Dear Bloguee,

I’ve hesitated to blog lately because some serious poop has hit the fan of my life; my mother, diagnosed with malignant melanoma four years ago, is experiencing a recurrence.  I’m in London right now, where she lives, cooking my butt off for her.

It is, as my friends in South Africa would say, “hectic”–only they pronounce it “hictic”.  That’s their word for what we North Americans would call “intense”, “insane”, “screwed up”, and everything stressful in between.  You see, I’ve never been this close or attached to someone with a terminal diagnosis–and, to the doctors, this is a “go home and get your affairs in order” affair.  And even within the world of macrobiotics, malignant melanoma is a bitch.  But not impossible.  Nothing’s totally impossible in macrobiotics–in theory–and that’s what I love about it.

However, this is my mother.  So my clear, objective, teacher’s eye is sometimes clouded by the cataract of fear.  Fear of losing her.  Of going through the seismic shift which that loss represents.  Of crying my guts up for the rest of my life.  You see, I am in the lucky, lucky club of people who genuinely and greedily love their mothers.  She has given me the closest thing to unconditional love I think one human can give to another and I have had the good fortune to recognize the good fortune in that.  So I don’t want her to go before she has to.

And all this feels like my career–my path–is being put to the test.  But I need to be really careful as I say that.  First of all, it’s ridiculously self-centered, and reveals a rigid, dualistic, perfectionist streak.  It’s also fueled by my fear of being judged–by you, the readers I’ve promised all sorts of macro miracles to in my book.  And believe me, MB is pretty freakin’ fantastic.  I know, personally, at least two handfuls of people who have recovered from conditions considered terminal–using food alone.  That’s real.  And it totally blew my mind to witness those recoveries.  However, I’ve also been around long enough to know that macrobiotic practice does not guarantee recovery–it simply gives nature a fighting chance to take back Her territory, if it’s not too late, and if that’s what’s meant to happen.

So I need to focus on the rainbow of benefits that macrobiotics brings, no matter what:  It makes the individual eating the food much more peaceful than would often be the case.  It gives perspective, and right now, is reminding us all of the yin and yang of things (my mother took care of me as a vulnerable child and I am tending to her in this time of vulnerability).  It is reminding me and my mother that we are just energy, expressions of a much greater whole–and we can actually talk about that stuff, without laughing.  It is keeping God in this house, not just through our thoughts, but through the food–its wholeness brings the oomph of the universe right into our cells.

MB philosophy tells me that everything has a front and a back.  Until now, I only ever saw death as a horrible black door down a long hallway that everyone tried to avoid.  I felt deeply repelled by it.  But now, as this situation brings me closer to that door than I have ever been, I can see that there are lovely flowers springing up around it.  I see how beautifully it’s carved.  In fact, it’s looks very much like the door I came in through.  I’m even learning that it can open without too much fear and with a helluva lot of love.  Before, death was all back.  Now I’m seeing some of its front.

But enough about death–my mother’s gonna live for a very long time!!  You see, I’m also reading all the recent books about the Law of Attraction, The Secret, etc. and although my critical mind says things like “that stuff is so cheesy” (because it happens to be popular right now, and I’m a snob) and my arrogance says “I’m a hypnotist–I KNOW ALL THAT”, knowing it and living it are two totally different things.  So we’re all applying the principles of vibrational healing, and this situation is ratcheting up my vibration like nothing has in a long time.  Although macrobiotics provides the excellent fuel that can support my mothers innate ability to heal, we must surround her–and support in her–the attitudes and belief systems that drive her forward to a new, healthier, more integrated version of herself.   And macrobiotics also backs that up:  George Ohsawa identified three Categories of Cure:  The first was Symptomatic, the second Educational, and the third he called Creative or Spiritual: “A life without fear or anxiety, a life of freedom, happiness, and justice–the realization of self.  This is the medicine of the body, the mind and the soul”

Every morning my mother and I do a gratitude list together.  We mention one another, our family, the wind, London, good food, kittens, my stepfather, our health, friends, good movies… the list goes on and on.  As I lie with her in bed, holding her hand, I swear our spirits expand beyond ourselves, into the room, out onto the street, going as far as God-only-knows where.  As our bodies relax and we merge into one being,  I realize that I am fully alive.

Please visualize my mother in perfect, joyous health.  Her name is Susan.  And she’s a redhead.

Thank you.

Jessica

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 8:22 pm and is filed under My Life, Spiritual Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

My whole life, I’ve been a total mess. Some blame it on having had a maid growing up, but my sister was picked up after too, and she’s neat as a pin. Some consider it laziness on my part, and yet I can exhibit profound un-laziness in may other aspects of my life. I remember in college, contemplating the ever-growing pile of dirty clothes in my dorm room thinking, like a frightened junkie: I gotta get a handle on this.

And I tried. I really did. But nothing ever stuck. A boyfriend I had in my twenties couldn’t understand that I cared so deeply about what I cooked for myself, and yet left the kitchen a total mess. After having inhabited by body for quite a while at that point, I completely empathized with the perplexity he felt. The only way I could explain it was like this: “I need you to think of me, honey” I said, sweetening the bomb I was about to drop, “as retarded.”

I wasn’t joking. It’s as if I’m simply wired to make a mess–as powerless as someone with any other wiring issue. And there’s no getting around it. It’s like asking a gay person to go straight, or a straight person to go gay. And what I was asking for from Todd was a little compassion, a little cut-me-some-slack-because-your-judgment-is-really-stressing-me-out and-it’s-not-gonna-get-me-to-be-neat-anyway. Know what I mean?

When I lived at the Kushi Institute, a teacher there said–with disgust–that messiness was a sign of mucky instestines. That totally freaked me out. So I did everything I could to clean out my inner tubing, thinking that could make me a Neat. And I got increasingly neurotic about it by the day. Dried daikon drink. Ume-sho-kuzu. Ginger compresses on my gut. You name it. Anything to make me a Neat! Until one day, I walked past the bedroom of a really fine, experienced, Japanese cook. His name was Naoki and he was in charge of all the food production at the K.I. He had not grown up on a sludgy Canadian diet. His energy was very refined, loving and yet, razor-sharp. His hips were as slim as a supermodel’s and he seemed the last person whose intestines would be full of sludge. And guess what? His room was a pigsty. Okay, not a pigsty, but there was a big, familiar, beautiful pile of dirty clothes on his dresser, spilling onto the floor. I almost had an orgasm.

But even with that validation, we Messies feel deep shame and are often judged by others. We spend our lives trying to turn ourselves into Neats, buying books about organization, filing and scheduling systems. We sometimes even hire the Neats to clean us up, providing short-term relief, but driving the shame deeper when we inevitably what we do best–make a mess.

But those days are over. Thanks to a wonderful book called “A Perfect Mess” by Eric Abrahamsom and David. H. Freedman. It has become my bible of the last week and I can’t express the relief it has given me. It actually questions the universally accepted assumption that neatness saves time and money. Or that strict organization and planning always lead to better results in life. Turns out we Messies (or “Scruffies” as we’re called in the book at one point) are better at a lot of things because we’re actually making room for flexibility, randomness and happenstance. And guess what else? We may even be saving time and resources by NOT CLEANING UP ALL THE TIME!!! Apparently, our messes have their own unconscious systems that work pretty well for many of us, and if the Neats would just stop judging us, we’d all get along just fine!

In fact, messiness is the new thing; companies like Microsoft and Google have a certain degree of messiness in their functioning that allows for ridiculous creativity. Process and not perfectionism is considered the road to innovation. Rigidity is so last century. Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t keep a schedule and yet he manages to run California. Soldiers have to work with the constant messiness of war. Einstein was a total slob. Hallelujah!!!

In terms of yin and yang, it actually makes perfect sense; Yin is the spiral governed by expansion, like a hurricane (messy). Yang is the opposite, governed by contraction (neat). Nature’s tendency is toward entropy–disorganization, expansion, falling apart–which makes sense because the universe is on expand mode. So wait… I guess it’s actually AN INCREDIBLY SPIRITUALLY EVOLVED THING to be messy. Which really begs the question: why do the Neats end up so neat? I have no idea. Those poor, poor Neats. Let’s get scruffy Al Einstein on that one.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 8:06 pm and is filed under My Life, Spiritual Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.