Greetings, Dear Ones!

I hope this finds you healthy and happy, enjoying or at least tolerating the encroaching holidays and solstice.

I am well. My last cat-scans (late September) were good, with the next series scheduled for January. I have been graced with 17 months now of steadily more robust functioning. I've had a chance to re-taste every season, and some now yet again. Thank you Osimertinib, thank you medical team, thank you friends and beloveds, thank you life.

I am in a small quandary about this blog. It (the blog, not the quandary) began when I was ill enough that detailed, regular reports seemed warranted. These postings have offered multiple benefits: I can communicate with many folks at once; writing helps me clarify what is most salient at any given moment, self-illuminating my health journey and sharing it; and it has felt healing beyond words (emotionally, not just physically) to receive the support, wisdom and smattering of cajoling you have so generously provided. I value the chance to write about my diagnosis in a non-superficial way, and you have met and accompanied me there. Thank you. I have not felt alone.

At the same time, I'm not a particularly public person. Extroverted, exhibitionist, attention-seeking, yes! But public? Nah. (It reminds me of a comment a fellow meditator once made at the end of a two month silent retreat: She discovered she was really an introvert trapped in an extrovert's personality). Prior to getting ill, I never opted to write a public blog. You still won't find me on any social media. In these posts, I've focused mainly on my diagnosis, mentioning but soft-pedaling non-illness details of my life.

So, the quandary: I don't have much to say about my illness right now, but there's several fabulous things going on that I'd like to share! But don't worry (cue the mordant humor) -- give me enough time and the illness reporting will be back. Please be patient (insert the perky emoji of your choice here).

The themes of my last few posts -- feeling renewed, feeling alive -- have taken root. To the degree it ever makes senses to arbitrarily demarcate one's life into discrete chunks, it feels like I'm in a distinct new period.

First, I've moved to a new home in Brookline, MA. It is spacious and comfortable and grown-up. In my heart, I'm still a nomad, or at least a faux-Bohemian couchsurfer (fo-bo-ho? fo-bo-ho-co-su? homo-foboho-cosu?). But I'm 64, with perhaps limited time, and if I'm going to be settled for a while, I'm happy now to do it in comfort. I've got spare rooms and plush towels; you are welcome to come visit!

Second, I feel well enough to step back into teaching. During the pandemic, I created an online course, Unmasking Mortality: A Yearlong Practice in Living and Dying, a program designed to grapple with the inevitability of our own death. With perverse cosmic timing, the harrowing opening salvos of my diagnosis arrived nine months into the course, and became its de facto, in vivo grist. I am now ready to offer the course again, starting in January. As with these posts, teaching helps me see more clearly where I am; it also gives me a sense of meaning and community. I'm trusting an intuition that I have metabolized enough of my journey to know when and how to share it, and when and how to step back and hold space for others. Please consider joining, if it speaks to you. The website is unmaskingmortality.com.

And third, I'm in a new relationship. I wasn't wanting or looking for one, and neither was he; perhaps this has allowed us both to enter with a delight and steadfastness that has previously proven more elusive. Romance at 64 is great! A hefty dollop of glee feels youthful and giddy, but it's leavened with the ballast of age-purchased wisdom. I feel grounded and sane, while in my brain there's also an old-style phonograph stacked high with cheesy pop tunes and Broadway schmaltz, running on autoplay any hour of the night or day, and each squib of each love song rings as true and trenchant as anything you'd find in Shakespeare.

So, lots of joy. This is true even amid the challenges, the most pressing of which is being with my parents as they (and we) navigate the sorrows and sufferings of their old age. I am grateful for the spiritual practices and wise human guides that help me meet all of it with more equanimity and heft than younger versions of myself would have ever dreamed possible. I sometimes think that the whole point of any spiritual practice(defined loosely) is to stretch one's ability to tolerate the exhilarating, excruciating electricity of being alive without overloading the circuits or dimming the wattage. To hold a bigger charge. And so this is my wish for all of us this solstice season: To withstand more beauty and more wonder, to not shut down in face of the unwanted, to remain openhearted amid all the catastrophic gorgeousness that life has to offer, the glories and the train wrecks.

Besides, like the scratchy old vinyl says: I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night, and still have begged for more...

Love, Steve