Hippocrates said many years ago, “Let your medicine be your food and let your food be your medicine!”This I have proven to be true.
A cancer survivor now for 25 years, I healed my ovarian cancer first with a diet given me by Monka, an ET from Mars, also known in Peru as Viracocha. Monka appeared on my lawn one afternoon as I was contemplating how to heal my ovarian cancer. He suggested I eat potatoes, wheat, watermelon and wild greens, focusing on potatoes, which I juiced and ate baked whole, or mashed with little else.
It is hard to concentrate. That may be a bit of an understatement. Aren’t the purple flowers pretty. It is impossible to concentrate, to craft words and sentences together in any semblance of way I did a year ago, even a month ago. So I will stop trying. Not sure if it’s the cancer itself or the immunotherapy for treating it or the morphine for pain management but the organ I had formally known as my brain is now in a constant shift of consciousness - which is kinda funny since one of the definitions of a witch in my Reclaiming Tradition is “one who can shift consciousness at will” not sure whose will it is but there definitely is a lot of consciousness shifting going on.
I have sat down many times in the last six weeks to write but never quite got there. My last post was between Samhain and Winter Solstice, and now it is fast approaching Imbolc/Brigid. It could be the way the cancer itself makes me tired, or the treatment that makes me even more tired, or the morphine I’m using for pain management that just makes me blissfully unaware of the passing of time. I am sleeping 12-14 hours a day, sleeping is healing. Somehow it is fitting that my body is paralleling the experience of the land Herself here in the Northern Hemisphere, after all between Samhain and Imbolc is time for quiet, for darkness, for the death of what grew last year being composted and metabolized so that new growth can happen as we move toward Spring.
I am infinitely awed by human bodies including my own. I revel and delight in the full range of embodied human experience. Now, in my late fifties, post-menopausal, I am experiencing another common embodied human experience, I have stage four squamous cell cancer in my body. This embodied human experience, for me, is also powerful, amazing and fascinating.
There was a moment when I once again began to panic then was suddenly flooded with the grateful and strong presence of Descendants, the ones who may not even be related to me by blood but would benefit from research on the cancer cells being harvested from my lungs. At that moment, that moment of gratitude and strength from the future, this time the needle passed through the wall of my lung easily.
It is no secret that we witches are deeply connected to the cycles of The Moon. We use lunar cycles to make decisions about planting and tending herbs for healing, food for nourishing our families and communities, and what kind of magic is appropriate to do personally, communally, or politically.
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
Janet Boyer
I love the idea of green burials! I first heard of Recompose right before it launched. I wish there were more here on the East Coast; that's how I'd l...