Missing Witches - Cancer Season #2 - Earth with Suzanne Simard

00:00:00.000 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:06.560 You must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:10.720 Friends, beloveds, witches, the demure and the curious, the filthy and wild, 0.88

00:00:18.620 welcome to a strange new season of the Missing Witches podcast.

00:00:23.860 Usually here, starting at the fall equinox, we go looking for the witches we've been missing.

00:00:29.240 But this summer, I was diagnosed with stage 3 invasive breast cancer, and Amy had her land wash away in a flood, leaving a crumbling wound, and we find ourselves on a precipice.

00:00:42.760 We're here, and we come bearing stories, but we can't guarantee what shapes they'll take.

00:00:50.660 I'm starting us off with a miniature cancer season, episodes drawn from the elements.

00:00:56.580 I began last week with water.

00:01:01.400 And this is maybe an awkward detour, but since posting my first in these cancer stories last week,

00:01:09.140 many folks have reached out to ask how you can support us at this time, which is just incredibly kind.

00:01:16.760 Amy and I aim to make our living and support our families from this missing witches work.

00:01:22.900 and we are currently, though definitely, benefiting from unearned systemic privilege

00:01:28.460 earning below the poverty line.

00:01:31.380 Here is a mini-rundown of things that are deeply supportive to us now and always.

00:01:38.360 One, on our website, missingwitches.com, check out Join the Coven and become a supporting member.

00:01:46.020 Two, on our website, check out Shop, buy some sweet merch.

00:01:51.020 three order our books or our ancestor deck from bookshop or amazon or your local witch shop or

00:02:00.500 bookstore four totally free things that actually really help to review our book or podcast on

00:02:10.180 Apple Podcasts or Amazon. Okay, awkward material world detour over.

00:02:20.060 Though it's always there, isn't it? The material, feeding these bodies,

00:02:27.800 keeping the roof from coming down. Today we continue with Earth, because after I've been

00:02:36.600 running in rivers all over the place. Melting. Boring. I need to figure out how to be solid

00:02:42.840 again. These things weren't linear. It wasn't water season and then earth. One thing about

00:02:50.720 cancer for us was the way it bent, fragmented, and twisted time. Things went fast and slow.

00:02:58.360 Timelines folded in on themselves. Noticing the way the moon moved through the sky was

00:03:04.280 helpful, as was the feel of slowly changing seasons on our skin. Better was reaching for

00:03:11.880 the basic elements of life, moment by moment, because they were there all the time. When time

00:03:19.920 folded and stopped making sense, I could come home to the way the water ran through my fingers.

00:03:25.860 I could reach into the soil and notice the weight and millennia of stones. I could feel the wind

00:03:32.100 and witnessed the spark, the ember,

00:03:34.880 the way the smoke covered when the fire went out

00:03:37.000 and we all breathed it in.

00:03:40.340 The elements are a rosary of the present

00:03:43.500 where all is possible.

00:03:46.560 These stories don't go in straight lines.

00:03:50.280 These are songs from a time of grasping

00:03:52.260 for the warp and the weft,

00:03:54.440 threads of life in the dark.

00:03:57.660 This is an episode about holding on to the world,

00:04:00.460 about grounding, digging into the soil, hitting the ground.

00:04:08.080 Trigger warning, this episode contains mentions of suicide.

00:04:15.380 This is an episode about Earth, and my priestess in this dark forest is ecologist Suzanne Seamard.

00:04:23.300 We'll get there.

00:04:25.140 In Red Tarot, Christopher Marmalejo wrote,

00:04:31.380 The Queen of Pentacles, and indeed all queens under the Empress, can help restore lost connections to our motherlands.

00:04:39.460 She helps us collectivize the body, extending personal identification not with a nation but with every bodily expression of the earth. 0.92

00:04:50.600 Her medicine for alienation and physical isolation is to invest in the body as a preserved wildland.

00:04:57.500 as tarot works to summon what's embedded deep within the psyche

00:05:02.940 it leads with the queen of pentacles to maintain psychic social connections through history

00:05:08.640 these connections may be ruptured but they cannot be severed once and for all

00:05:14.660 the queen of pentacles calls upon mother right traditions

00:05:19.900 matrilocality and matrilineality which recognize all equally 0.92

00:05:27.320 the queen of pentacles has no bastard children because all life born from her body is legitimized 0.73

00:05:36.120 by her disregard of state-sanctioned relations we are legitimate as long as we restore the

00:05:43.560 connection to the lands we come from end quote cancer is very lonely no matter how encircled

00:05:53.000 and supported you are and I've been very lucky. You're all alone in the body, the lone reporter

00:06:00.800 that everyone is looking to for reports. And you're alienated from the body too because

00:06:08.000 it is ranks of white-coated unknown celebrants who interpret the sacred texts of your tests 0.96

00:06:15.000 and tell you how in danger you are from what's inside you. The body holds secret betrayal.

00:06:23.000 you're even more alone than you thought.

00:06:26.380 When I was facing and then finding my way back from a surgery

00:06:30.240 that would cut dense bundles of nerves from my chest,

00:06:34.560 myself from myself,

00:06:36.720 I needed to hold on to the knowledge that

00:06:39.440 our connections may be ruptured,

00:06:42.340 but they cannot be severed once and for all.

00:06:47.160 We are legitimate as long as we restore connection to the lands we come from.

00:06:53.000 I can become flail-y and hand-wringing at the thought that I've never really been to where I'm from.

00:07:01.580 Aside from a 24-hour layover one time, I've never set foot on the lands most of my ancestors came from.

00:07:09.100 England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Norway. I'm rootless and severed. 0.88

00:07:16.660 How much more nauseating, then, to be cut off from the body as well. Sensory homeland.

00:07:23.000 As Amy once put it, my daughter's first hometown.

00:07:27.760 May, five and three quarters now, came to my bedside as I was writing this

00:07:32.060 and wanted to add one sentence. 0.99

00:07:34.880 She picked out the letters one by one, then danced away when she was done. 0.94

00:07:41.060 Earth created us.

00:07:45.240 So, not severed, I guess.

00:07:48.820 I have a home, and so do you.

00:07:51.020 to restore connection to the way earth creates and how it holds us

00:07:57.560 i had to feel both the sever and the suture

00:08:02.320 i had to write while the stitches were still bloody all along the underside of my breasts 0.98

00:08:09.160 and while my stupid toe was still stupidly broken and yellow and blue from losing my balance getting 0.98

00:08:17.280 out of bed, after my chest was cut and every startle felt like it ripped me up again. 0.99

00:08:25.060 I had to write while I was more concretely in my body than I had been since giving birth.

00:08:32.380 Birth and death proximity slam us to the ground.

00:08:38.560 Let us touch the unnameable cavernous loop that only the life force knows.

00:08:43.760 No wonder caves are holy places

00:08:47.720 After the diagnosis, I was suddenly tired

00:08:54.260 Like I had never been before in my life

00:08:57.600 I realized later it was shock

00:09:01.640 My body went into a protective, shaky, tender fugue state

00:09:07.020 That is apparently not uncommon

00:09:09.880 At the time, I wrote

00:09:12.720 I am tired and the terror creeps in it's there all day but it builds as a band around my heart

00:09:21.420 the more tired I am the more I feel the weight of the material body and the weight of what is

00:09:27.220 happening so goddamn fast my breast hurts and I have aches in my bones and every weird ache

00:09:34.520 asks the question, is that more cancer? Is it more places? Cancer diagnosis stage three is 0.88

00:09:43.020 standing at the precipitous edge of what gets called uncurable stage four. Though for many

00:09:49.980 people these days, even metastasized stage four is treatable, long livable. The internet says the

00:09:58.660 five-year survival rate is under 30%, but those stats change all the time now.

00:10:04.480 Pharmaceutical innovation is a high-speed train, but not everyone gets to ride.

00:10:12.380 Some people say this is the worst part, the part between diagnosis and treatment,

00:10:17.740 the valley of helplessness, the panic of being untethered with no strings you can pull to

00:10:24.040 affect your own fate. Maybe I'm in the worst part. Maybe other parts won't be as bad as

00:10:32.040 this part. I feel like I can't move my arms from tiredness. I feel like my skin has melted

00:10:41.100 off and I am bones in a barren place. But then my kid comes out onto the porch and asks

00:10:49.160 me to pick her up, and I do. I wasn't strong, and then I was. And as I lay on the couch again after

00:10:57.580 putting her to bed, writing this down, dictating actually, too tired again now to type, just as I

00:11:04.900 spoke those words, I wasn't strong, and then I was. I promise you I couldn't make this up. A blue

00:11:12.300 Heron flew across the sky, across the one small stretch of sky that I can see from where I spend

00:11:19.560 my days melting, dissolving, losing form, worrying. I am called back into my solid state by the solid

00:11:28.740 weight of love in kid form. And there is Heron, flapping improbably, floating on the thick air.

00:11:39.820 we are blood and bones and shit 1.00

00:11:45.140 and yet even weighty lumps of clay like us 1.00

00:11:48.920 can get back up again

00:11:50.620 in Something in the Woods Loves You

00:11:56.720 Jared K. Anderson's memoir of mental health

00:12:00.560 after a long season of deep depression

00:12:04.420 and suicidal ideation

00:12:06.540 the poet writes of his own encounter with the heron it's all still here i thought

00:12:14.260 the heron the creek the trees it's not dead and gone it's not locked away in the past it's not

00:12:24.200 a phantom of childhood or a metaphor for a bygone age it's still here a hundred thousand little

00:12:33.320 rivers. A million secret sites beneath fallen logs and riverbank rocks. It was all still

00:12:43.040 here. I had gone away, not nature. But of course that's not quite right either. I hadn't

00:12:50.560 gone anywhere. I had just stopped noticing. There are two paths to magic, imagination

00:13:00.420 and paying attention.

00:13:03.620 Imagination is the fiction we love,

00:13:06.180 the truths built of falsehoods,

00:13:08.860 glowing dust on the water's surface.

00:13:12.360 Paying attention is about intentional noticing,

00:13:16.400 participating in making meaning

00:13:18.320 to lend new weight to our world.

00:13:22.140 An acorn,

00:13:23.820 the geometry of a beehive,

00:13:26.540 the complexity of whale song,

00:13:28.780 The perfect slowness of a heron

00:13:32.500 Real magic requires your intention 0.99

00:13:36.840 Your choice to harmonize, of course it does

00:13:40.720 The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows

00:13:44.660 To entrance the blue gills

00:13:46.500 Not unless you do your part

00:13:48.780 You must choose to meet her halfway

00:13:51.140 And when you do, you may find that magic isn't a dismissal of what is real

00:13:55.980 it's a synthesis of it the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning i stood there 0.87

00:14:06.040 watching the heron watching as she decided i was not a threat as she turned and paced upstream

00:14:12.900 a poem of ancient slowness i stood and i silently cried with the wind numbing my ears and my tears

00:14:22.800 shining in the sunlight.

00:14:25.160 I was a grown man alone in the woods,

00:14:28.400 crying at a heron's back.

00:14:30.800 And even if I couldn't articulate it at the time,

00:14:33.840 it was the most hopeful I'd felt in years.

00:14:37.680 There was the bird, but not just a bird.

00:14:42.340 The encounter was a bridge

00:14:44.300 to when nature was family.

00:14:49.200 End quote.

00:14:50.160 How has Earth reminded me that I am of them, that I am already home?

00:14:58.000 I struggle to remember sometimes.

00:15:02.240 What do flight and fear of death have in common that they bring me back to the miracle of the material?

00:15:09.420 The day before my biopsy, the first one,

00:15:13.720 a wise coveted mate and friend, Holly,

00:15:15.940 told me that when she'd had a biopsy years before,

00:15:18.960 she had walked out of it feeling okay,

00:15:21.000 and then 20 minutes later, in a coffee shop,

00:15:23.300 the blood had rushed from her head.

00:15:25.480 The pain and fear had hit, and she had nearly fainted.

00:15:31.080 I got the good advice, and still, still drove myself

00:15:35.060 out of the mountains 50 minutes to the Radiologics office to the biopsy.

00:15:42.760 Because I'm still high on the independence of being able to drive myself places alone.

00:15:49.000 Driving was a terror for me for decades. I didn't have my license, so I was a perpetual passenger,

00:15:55.360 out of control, constantly flinching in the car, imagining metal folding towards me,

00:16:01.020 window smashing in. But I got pregnant and moved out to the lake and finally got my license. And

00:16:07.820 after a year of driving May to and from Gauderie in turns with Mark an hour each day, my brain

00:16:15.220 finally just stopped producing constant streams of molecules of glutamate, a neurotransmitter

00:16:22.240 screaming to the hypothalamus, triggering my nervous system, sending electrical shocks to

00:16:27.880 the glands which produce adrenaline, releasing hot clenched terror into my blood.

00:16:35.020 The constant fear triggered by being in the car stopped after enough exposure therapy,

00:16:41.060 I guess, and I could drive and feel my instincts cohere in my muscles.

00:16:46.840 And it felt so good to drive mountain roads and curve around their solidity and feel the

00:16:53.400 palpable power my brain and body wielded in deft adjustments to the wheel and the pedals.

00:17:02.140 So out of stubbornness, I drove myself to the biopsy, and so I had to drive back alone afterwards.

00:17:09.160 But I had Holly's warning in me, so after leaving the hospital, before getting on the highway,

00:17:14.180 just as the head rush hit, I pulled over. I went to a cafe and sat in an awkward rattan swing in

00:17:22.780 the window as the post-biopsy terror slammed my body like a punching bag and the pain came in

00:17:30.200 aftershocks like an earthquake this was one of those things that make you remember you are meat

00:17:42.100 theoretical physicist and cultural theorist karen barad in interview talked about the

00:17:51.000 cutting ways of knowing. The ways that knowing leaps through matter. And I read it differently

00:17:58.140 when I was in the bloody ghostly land of cancer tests. Knowing is a direct material engagement,

00:18:04.880 a cutting together apart, where cuts do violence but also open up and rework the

00:18:11.300 agential conditions of possibility. There is not this knowing from a distance, instead of there

00:18:18.060 being a separation of subject and object, there is an entanglement of subject and object,

00:18:24.060 which is called the phenomenon. Objectivity, instead of being about offering an undistorted

00:18:30.560 mirror image of the world, is about accountability to marks on bodies, and responsibility to the

00:18:39.380 entanglements of which we are a part. End quote. Biopsy cuts do violence and rework the conditions

00:18:48.240 of possibility. Some cases of spontaneous cancer remission have been attributed to violent accidents

00:18:55.960 or hits to the body, or even the biopsy itself, a stapler to the secret under the skin,

00:19:03.000 triggering a fierce immune response in the body that attacks the cancer.

00:19:09.380 For now, scientists can't predict when this will happen, and it's incredibly rare.

00:19:15.560 But reading about it might make you imagine falling down stairs.

00:19:20.880 What would you throw your body towards to escape a disease you can't see killing you from the inside?

00:19:28.540 But there's no way of knowing when and whether this flesh sacrifice would work.

00:19:33.440 And I am responsible, not just to the entanglements of cells that cohere my body,

00:19:39.380 but to the entanglements of love,

00:19:42.440 to the way fear moves through my body and into my daughter's.

00:19:47.740 The fear in labor, all of this wraps around Mark's sinews.

00:19:52.820 I have to do research.

00:19:54.880 I have to advocate for myself

00:19:56.440 and make good choices to ease our pathways

00:19:59.700 and affect the probabilities of life and death.

00:20:04.440 Having driven myself to the biopsy,

00:20:06.980 I have to pull myself together and drive myself home.

00:20:13.460 The bone scan was done down in the basement in a section called nuclear medicine with nuclear waste hazard signs screaming yellow.

00:20:23.380 between friendly posters about online cancer support communities,

00:20:28.500 which, I discover, are largely unmoderated

00:20:32.860 and so have become a molten fear riot of people quitting chemo

00:20:37.940 because they think their nurses poisoned them on purpose

00:20:40.720 or quitting their hormone suppressors because the side effects make them sick,

00:20:46.520 heavily interspersed with unhelpful, to me, messages about Jesus.

00:20:51.540 online gardens need gardeners especially in places where fear is invasive

00:20:58.740 we need plans for the safe containment of our toxic shadow selves and hazardous secretions

00:21:06.600 anyway in nuclear medicine i receive an injection and come back three hours later when the isotopes

00:21:13.060 are at their half-life to lie in a quiet machine that rotates its strong arms around me

00:21:18.560 never touching me

00:21:20.300 making no noise as it moves

00:21:22.680 so that I nearly doze off

00:21:24.200 and then open my eyes

00:21:25.360 to find a massive extension of metal

00:21:27.420 resting

00:21:28.060 silently breathing

00:21:30.900 centimeters from my face

00:21:33.340 and I gasp and imagine being crushed

00:21:35.820 by the weight of it

00:21:36.660 before it silently spins

00:21:38.400 inches away again

00:21:40.560 Alien Choreography

00:21:48.560 bone scans map fast-moving cells in the body but are notoriously hard to read

00:21:56.040 my doctor friend morell says it's more an art than a science they are like diviners

00:22:02.200 we wait for results in the box with schrodinger's cat

00:22:07.280 on the way back from the nuclear test in those days when the shock left my body a terrifying

00:22:14.220 stranger, and it felt like moving slowly through choking soil, and my muscles trembled like that

00:22:20.580 time I'd hauled my body out of the Grand Canyon in an ice storm, screaming with every step.

00:22:27.880 We stopped for a sleepover at Jill and Joe's cottage with their little twin girls, Margo and

00:22:33.680 Nellie, who May calls her sisters. I mostly lay down inside and listened to the sounds of normal

00:22:40.600 life through the window. The girls built a fort with downed branches in the woods. 0.67

00:22:47.120 I mustered myself and went to sit out by the fire, and we sat under a great white pine whose

00:22:53.000 needles had all yellowed. And as the sun went down, for some reason, the pine started to cry.

00:23:03.440 I wrote about the white pine as kin last year, and ever since these trees have felt more than

00:23:10.340 ever like family and here I was beneath a grandmother crying. Needles fell and fell and

00:23:22.220 fell like a soft rain and there was no wind and there was no animal shaking its branches

00:23:29.120 and we thought it was something in the chemistry of the evening, the chemistry of dying

00:23:36.160 and i tried not to imagine it was an omen as a blanket of needles gathered on our hair

00:23:44.600 the table our knees we talked about the origins of democracy in america the origins of american

00:23:52.760 pragmatism rooted in the hodunasani confederacy when the leaders of the six nations agreed to a

00:23:59.720 revolutionary peace and buried their weapons in the roots of the white pine tree. And the authors

00:24:06.580 of the Declaration of Independence referenced this great peace as their inspiration. Peace

00:24:13.500 made more peace. Theory made a multiplying, imperfect union. At some point, late on a panic

00:24:25.140 night before surgery, I imagined that all the cruelties of the world, all its poison

00:24:32.600 and injustice, were rooted in my cancerous left breast.

00:24:40.660 During a missing witch's coven circle I lay and listened to, I imagined holding the fears

00:24:46.400 and brutalities that every member of my coven had been subjected to in their lives, in my

00:24:53.680 flesh and then letting them be cut away. It's magical thinking and grossly grandiose,

00:25:02.100 but it helps pass through the feeling of choking helplessness.

00:25:07.960 Put your sickness here in this flesh and I'll get it surgically removed for us. I'm going anyway.

00:25:16.480 I still had choices to make about how much of my meat self, earth self, I would cut away.

00:25:23.680 My left breast had multiple cancerous lesions,

00:25:27.780 but the right breast was a mystery box.

00:25:30.700 They didn't think there was cancer there.

00:25:34.560 You are not more likely to have it in a second breast

00:25:37.340 just because you have it in the first,

00:25:39.980 but they kept asking for more tests.

00:25:43.600 It turns out on a density scale,

00:25:45.940 I have the densest of breasts, 0.99

00:25:48.100 two black holes within me. 0.99

00:25:50.480 Mammograms are unable to decipher their depths.

00:25:53.680 According to the tech, not only were they black hole-dense, but also riddled with calcium deposits, making ultrasounds frustrating and useless.

00:26:05.100 Biopsies kept coming back undetermined, and when they asked for yet another MRI, it tipped my internal Geiger counter over, and I chose to remove that breast as well, rather than be forever haunted by it.

00:26:20.020 book the surgery no more delays 0.93

00:26:23.900 a college friend writer gene hannah edelstein author of the forthcoming breasts a relatively

00:26:33.040 brief relationship reached out when she saw i had cancer and she became a lifeline to me even though

00:26:40.440 we hadn't really spoken in almost 20 years she wrote to me of her own choice to remove her

00:26:46.480 unaffected breast, and to have a similar reconstruction to the one I'd chosen.

00:26:52.180 Quote,

00:26:52.980 Definitely the right decision, but also a decision that feels like a kind of self-harm.

00:27:00.320 It took me a while to settle my brain around having done it.

00:27:05.120 I had the expanders, too, for six months.

00:27:08.860 The pain does fade, and in time I forgot they were there, except when they made strange

00:27:14.500 sharp corners in my swimsuit.

00:27:16.480 end quote

00:27:18.060 a kind of self-harm

00:27:20.420 I cried and wrapped my arms

00:27:24.660 around my right side one night

00:27:26.300 before the surgery

00:27:27.260 why had I chosen to hurt her

00:27:30.360 when she didn't do anything wrong 0.95

00:27:32.120 part of being dense-breasted

00:27:36.440 also meant that they were dense with nerves

00:27:38.720 the doctor who did my second round

00:27:42.280 of biopsies explained

00:27:43.540 that the two commonly go together

00:27:45.620 and that might have been why I experienced so much pain during the first biopsy.

00:27:51.980 He saw the pain I was in from the very start of the second one

00:27:55.380 and added additional deep layers of numbing

00:27:58.040 till the low-down secret screaming finally stopped.

00:28:03.220 But before all this, being brightly wired with nerve endings had been a good thing.

00:28:10.000 A deep and late-blooming pleasure.

00:28:13.000 I had spent my 20s in a relationship that had numbed my body, and after I got out of that, I swear I could have an orgasm sometimes, just from a soft fabric moving against my skin.

00:28:30.320 It was a kind of self-harm to cut that away.

00:28:34.820 I went through a dark valley of anger and weeping after the adrenaline of surviving the surgery itself wore off.

00:28:41.880 I had expanders placed in the hollow cavities of my chest in hopes of reducing the chance of capuscular collapse, where the living shell your body makes around a foreign object sometimes turns hard and rejects the foreign body, especially after radiation, and you lose your best chance at having a shape that looks close to familiar again, even if it doesn't feel quite right.

00:29:08.780 it felt like the expanders were squares made of sharp edged plastic it felt like they were

00:29:17.040 creeping through a thicket of angry nerves up my neck to strangle me the expanders have metal

00:29:23.500 plates in them to prevent the giant needle they use to fill them with saline solution

00:29:28.120 from piercing through the plastic and i felt and saw and still can see the metal squares in my chest

00:29:36.560 and was angry at the pressure of them.

00:29:41.040 Jean and all the doctors and nurses said,

00:29:43.240 get outside as soon as you can.

00:29:45.980 Sunlight, moving your body, these things will help.

00:29:49.840 On the first day home, I walked 20 steps

00:29:52.680 down the tumbled river stone path

00:29:55.500 to the sand at the edge of the water.

00:29:59.840 On the second day, I made it through the Arch of Alder.

00:30:03.000 I have always thought of, winkingly, as Hecate's bower. 0.61

00:30:08.980 Michael Phelps says a positive affirmation

00:30:12.260 every time he goes through a doorway, apparently,

00:30:15.360 because our mind processes each transition as a new world,

00:30:20.480 a portal of possibility.

00:30:23.540 Hecate, help, stitch me back in.

00:30:28.660 On the third day, I made a small loop

00:30:31.060 around the half-acre of our property,

00:30:33.500 and slowly this became a ritual.

00:30:36.940 I realized I could walk the paths

00:30:39.080 in such a way they made a lemniscate,

00:30:41.380 an infinity loop.

00:30:43.480 The leaves and the sunlight

00:30:45.180 and the pine needles and the ferns

00:30:47.360 and narrow wood-chipped paths

00:30:48.980 and the tall, thin mushrooms

00:30:51.040 so perfectly camouflaged

00:30:52.760 that when you see them,

00:30:53.840 it's like a new dimension

00:30:54.960 suddenly, laughingly alive.

00:30:57.760 It was all more vivid than before.

00:31:01.540 Hallucinatory. Dizzying.

00:31:05.560 But if I'm honest, I walked circuits of anger those days.

00:31:10.100 I didn't show it much, but there was a quiet seething.

00:31:14.060 I didn't feel at home. I felt enraged.

00:31:19.200 I'm writing to you from the chemo well now, even further afield.

00:31:25.460 Chemo kills all the fast-moving cells in your body.

00:31:29.320 That's why you lose your hair and your ovaries stop functioning.

00:31:33.220 And it does feel as though all I'm left with is slow-moving cells.

00:31:39.280 Slow and fetid.

00:31:41.840 Everything tastes and smells bad.

00:31:46.640 Those weeks after surgery were like a premonition about chemo.

00:31:51.540 Everything slow, nauseating, angry, and uncanny.

00:31:55.800 And also, I was always hungry, but food was a stranger, unpredictable, and weird.

00:32:03.280 I had strange dreams and often woke in the night, starving.

00:32:09.560 Once I woke up from a dream about my sisters, planning a makeover for an apartment I'd been staying in,

00:32:16.760 though we didn't have the owner's permission.

00:32:21.000 Another time, one of my oldest friends texted me,

00:32:24.020 hey darling i had a dream about you last night we were in a home depot type of place and you

00:32:29.480 were tired but good fixing stuff up kind of vibe sending you so many hugs my body was a house

00:32:37.640 borrowed and under reconstruction i was being renovated against my will

00:32:43.960 my connection to the earth of myself was being rebuilt in my subconscious and in the dream lands

00:32:50.940 of my loved ones, who held pieces of myself for safekeeping.

00:32:57.600 My strength slowly returned.

00:33:02.320 Kate came to visit, and she and I walked farther than I'd been so far, off the property even

00:33:08.440 and halfway around the lake.

00:33:11.340 The walk smelled of warm, wet earth, and Kate reminded me of Suzanne Seamard's finding

00:33:18.340 the mother tree.

00:33:20.940 I had completely forgotten that her memoir of scientific discovery

00:33:25.020 that showed us how trees pass on nutrients to their kin and community,

00:33:29.860 how they nourish each other, warn each other,

00:33:34.080 how they pour their lifeblood through mycelial underground webs to their children

00:33:38.460 when they know they are about to die,

00:33:41.040 that this story is a cancer story too.

00:33:45.760 Suzanne Seymard writes,

00:33:47.320 the surgeon removed both my breasts

00:33:51.500 and I woke up to Mary and Jean

00:33:53.840 Barbara and Robin

00:33:55.280 hovering as I looked at my flattened chest

00:33:58.800 and pressed the morphine pump

00:34:00.460 a few days later I was in my apartment

00:34:04.460 eating kale and salmon

00:34:06.100 my scars red

00:34:07.940 my bruises as purple as eggplant

00:34:10.440 I walked a hundred meters

00:34:13.780 and another and another

00:34:15.740 ready to go home to Hannah and Nava for Christmas.

00:34:19.720 We just needed the full biopsy results.

00:34:23.340 You might be done with treatments if your lymph nodes are clean, Barbara told me.

00:34:29.180 On our way out of town, we learned that the cancer had spread to my lymph nodes.

00:34:34.840 The two oncology doctors, Dr. Malpass in Nelson and Dr. Sun in Vancouver,

00:34:40.860 said I would receive a new dose-dense regime

00:34:44.560 of eight chemotherapy infusions,

00:34:47.400 one every two weeks over four months,

00:34:50.260 the most effective option for my kind of cancer.

00:34:53.740 They figured I was young and fit enough to handle it.

00:34:57.400 The first half would be a combination of two older drugs,

00:35:01.800 what Barbara called the red devil,

00:35:03.720 and the second was paclitaxel,

00:35:07.380 derived from the Pacific yew tree.

00:35:10.860 I was heading for this exact same regime when I found myself in the arms of the Mother Tree book again.

00:35:20.920 And like Seymard, I'd been muttering this to myself too. 0.81

00:35:25.900 The chemo was derived from the ewe.

00:35:29.040 And not just the ewe, but from a fungi relationship that happens under the bark.

00:35:34.880 Deeply entangled relationships, hidden in plain sight.

00:35:40.860 This helps a little, but I tell Kate,

00:35:44.740 I can't shake the fear and anger at myself 0.99

00:35:48.280 at feeling the desire for these useless breasts 1.00

00:35:51.160 so much that I chose to have plastic under my skin. 0.98

00:35:55.060 I'm mad at the burning, sharp pain of the plastic and metal,

00:36:00.420 at my compromised cyborg desires,

00:36:03.960 and bereft at the loss of feeling all across the front of me

00:36:09.160 that used to face the world and reach out into it

00:36:13.140 with fine, invisible sensors.

00:36:16.940 Kate tells me that she's proud of me

00:36:18.960 for knowing what body shape I needed to be for me.

00:36:23.780 And also that she had knee surgery five years ago 1.00

00:36:27.820 and spent a long time angry

00:36:29.460 at having this metal and plastic rod inside her body.

00:36:33.500 She wouldn't touch it.

00:36:35.060 She felt her whole self pulling away from it, resenting it.

00:36:39.160 She asks me, a little tentative, long pink and silver hair curling down her back,

00:36:46.220 if I've talked to my body, if I've told it why the expanders and the metal plates are there,

00:36:54.540 what they are keeping space for, why the flesh that once was there needed to go.

00:37:02.560 She tells me that some of the nerves affected in her surgery and mine are myelinated nerves.

00:37:09.160 They grow with use, and the memory of use.

00:37:14.100 They're tied to mind.

00:37:17.100 Quote,

00:37:18.060 The bundles of myelinated nerve cells that make up the white matter project into and connect various gray matter areas of the brain,

00:37:27.580 and are thus the site of signal transmission and passage of nerve impulses between neurons.

00:37:35.680 End quote.

00:37:36.220 I tell her about a practice I found online that suggested standing in a mirror naked and lightly tapping in widening circles around the numb flesh of your post-mastectomy breast, then doing it again with your eyes closed, then do it again with a feather, then do it again with an ice cube.

00:37:56.400 i thought that since the nerves regrow at a speed of one millimeter a day i wouldn't bother starting

00:38:04.300 till six months or a year i could avoid the dull sad feeling of touching them for a while

00:38:10.720 but kate said no they grow with use don't wait like i did start now think of them like the

00:38:21.300 mycelial web. Let them send information about what happened to you so they can accept it

00:38:28.240 and reach toward feeling again. You have to face it, even though it hurts.

00:38:36.720 And in a way, you have to forgive it so that you can heal around it.

00:38:42.900 Start wrapping the nerves in you with your memories of how they once were,

00:38:47.180 and draw forward into new memories as soon as you can.

00:38:52.900 You have to talk to your body to rebuild your body.

00:38:57.780 You have to touch the numb and painful places.

00:39:02.940 I walked my figure eight around the property after my dad and Kate left.

00:39:08.360 I passed Hecate's bower and stopped just past the portal in the new world.

00:39:15.020 The moment ticking noon.

00:39:17.180 stood in the little grove watching the sun dance on the water.

00:39:22.200 And I rested my hands, and then my forehead on the alders.

00:39:28.320 The trees which foresters were clear-cutting to give the pines more room to grow,

00:39:34.400 when Suzanne Seamard showed that these fast little limbs of alder weren't taking from the big trees.

00:39:41.880 Instead, they were fixing nitrogen and water in the soil.

00:39:45.340 in forests with a diverse understory left intact the pines were taller stronger better able to

00:39:55.360 resist the pine beetle blight when it came and erased whole cash crop forests needles falling

00:40:02.560 in a dry gray rain for miles and miles and miles i rested my face on the young wise generous boughs

00:40:12.440 And then, so carefully, so afraid of both the numbness and the pain and the weirdness, I held my burning chest.

00:40:25.520 It felt like garbage bags beneath my skin, and I could see a bit of plastic tangled by my feet in the roots at the shore, and I felt a wave of panicked revulsion.

00:40:38.100 But I spoke awkwardly to my insides anyway.

00:40:42.440 These garbage bags, these agglomerations of invention, capitalism, and care, these strangers inhabiting us are holding space, I said.

00:40:58.860 Holding space for a future post-chemo, post-radiation, when they will be replaced with shapes made of sand and cross-linking polymers.

00:41:10.220 this isn't what everyone wants or chooses and that is beautiful this is what i chose

00:41:18.180 and that is beautiful

00:41:20.580 a friend and theorist jake moore wrote to me i look forward to saying nice rack at the beach

00:41:30.860 sometime in the future and it will be funny not creepy because this will be the part you chose

00:41:37.080 for all the reasons that move so far beyond the yet-to-be-known.

00:41:42.580 Yours is a truly theoretical response.

00:41:45.940 For, quote,

00:41:47.160 Theories are not mere metaphysical pronouncements on the world

00:41:50.900 from some presumed position of exteriority.

00:41:56.120 Theories are living and breathing reconfigurings of the world.

00:42:01.640 She quoted Karen Barad.

00:42:03.920 breathing reconfigurings

00:42:07.040 and I held on to that

00:42:09.500 as I held my beautiful garbage bag

00:42:11.940 rock in the woods

00:42:13.000 believing in the future

00:42:15.160 talking theory to my cells

00:42:17.980 we made it

00:42:19.800 and we're part of nature too

00:42:22.100 we make mistakes in what we make

00:42:26.040 but our mistakes have the wisdom

00:42:28.720 of earth in them

00:42:29.920 and growing right next to them

00:42:32.920 might be the undoing of our mistake

00:42:36.980 or the antidote or the symbiont or friend.

00:42:42.980 I picked up the plastic off the beach and kept walking.

00:42:48.240 Suzanne Seamard wrote,

00:42:50.520 After the last of the paclitaxel had been shot into my veins,

00:42:55.240 I brought Hannah and Nava to this grove.

00:42:59.240 The spring beauties and skunk cabbages were in bloom.

00:43:02.920 These are the ewes that made my medicine, I said, and we put our arms around their gnarly trunks.

00:43:12.000 I asked them to look after my daughters, all of the daughters, as they did me.

00:43:19.060 In return, I promised to protect them, ask questions of them, seek treasures still unknown.

00:43:25.740 unlike most conifers here they formed relationships with arbuscular mycorrhizas

00:43:34.080 so did they connect with the cedars and the maples i bet that they kibitzed with the bigger

00:43:41.320 trees and the tiny plants at their roots the wild ginger and rosy twisted stock and false

00:43:48.480 lilies of the valley. A thriving webbed neighborhood might boost the ewe in producing

00:43:55.440 paclitaxel in greater abundance, stronger potency. End quote.

00:44:04.680 I walked slow loops for days. I still do now, as I claw myself step by step

00:44:11.360 out of the poison path inertia of chemo.

00:44:17.000 I imagine if I walk enough,

00:44:19.900 then whenever I do pass on,

00:44:22.340 sometime a long, long time from now,

00:44:26.080 the particles here will still swirl

00:44:29.780 and remember my heat and breath.

00:44:33.380 These fabrics and this particular balance

00:44:36.560 and weight passing through.

00:44:38.120 and maybe whoever lives here then

00:44:41.580 will catch a glimpse of me

00:44:42.960 coming around the corner

00:44:44.500 maybe it'll be May

00:44:47.600 and I will wave

00:44:49.540 I walk through spider webs

00:44:54.440 fine across my face

00:44:55.980 all along the path

00:44:57.880 and try to pluck them from the air

00:45:00.860 and reattach them safely

00:45:02.480 can I act

00:45:05.240 walk

00:45:06.080 speak

00:45:07.060 parent gently enough

00:45:09.580 to restore connection to the lands we are from

00:45:13.460 leave enough behind to earn my place

00:45:18.200 in the neighborhood

00:45:19.220 weeks after surgery

00:45:23.580 I get access to the full text of all my test results

00:45:27.200 and pour over them like tea leaves

00:45:30.260 why is this part of my insides

00:45:33.640 slightly thick, slightly long

00:45:37.400 What does probably benign mean?

00:45:40.720 What do you know about my body that I don't?

00:45:44.360 After the surgery, I want to ask all the white-masked faces who had been there,

00:45:49.100 what did you see in there?

00:45:51.140 What can you tell me about me?

00:45:53.860 You, who have had your hands feeling along my wet muscles,

00:45:58.040 following lymph nodes,

00:46:00.100 carefully cutting away my root work of veins,

00:46:03.260 do you know which parts of me are me?

00:46:06.580 which parts are cancer

00:46:09.340 which parts are mother tree

00:46:12.380 this is also how I learn 1.00

00:46:15.180 that the right breast

00:46:16.540 which I had decided to remove prophylactically

00:46:19.960 did in fact have lobular carcinoma in situ

00:46:24.640 stage 0

00:46:25.940 not cancer yet

00:46:28.120 but a tipping over state of pre-cancer

00:46:31.000 that makes you 7 times more likely

00:46:33.420 to develop cancer in that breast 0.76

00:46:36.460 It was not self-harm, though it hurt like hell.

00:46:42.240 It was self-preservation.

00:46:49.480 One night, while wrapping her head around what she was learning about what would happen to me,

00:46:56.160 that after surgery I would take a medicine so strong I would lose all my hair,

00:47:00.580 may panicked before bed and in response i gave her a teacup full of stones

00:47:07.280 earlier in the day she had picked up a geode which our friend spencer had given her last

00:47:12.860 year for christmas and held it close to her heart saying she needed it down in her room

00:47:17.980 so when i took my grandmother's china cup and filled it with small crystals and favorite rocks

00:47:24.600 while she dried her tears and took gulping breaths.

00:47:28.080 It wasn't entirely out of the blue.

00:47:32.380 I said, these come from deep in the earth.

00:47:36.000 They have been made beautiful by heat and pressure,

00:47:39.840 so they know about wisdom and patience and strength.

00:47:46.280 When you're scared, you can think of them, I said.

00:47:50.180 And she held the cup to her heart and said,

00:47:53.380 thanks so much mom that helps so much

00:47:56.840 and in the end

00:48:00.300 that's all I have to offer you

00:48:02.800 here is my cup full of stones

00:48:06.460 no energy gets created in the universe

00:48:10.040 and none is destroyed

00:48:11.720 while I was recovering from surgery

00:48:16.560 a wise and beloved coven mate

00:48:18.860 who had joined our circle and made a huge impact

00:48:22.760 and then gone quiet, died by suicide.

00:48:27.680 She had led grief circles that profoundly impacted all of us

00:48:31.580 who got to be there with her.

00:48:34.180 She hosted them from a park because she was living in her car, 0.57

00:48:39.080 because she was on the run from a bad man.

00:48:43.580 We all loved her and were in awe of her

00:48:47.100 and checked up on her,

00:48:50.020 and it wasn't enough.

00:48:52.760 My belly is a cold cup of stones.

00:48:56.180 I found out about Tara's death on my chemo eve.

00:49:00.780 That night we talked about fear and grief

00:49:03.660 and Genesis Peorges' invocation to try to alter everything.

00:49:09.920 How can we make altars to a universe that seems to act without sense

00:49:14.940 or feeling for our gouging pain, our terror, our heartbreak?

00:49:19.840 The next morning I opened a package from a coven mate who goes by Granny Witch

00:49:25.480 And unfolded a purple and gold quilted altar cloth

00:49:29.980 The design twisted and braided like my paths through the forest

00:49:35.640 May and I laid it across us as we watched first aid kit concert footage

00:49:42.580 And the secret sisters

00:49:44.460 And the fat needles of chemo drugs coursed through my veins

00:49:49.460 and my vision blurred

00:49:51.720 and the world looked jeweled

00:49:54.700 like it was made of tiny hard-edged stones

00:49:57.640 all vibrating.

00:50:01.440 Quote

00:50:02.240 If we could follow an individual atom

00:50:06.160 back through its history

00:50:07.980 it will have been incorporated many times

00:50:11.320 into other animals and plants.

00:50:14.780 Bear in mind that you contain

00:50:16.280 around 100,000 times more atoms

00:50:19.020 than the number of humans that have ever existed.

00:50:23.700 In fact, your atoms have been in pretty well every type of living thing,

00:50:28.640 from trees to grass, insects to dogs, end quote.

00:50:36.560 We are cups full of stones, particles moving with coherence and momentum,

00:50:41.860 with our myth-making for a while before moving on to another formation.

00:50:47.220 Physicist Aaron Freeman wrote in Eulogy from a Physicist

00:50:52.340 Quote

00:50:53.440 All the photons that ever bounced off your face

00:50:57.000 All the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile

00:51:01.640 By the touch of your hair

00:51:03.860 Hundreds of trillions of particles have raced off like children

00:51:09.080 Their ways forever changed by you

00:51:12.500 Scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy

00:51:18.560 and found it accurate, verifiable, and consistent across space and time.

00:51:26.840 Your energy is still around.

00:51:30.660 According to the law of the conservation of energy,

00:51:34.600 not a bit of you is gone.

00:51:37.540 You're just less orderly.

00:51:40.360 End quote.

00:51:42.500 For now I am here, on this side of the veil, and Tara is free, stones out of the cup, long hair in the leaves, her energy elsewhere, particles still dancing from glancing off her face.

00:51:58.720 I wish I could have known and flown to her and held her close, my beautiful friend in the pixel box, shape made of light who reconfigured the world.

00:52:09.360 all i know is there are pieces of you over here in me

00:52:15.040 in all our forms broken sick tired we belong to earth to tara to every single loved one now

00:52:26.940 less orderly and woven through us all atomically no matter our parentage we are chosen ones

00:52:34.740 perfectly designed and desired

00:52:37.060 by the fractal, spiral soup goddess

00:52:40.560 of ferns and compost.

00:52:43.800 You are exactly where you are supposed to be,

00:52:47.340 I whisper through the portal,

00:52:50.320 reaching with my nerves growing millimeters at a time

00:52:53.560 towards the mother trees,

00:52:56.500 shaking with fear and grief.

00:53:00.240 I fill my pockets with stones when I go to chemo.

00:53:03.520 I tuck Tara in my heart

00:53:07.680 And promise her sister I'll keep the pieces of her she left with me

00:53:12.660 Safe and cherished the way she always should have been

00:53:16.960 I'll tuck you in my place of safekeeping, too

00:53:21.860 And I know you're out there holding me

00:53:28.220 In Cat's Cradle, a novel about string games and entanglement

00:53:33.080 Kurt Vonnegut, who is one of our patron saints

00:53:36.700 in the Missing Witches' Coven

00:53:38.460 wrote,

00:53:40.200 Life is a garden, not a road

00:53:43.040 We enter and exit through the same gate

00:53:47.080 Wandering where we go matters less

00:53:51.440 than what we notice

00:53:53.040 In Tara's name I invite you to notice with me

00:53:57.000 Reach your tender roots out to see who might need you

00:54:02.120 make it part of your craft

00:54:05.840 this weaving of care in action

00:54:09.020 coven

00:54:11.540 here in the dark we make between our ears

00:54:15.020 as we slip through the portal of this ending

00:54:18.860 let's whisper into possibility

00:54:23.640 ourselves

00:54:26.000 as a terra web of mother trees

00:54:29.500 so it goes 0.99

00:54:31.460 and blessed fucking be 1.00

00:54:34.560 you must be a witch 1.00

Missing Witches - September 30, 2024

Cancer Season #2 - Earth with Suzanne Simard

Episode Stats

Transcript