Hope and fear in The OC

This morning I arrived at my dad's in Costa Mesa. I'm making him a lime walnut tart for his 83rd birthday tomorrow. He is doing better than I thought he was. He is sometimes repetitive but in other ways he is pretty mentally sharp. Laura and I will head for L.A. tomorrow night and the train to New Orleans.

I had a wonderful day yesterday. It started with an hour of chi gung at the tennis court with Teng How (shown on the left, not his best side perhaps), a short nap upon my fatigued return, Misha's for acupuncture, and the MBSR course I'm co-teaching with Bill and Allison. My body is sore from the chi gung but it makes me feel great.

On the table at Misha's, I visualized my lungs being healthy, healing energy coming to me from the universe, and briefly White Tara (archetype of long life and wisdom among other things) appeared above my head. Then I bonded with the guy, Drew, who came to do moxa and take out the needles. Usually the person doing moxa asks that I let them know if it gets too hot, but it never does, I'm assuming because of numbness. This time it did get too hot...does it mean there is feeling coming back to my feet? Or was he simply less timid? They do seem less cold. If it has changed it is very slow so it's hard to say. But I felt very happy when I was there and had a great chat with Drew who gave me the all time best foot massage (at least that I've ever gotten there, possibly ever!)

While there I thought, Ah, I ought to do this all the time: Maybe find a photo of healthy lungs and visualize them all the time, imagine healthy energy, in the same way that we "scoop up the energy" doing chi gung, descending into my lungs. (Of course I haven't done it since then but thinking about it was damn inspiring.)

Co-teaching the MBSR course is interesting. I know that we are helping people a great deal, well, people who are up to the task anyway. What's interesting is how my confidence in myself waxes and wanes. I sort of alternate between wondering if I'm a fuck-up or a fraud with feeling incredibly inspired by what we are doing (and how we are doing it.) (The class however is incredibly late for me, and the second half especially I was very tired. I got home at around 10pm.)

Anyway, I'm here now.

I spend much of every day looking after myself in various ways. People, including doctors, no doubt including me, have very strong opinions about what I'm doing, or have done, that helped, or not. Whenever I cough or I'm tired or whatever, some small voice in me is saying, Is it cancer? Is it happening now? Or it says, What if I went into, or am in, remission? What will I do? And yet another part of me hovers somewhere else, immune to hope and fear.