"Did you feel pain or recall anything of the surgery?" asked the chipper anaesthesiolgist, leaning over my recovery room bed.

"No, I was at the beach," I answered, newly conscious.

To be exact, I was the beach, the Pacific Ocean, curving, roiling, rushing up the sand, every watery molecule aware, a living motion of waves gathering, building, emerging, breaking, rushing, pausing, retreating, re-joining the immense eternal whole.

Pale yellows and deeper golds reflect the sun, superimposed on a base blue-grey like underpainting in an Impressionist's summer seascape.  The colors mix and roil, pulse and change.  And the Pinks! the palest rose blushed across froth, pink reflected in the glass-clear liliputian parts of water shining out, ecstatic in its waterness, serene in a tenderness of hue.

As my son and I sat in the surgery waiting room earlier that day, chatting with equally nervous and hungry neignbors, an exuberant fellow across from us shared the experiences of his own cancer and treatment -- now a year past --a far more complex and intense affair than I am led to expect.

"It was hard," he said.  "It changed my life.  I am not the same."  He smiled at us, offering any help he could give, encouragement for the journey, apparent satisfaction in the change.

"I am not the same," my dear neighbor and friend has told me, another cancer survivor.  It is clear her experience was frightening, a trauma played out in a foreign land, and yet a gift came out of it.  "I will never be the same," she says, and hearing her, watching her face as the words form and are spoken, it is apparent she means this in the most positive way----a precious secret, shared with an initiate.

Now, days later, I am decidedly on the mend.  Yesterday I was impatient to get about my business but not yet ready..habit preceding its time.  Today I am more myself:  intent and action nearer to congruence. 

I hold the memory of water close, the feeling of color, the perfect unfolding of a cresting wave.  I hope to remember.

Oh Muskrat, you are a tricky one!

Sundays are unique. For some, of course, it is the day to attend a worship service, to set aside customary morning routines and redefine focus and attention. For others it is the day that starts late, the day that is for rest, for a leisurely read of the newspaper, for poking about in some pursuit not intent on outcome.

Growing up, Sundays were for church attendance. In the afternoon a large and leisurely dinner was served and it wasn't until evening that the tedious requirements of daily life pressed in (well, bickering with my sister over dish-washing duties notwithstanding).

Although I no longer attend church services, Sundays continue to be holy for me. When I finish this post I will go out and run the weed-eater, disrupting the quiet in my neighborhood, upsetting the Sunday smooth curve of late summer's mid-day air. But when I am done the rift will close, the air will reform into its unbroken quiet path across our forested suburban countryside. The Sunday-ness of the world will have been just slightly disturbed by me, the wholeness of it intact.

I don't know what makes Sundays so unique: is it the inhabited quiet, the collective knowledge that it is a day outside routine, the unhidden secret of time stolen from our usual pursuits, the reverberation of innumberable lifetimes identifying this day as different?

I imagine that were I the Dalai Lama or some other Enlightened Being a sense of unremarkable holiness would be evident every day. It will have to be sufficient for now that it is this day, today, that feels holy to me. Tomorrow will have to fend for itself.

The first day of school is imminent: my resident grandson is entering his high school sophomore year. If I were a muskrat my grandchildren would be virtually uncountable (assuming muskrats can enumerate). Mother muskrats produce approximately six babies twice per year. Even given the dangers of the woodland, brush and stream, that means a lot of progeny! Their cozy burrows--reached like beaver dens from underwater portals--must get very crowded, requiring early emancipation for sheer survival's sake.

I, on the other hand, have slacked off with only three children and five grandchildren, the youngest mentioned above. Each of them is precious beyond speaking. When I think of the various and varied activities undertaken these seventy years, my children and grandchildren are paramount. Whether I see or hear or hold or even know them is irrelevant. The cord that binds me to each of them is made up of too many strands to ever break. They are irrevocably part of me.

Cancer (the illness) has become a societal catch-word for mortality. Yeah, yeah, we're all mortal, and so what. But cancer...now there's some serious mortality! It's a word, when applied to oneself, that puts muscle into the phrase "live each day as if it were your last." Even if it's clear that the cancer in your own person is not going to be your particular cause of death. In that sense, cancer is indeed a gift. "Living in the moment" (with appropriate regard for paying the light bill, showing up for your chemotherapy, etc.) is certainly preferable to worrying the past and second-guessing the future.

This moment: warm smile thinking of progeny, friends, relations, and the hundreds of people who have tenderly shared their lives with me in my therapy office.

Next moment: oatmeal with raisins and brown sugar. Num.

Some evenings ago driving home from my last client of the day, an odd apparition appeared. It was dark out and I was on the last leg of the drive, just past the fish farm. In the middle of the headlight-illuminated road stood what looked to be a long-legged rat wearing overshoes, its stretch-nosed face turned up toward me with a pleasant if inquisitive expression. When I mentioned the odd sighting to a friend who was visiting, he said it was a muskrat. Perhaps, I said vaguely, my mind worrying at the schedule of doctor's appointments ahead of me and the unknowns they represented.

A week later..appointments met, surgery scheduled, preliminaries arranged, information gleaned...I have sulked my way through a spot of resistance, pulled up my metaphorical socks, and pronounced myself ready to embark on this journey called surviving breast cancer. I have no doubt at all that I will survive it. There may be surprises and unpleasantness along the way, but the current news is positive.

I write as a poster-woman for regular mammograms performed by top-notch professionals at a central medical center. Because my primary care provider prods me annually, I have been compliant if dismissive. No one in my family has ever had breast cancer. My expectation of ever encountering it personally was less than zero. But I was wrong.

So I am pondering that muskrat and considering its news. S/he is "Wazhushk" in the Ojibway language, spelled Wajashk by extended relatives I once visited on their northern Ontario Reserve. They named their Fish Camp and cabins Wajashk, to honor muskrat. The cabins are trim and painted yellow, and sit alongside the beautifully turbulent French river.

Muskrat is critical to the Anishnabeg, for she dove through the seemingly bottomless waters and retrieved soil crucial for First Woman to begin life on this turtleback world. Wajashk was the least of the water creatures, expected to fail, but she did not. Without Wajashk life would not have taken hold on Turtle's back, and we would not be.

So also, perhaps, is Muskrat critical to my new world. Perhaps this musing is the start of my own "Muskrat News"...notes of an unexpected journey begun as I step into my seventieth year confronted with cancer. What could be better than that!