"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!