her nipples and I have one hand on top of her silky white skin and the other I am patting her bulging shape. I begin. My tender lips latch onto the dark nub of her, she is nursing me that bluish white milk you can see through I am calmly drinking NO THINKING NO THINKING JUST THIS A WHISPER OF “I LOVE YOU you little precious girl!” And when you are two you will grow pipecurls with golden rings.” 

A little crazy wouldn’t you say? But the key thing is 

This

Writing

Is 

Working

To

HELP HEAL 

ME.

Writing is therapeutic. So many experts agree on that.

 For example CHECK OUT MY BLOG POST ON DR. JAMES PENNEBAKER’S WORK; he found that students who wrote in journals about what was bothering  three times a week ended up at the college health center far less often. 

I have a whole shelf load of books about writing and healing. 

Writing drains feelings out of my brain heart mind fingers gut breasts toes knees and makes me feel

Contained.

Supported.

NURTURED.

As I said, I am calling it GOD IN MY BODY WRITING and I think it’s part of the book that I thought was finished. This is the book I call “Angels Keep Whispering in My Ears.”

When I write in this new way – letting my body steer -- the words are full of sweat and mud and pink flesh and bluish white breast milk. 

I am enmeshed in the sensations that I am creating in my own words.

Of course, it isn’t just the writing that has helped me get to this point. I am extremely blessed to have an incredible therapist who has been with me every step of the way as I opened the door onto PTSD that I had never before explored. More on that extraordinary journey another time.

Meanwhile, I feel so much better than I have in weeks and weeks. I am grateful to Mary and the Universe for helping me reach this point in my healing.

Writing can save your soul. I’ve always known that, but not as much as I do now.

I’ll say it again. 

Writing can save your soul.

I like the sound of that sentence, It’s bold. It’s calm. It offers promise! 

The important thing is that I am starting to see how, once again, writing – ART – is helping me feel whole again.

ANGELS TELL DIVINE STORIES, REMEMBER THAT!

Oh let the words flow. I can feel THEM FLOODING OVER AND INSIDE ME LIKE I AM WASHING MYSELF -- A CRYSTAL GLASS WINDOW. NOW God. 

NOW GOD.

NOW I CAN FINALLY SEE GOD!

AND FEEL THE GLOW AGAIN. Soft and gentle EVERYWHERE THAT BLOOD JUST FLOWERED! 

Cool and warm. I am staying right in the swimming pool of my heart which is to say I’m dogpaddling now

How do we stay happy?

WE STOP THINKING AND INSTEAD           weSTAY INTHEBODY          NOW           IN LIGHT AND LOVE AND GRATITUDE!

(Eckert Tolle's books are full of instruction.)

It’s been a might almighty prayer THAT this meditation HAS DELIVERED ME today. 

How it feels: I have love sluicing the inside of my calm green palms. Some memoirs, one in particular, need to be rereared rereaded retreat removed from your lonely story, and instead START READING AND SPEAKING and YELLING AND HOLLERING

I AM NOT ALONE. I HAVE ALWAYS GOT THE DIVINITY FEEDING ME 

“ANGELS KEEP WHISPERING IN MY YEARS.”

The trick is to keep a long slow warmish glow just going up and down so gently in the pink wetness of my skin

STAYING IN THE BODY MEANS QUIETING DOWN THE MINDS’ SOFT QUILT SO SO MUCH SLOWER THAN SPEAKING

THIS POETRY is POET TREE, see me standing in TREE POSE TO THE COUNT OF 52?

you can hear this poetree THIS WAY:

LISTEN: HEAR THAT HEARTBEAT? FEEL THAT voice in your head? FEEL IT You don’t need it. Stop the BAD radio in your head and reach deep into the flesh beneath my baby blue bathrobe AND RETRIEVE THE MIRACLES OF THE ANGEL NOVEL/MEMOIR

How do your stop the radio? How do you use words to get unsad and UNSTUCK? 

Ironically you have to YOU CHUCK THE VOICE YOU know HOW THE EGO VOICE MAKES YOU THINK THINK THINK RATTLING ALL OF THAT CACOPHANY OF SENTENCES 

INTO A wad of non-GOD

Thinking thinking I’M THROWING INTO THE ABYSS 

THIS IS HOW THE SOFT WHITE FLESH AND GOLDEN LIGHT OF ANGELHOOD FEELS.

I’m feeling what it feels like in the THIS MORNING OF JUNE 14, 2021

WHEN bliss of PURE FEELING breathe FEEL. LIMBS. FOREARMS. Inside thighs

INSIDE THINKING IS THE POTENTIAL FOR DESTRUCTION ESPECILLY WHEN THE THINKING VOICE

TELLS

NEGATIVE

DEAD \\\ STORIES///

LEAH, just make sure you remind your SELF over and over and over over STAY THIS WAY WE FEEL EVERY MOMENT WRITING THIS WAY.

REMINDER: GET OUT get out let go of the business of negative stories. Just keep telling this one:

ANGELS KEEP WHISPERING ETC. ETC.

Over

Over

And

Over again I LOVE THIS POETREE INSIDE ME

Now it’s time to soften the glow and SLOW DOWN

AND EMBRACE THE NEXT MOMENT. 

I Pray

By Jadwiga Brown 

I pray. I pray silently. I pray aloud

Always my prayer is the same —

I pray that I may use my gifts each day 

To make our world more whole 

 

I pray for goodness, peace and justice

I pray that when we look at a person

We see a heart, a soul, not skin tones, 

Not disabilities, not whom one loves 

 

I pray that we will learn to truly listen

To people, even those we do not know

I pray we do not turn our backs on others

Instead, we offer an open hand to all

 

I pray that each of us will choose 

To be better, more loving, more caring

I pray that we see beyond ourselves

Chanting “Hallelujah” to our differences

 

I pray you will allow me to sit by you

To share your prayers with me

I pray that we can journey together

On this beautiful road we call life

 

Jadwiga Brown is a writer living in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday Morning Haiku

Woke up to bits of

ANGER inside, now it is

ALL LOVE AND ANGELS.

FOR ME ART IS ALL HEAVEN SENT!!

How to start. That's always an issue in art, except when you are in the ZONE. This talk will be how I first found myself DEEPLY in the ART ZONE during the summer of 2002 when I was in very intensive chemo for Hodgkin's disease, a curable form of lymphoma. And how ever since then, each and every day, I try to stay SERENELY in the ZONE. Through meditation, chanting and prayer, I have learned over the past two decades how to keep delving into the ZONE, letting go of my "rational" mind, trusting my intuition and giving into my desire to throw paint onto canvas letting it go anywhere it wants to go. 

FIRST OF ALL, though, here is a photo of where I'm sitting in my studio/study/sewing/creativity room: I have two desks, one sewing machine and table, one long work table, a printer, a bookcase, an easel, a file cabinet, a teal blue wooden chest (my dad made), plants and of course my laptop where I write poetry and fiction and lots of blogposts:

And here is the start of a list of principles that have come to me as I have been preparing for this talk.

NUMBER ONE: Art, like life, is God-given. Before you start doing art, it's important to say A PRAYER OF THANKSGIVING, just like the Native Americans do. Say Thank You to the ultimate CREATOR. Keep mindful of the great gift that is creativity. 

Back in 2002, I learned to heal my body and soul with art, and today I continue to find health and happiness by buttering canvases in thick swaths of acrylic paint. With the Divine in the driver's seat, painting, poetry, fiction, photography, sewing, making pies, all of these have become for me a continuous outpouring of energy.

NUMBER TWO: Stay mindful of breathing. Every single breath is a gift. It's so easy to forget.

In Hebrew, the word to tell is "Hagid," which is why on Passover we talk about using the Haggadah to tell the key story of our heritage, that is, the EXODUS, how the enslaved Jews gained liberation from Egypt and found themselves in the Promised land. 

Art has landed me in the Promised Land over and over and over again.

Like all good stories, this one could begin in many places, but I'll start with my first novel, Dreaming Maples, which I published in April of 2002, two months before the dreadful cancer was diagnosed. The cover of this book features a beautiful painting by my very dear and generous cousin Pat Rotondo, who surprised me with the painting while we were in the Clark Art Institute on 9/11 twenty years ago. Unlike me, Pat actually went to art school in NYC -- she's an incredible painter, jewelry maker and now, a furniture designer and builder too. 

Dreaming Maples, the first of my three novels, is the story of four generations of women artists. The women live in Vermont in a sugarbush and they actually try to make a living selling maple syrup. The matriarch, Audrey X, is a sculptor; one of her first sculptures is outdoors, the huge marble bust of a little girl -- the baby Audrey lost. She discovered art as she suffered the bottomless grief of losing a child. Audrey's granddaughter and a central character is Candace, who is passionate about her painting. The climactic scene of the novel takes place at the Clark in Williamstown beneath Renoir's Blonde Bather, a spitting image of Candace.

The way I used to write fiction, I would "SEE" every scene before I wrote it. Readers claim that when they read my books they feel as though they are watching movies. So as I wrote Dreaming Maples, I kept seeing and seeing. I saw a lot of paintings. My journals from that period are filled with drawings and small paintings.

I started a small publishing company, Star Root Press, to put out my book in April 2002. All was well and awfully exciting until disaster hit the night before my son's Bar Mitzvah in early June. It's a long difficult story but suffice to say our family doctor diagnosed me with Hodgkin's disease (the good kind of lymphoma, the one that's usually curable!). On July 16th, I started making weekly trips to NYC (courtesy of my chauffeur husband Richard Kirsch) to get chemo at Sloan Kettering. It was an experimental treatment: I had five chemicals a week for 13 weeks straight. Over the summer, I wrote a whole manuscript of poetry called -- "RIDING MY KITE THROUGH LIGHTNING-- to get through the rare torture that is chemo. 

Soon enough, I was wasted. Besides writing the daily poems and sending them out to a slew of supportive family and friends, I started wandering around the house and for some reason it gave me great comfort to cut up pieces of colored paper and stick them onto other pieces of colored paper. I started gluing the odd assortment of papers together. Sometimes I would add little artifacts, like leaves and broken earrings, and here, below a syringe. The poem accompanying this image is called "ONE TWO ONE TWO," and it describes how I felt like I was a soldier marching through treatment. We'll take a closer look at the art i did in 2002 in a few minutes.)

On August 27th, I stopped by my painter friend Leslie Gabosh's art store, The Handcrafters in Chatham New York, and she handed me a fistful of colored pencils. She pulled up a black-eyed Susan from outside the store and she told me to draw. And so, while I was waiting for the dreadful five chemicals that day, I drew in my small journal. And out came this flower:

And that drawing, thank you Leslie Gabosh so so much, brought me a full step closer to painting. And healing.

One day in early September (my chemo was due to be completed October 1st) the difficult doctor I had at Sloan found that I was anemic. This miserable man announced: "Get ready to have a blood transfusion next week because you're gonna need one." I put my mind to avoiding the transfusion and curing my anemia. My friend Connie Caldes, a shamanic healer, came to my house with a giant frame drum one afternoon -- it is four feet in diameter. She drummed me as I sat cross legged on a table. Then I ate a big hamburger for dinner. Lo and behold I didn't need the transfusion. That Tuesday, the doctor stormed into the waiting room. I was eating a banana. He demanded to know "what did you do?" that you don't need the transfusion. I kind of smiled and said, "Well, I had a hamburger and my friend drummed me." And of course I did ANEMIA ART! in my journal!

NUMBER THREE: Art can be endlessly PLAYFUL, if you just give into it.

My routine during those long long weeks of chemo was to have treatment in New York City on Tuesday and then the rest of the days of the week, I drifted gently around the farmhouse and the pond outside my house in a chemo-induced fog, I played with my colored paper, assembling them into some wonderful and some weird collages. And then one day I bought a canvas and a few tubes of oil paint at Leslie's store and I stood outside and painted the lush green hillside outside my Austerlitz farmhouse. 

NUMBER FOUR: Art is like life: it is a moment by moment unfolding! The important thing is to stay connected to the present moment. Stay in your BREATH AND YOUR HEART and art will follow.  Let your heart be an ANTENNA for the Universe, and your paint an accessory!

NUMBER FIVE: Art is everywhere if you just let yourself see it. Slow way WAY down. Breathe. Listen. Let it life/art/love, let BEING arise and flow.

NUMBER SIX:  Everyone is an artist. This comes directly from my Beit Midrash creativity class, a lively group which meets on Shabbat mornings. Last week writer Jadwiga Brown said this: "If you live life to the fullest in each moment, AND YOU NOTICE THE BEAUTY OF EACH MOMENT THEN YOU ARE AN ARTIST, you are being creative. Making your bed, you pull the sheet a certain way and the sunlight falls right there. Or hugging a child." Or arranging flowers, or making pies, or furniture. In other  you are honoring the Infinitely perfect art that is the Universe.

NUMBER SEVEN: As Denise D, a very important healer in my life has said over and over again, do not multi-task. GIVE YOURSELF OVER TO WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING IN THE MOMENT, PAY FULL ATTENTION TO THE BEING and work hard to get rid of your ego.

NUMBER EIGHT: STAY HUMBLE

A few days ago as I was preparing for this talk, I dug into a huge box of old journals. It amazed me to see that I have been drawing and "painting" in my journals for many many years. The journal I kept when I was writing the concluding chapter of Dreaming Maples is proof.

******

Fast forward one year later. July 2003. I was healed. My hair had grown back into a long head of bouncy curls. I had more energy than a racehorse. At my routine checkup at Sloan, however, one tiny spot of cancer was detected on the film. The miserable doctor treating me had not even biopsied it before he insisted that I had to have a stem cell transplant, a last-ditch life-endangering procedure that scours out your immune system. I refused. I said, "you haven't biopsied me." He said, "we will find the cancer I'm sure."

I demanded a second opinion. He said I didn't need one. He said he was the best in his field. The thing about stem cell is that it can kill you even as it's supposed to cure you.  And since I was feeling perfectly healthy, and had been for months, I was damned if I was going to submit without a fight.

Segway to the blue tree. Like all my art, it involves faith.  And the belief in the power each of us has to heal ourselves.  If you’ve read anything about the so-called placebo effect, you will know what I’m talking about.  If you are told that you are taking a very potent medicine, one that will cure you, then darn it, oftentimes it works, even if that medicine is just a sugar pill. 

 

The mind is a very powerful thing when it comes to controlling the body.

 

OK.  So the tree in question was a giant old maple that used to tower over the front yard of our lovely farmhouse. Anyone who knows me and my first book knows that I have a deep affinity for maple trees.  The key maple tree in that book is one I referred to as the Mother Maple, because it was a pivotally-important tree for Candace and Audrey. So I had what you might call a very close relationship to this tree that was in my yard.

OK, so it's this next part that’s a little hard to explain. On a warm night in July of 2003, I had to leave my home to drive to Sloan Kettering for a biopsy the next morning. My husband and I drove off under a perfectly clear blue sky that evening in July.  I don’t remember if I was crying or not as I left, but I know I had terrific heartache.  It was easily one of the scariest nights of my entire life.  My three teenaged children stayed behind.  My children are the ones who reported the weird episode with the maple in the front yard. Within minutes of our departure, the kids reported that the blue sky disappeared and in its place, a vicious lightning storm whipped up out of absolutely nowhere. 

 

“Mom,” my daughter Jocelyn (who today is an extraordinary nurse practitioner leading the COVID vaccination effort in Boston) told me the next day, “It was the strangest thing we ever saw.  You left, and everything was absolutely fine one minute and then the next thing we knew, lightning and thunder came crashing down, and then, all of a sudden the tree just collapsed.”

Just as fast as the storm hit, it vanished.  The maple, a tree that had seen a century of storms, was split in two, the top half fallen across the yard. When I got back home the next day, there were giant green boughs lying like mammoth arms across the lawn.  I started to cry.  I saw that giant motherly tree that I loved so much and She was reaching her motherly arms out to comfort and protect me.  She had seen me the night before get into the car and drive away, to do one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do in my entire life.  It was almost as though she was calling out to me, throwing her biggest boughs  half way across the yard.  She had laid herself, her life, right down there for me in the front yard. 

 

To honor that sacrifice, I decided to paint the remaining portion of the tree blue.  I went to Home Depot to buy a gallon of sky blue paint.  I asked the salesman behind the counter what kind of paint I should buy for “outdoor use.”

 

“Well, so, ma’am, what are you painting?” he asked me.

 

I scrunched up my face. “I am...painting...a tree,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t laugh.

He smiled.  He sold me the right paint, and a long handle for my roller.  Over the next few days, I painted.  Once I’d climbed as high as I dared on the stepladder, I phoned a young man in town and he donned a leather harness and hoisted himself up 30 feet and swung there, right above the main road, and he painted the very top of the tree blue. The neatest thing about the blue color of the tree is that it was exactly the same color as the sky, so that if you looked up, the top of the broken tree seemed to disappear into the ethos.

  

Painting that tree helped me face the trauma I had to deal with that summer.  It reinforced my faith in all kinds of ways.  It helped me find the courage to stand up to the miserable doctor at Sloan and say, “Look, I don’t care if you think I need a stem cell transplant, I disagree, and I want to get a second opinion.” 

 

Painting that tree gave me the strength to go to Dana Farber in Boston to see a second oncologist. The night before I went to Boston, I held a healing ceremony beneath the blue tree.  I invited my closest friends and told them to bring drums and shakers.  We sat in a circle as the sun went down.  We lit candles.  We sang.  We banged on drums.  We asked for healing.  We offered up ears of corn.  We read Native American poetry.  We prayed for health, for me and for all others in need.  We even had a woman there – a professional photographer— who insisted on capturing the event in pictures.

 

NUMBER NINE: ACCEPTANCE. WHAT GOT ME THROUGH CANCER WAS IN PART DEEP ACCEPTANCE. Every morning in meditation, I would yield up my will to the Divine. I would accept in advance whatever it was that was supposed to happen to me that day.

 

The next day, a miracle happened. Witnessing it with me was daughter Jocelyn, my husband and my dear sister Karen, a nurse and public health researcher. When we finally got into the examining room, the doctor at Dana Farber, Dr. George Canellos (an older man considered the Father of Hodgkin's treatment) told us that he was pretty sure that the doctors at Sloan -- who had given me an experimental treatment called the Stanford Five -- had missed a spot of cancer. "I told him that if you're using the Stanford Five, you've got to radiate the edges (of the tumor) properly." Dr. Canellos said that he suspected that the radiation that I had endured in 2002 hadn't done the trick.

 

I didn't think I was hearing correctly. I couldn't process the information.

 

But yes, Dr. Canellos was saying what I thought he was saying.  As my family and I sat there in total shock and amazement, he said that he would need to review my CT scans, etc., but that in his opinion, he was pretty sure that I would not need the stem cell transplant after all.

Suddenly the heavens opened and they were filled with Rockets and Blue Lights!

 

                              (This from the Clark: JW Turner's "Rockets and Blue Lights!")

If you have ever faced a life-threatening illness, or know a loved one who has, then you might have some idea of how enormous was our joy. I sobbed and so did my husband and my sister and my daughter too. And I know even though there is no proof that the blue tree helped, in my mind, it gave me the faith and courage that I needed to make it through.

 

Well, so, it turned out George Canellos at Dana Farber, was indeed right.  I did not need the stem cell transplant.  I needed a bit more treatment but it did nothing to interfere with my good health.

How grateful I am to this day April 16, 2021, to that doctor, long since retired.  I also can't say how grateful I am that I have enjoyed enormously good health since 2003.

 

In 2015, we sold the old farmhouse, and by that point, most of the blue paint had worn away.

But I still drive by the tree from time to time and I breathe in and I say  "thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, for what you did for me."

NUMBER TEN: Always end with a prayer: THANK YOU GOD FOR LIFE FOR HEALTH FOR ART FOR FAMILY FOR FAITH FOR FRIENDS FOR ALL THESE PEOPLE WHO ARE WILLING TO LISTEN. THANK GOD FOR EVERYTHING!