goodbye to all that!

My treatment for cancer finished last week. Hurray! My friends want to know whether the cancer is gone and all I can say is that the tumour was removed, along with my breast, in June, and that the radiotherapy I've been having daily for three weeks was to zap any cancer cells remaining on my chest wall. Will it return? I don't know, but for the rest of my life I will be much better at nurturing my terrain of wellbeing.

When I was first diagnosed with cancer nearly a year ago I set out on an urgent quest to find the cause. The toxic mix for me was a combination of despair about our planet (along with an echo of grief about my mother's death and even from lives beyond that) and a great attraction to alcohol; no doubt the two were related. I didn't tell many people, but for most of the last year, the cancer was suspected (but no longer is) as being a rare and agressive form of cancer, 'inflammatory breast cancer' from which only 40% women are left surviving after five years.

That really focused me on healing in a way that perhaps nothing else would have. So apart from handing myself over to the good people of the NHS - who really are wonderful despite working within a very limited paradigm - and all the other healers from whom I've learned so much - I've been developing (it's still wobbly) a 'trust that goes beyond time' about the process our world is going through I've also finally got the hang of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is one of the sanest, funniest bunch of people I've ever come across. It sometimes strikes me that the one billion of us who are so determined to follow an over-consuming lifestyle that we would even destroy our own home and the people around us, are behaving much as an addict does towards alcohol. Watching myself and the people around me gradually letting go of flying, giving up the aspiration to material wealth, this feels like a kind of withdrawal, with all the sadness and loss of deluded, pseudo-identity that goes with it. But as I've found out this year, losing things can actually be quite liberating.