Clarity

Earlier today, I was recalling the telephone call I got from Dr. Chuma several weeks ago informing me that the pathology report on the original lymph node removed from my neck had come back positive for cancer.

Dr. Chuma -- who I'm sure has had to make this type of call on many occasions in the past -- just moved quickly through the facts that he felt I needed to know and start dealing with. No sugar coating. No "I'm sure everything will turn out okay." However much I wanted to hear him say that, it really wouldn't help since it wasn't true.

I had expected the pathology to come back negative -- that the lump he removed in surgery was simply a harmless sebaceous cyst like the half dozen I've had located here and there around my body. Which made the information he was giving me all the more unbelievable, surreal, impossible.

As I paced the floor with my telphone in my ear, hearing these totally incredible words, my mind racing to figure out what really going on (since this couldn't be true!), a remarkable thing happened:

I felt there was a mist forming over my head -- maybe 2 or 3 feet above me. And after forming, it descended ever so slowly until it touched me, and then it proceeded to move down the length of my body. And the parts of me that it touched were transformed.

As it moved down my body, a great deal of pettiness and silly or stupid ambitions, false beliefs and useless fixations, were washed away. (You know how, when you're taking a shower, you soap up outside the water stream, then step under the shower head and the soap forms a cascade as it rinses off your body? It felt like that, but this was a non-physical -- a metaphysical/spiritual -- rinsing.)

I lost track of Dr. Chuma's words as he was speaking, but that wasn't a problem. I knew that I would have other occasions soon to get all the medical information I needed from him.

But this feeling of being cleansed I knew to be a special blessing that I should experience as fully as I could. So I tried to relax into the feeling of goodwill and peace that the mist brought with it. I felt that, if I could hold onto the feeling -- the clarity -- that this mist imparted to me forever, that I would move beyond the vicissitudes of life forever. Maybe to become the rightful self that we all have in store for us -- that lives inside of each and every one of us. Waiting for release.

I can't tell you which stupid ambitions were washed away. Or which useless fixations no longer have a hold on me. That's not really the point.

And, at the moment, as I try to keep up with my doctors' visits and the medical information I'm working to absorb and the decisions I'm being asked to make, that wonderful feeling of being cleansed seems remote.

But not gone.