Dead man walking???

Got the results of my scans on Thursday and the cancer is back. Three nodules in the intestines. My oncologist made it official. My cancer is now considered incurable. She gives me 4-6 months without treatment. 6-12 with chemo. You might think I'm depressed and anxious but I'm not. In fact my spirits remain strong. After meeting with the folks at MDA, I called Bill, my homeopathic consultant, who has a completely different script for me to follow. Bill's prediction is, that if I follow the regimen he's given me, within 4 months I'll see a reversal of the cancer growth and within another 4-5 months it will disappear. I already have one month completed. Bill tells me he has worked with over a hundred people in the last 17 years and every one of them has gotten healthy. All kinds of reasons for skepticism here. I get that. He could be a complete fraud. I don't think so and neither does Paula but the possibility exists. Either way though his script is a lot better than the one from MDA. His story has a happier ending :-)

So we are going to move to Asheville, NC to be close to family and to practice at the Wind Horse Zen Center. The next six months, I suppose, will write another chapter in this tale. Perhaps the last chapter, perhaps not. Either way is okay.

Meanwhile I'd like to share with you a quote from Zen teacher John Tarrant that I recently read on the Austin Zen Center discussion listserv. It struck me as particularly salient considering the certainty with which MDA predicts my imminent demise and the certainty with which Bill predicts my full recovery.

"Zen people talk about emptiness because when you awaken, the maps that hold your beliefs are suddenly gone. You also notice that new maps appear in the mind, even without encouragement from you. And as new maps appear, you can take them as provisional.

The Zen task is to open to the gates of the world beyond our prejudices. Like the Buddha, we can step away from everything we are certain about. I think this possibility is the best contribution we can make to healing the flaws in consciousness and helping the world. Unkindness comes out of certainty; when we throw out certainty, we have the bare reality of consciousness, and another name for that is love."

I love you all,

Koso