Since being diagnosed with breast cancer, I’ve heard several women share that they viewed breast cancer as an inconvenience and chose to not give it any power. It’s like someone backing into a car door and having to take the car in for extensive work. It’s a pain; it costs money, time and energy but its just life so it has to be taken care of. I’m sure there are more layers to their journey and this is merely one nugget they wanted to share in an effort to ease my mind but I must say it did not resonate with me.

I’m choosing to view my cancer as a doorway, an opening to deeper understand and healing. My friend Laura quoted Rumi the other day, “the door is wide open, don’t go back to sleep.” That resonates.

I will take care of the cancer by removing my breasts but then I still have to do the work. I find when I don’t do the work my basket gets full and the ideas become toxic and start sloshing around between my ears. Then I become crabby and angry, so I have to drive myself up to sit by the river so I can fill up a journal of thoughts and creativity. Then all feels right within me again.

This is what I wrote today at the river.

I know this cancer came to me for a reason so I can’t ignore it by going to surgery and coming home and continuing on in the same manner I have been living. I believe this cancer developed from the deluge of toxic thinking that I’ve been swirling in for the past several years that wasn’t allowed to flow. I held it in and its energy has to go somewhere. Lucky for me it tucked itself into a few tiny ducts in my breast so that I could easily remove the toxic hairball of energy and go on living my life.

This is what is calling my attention right now and anything that catches my attention becomes a doorway to my deeper self. It’s really no different than a pinecone floating down the river or the dart of cerulean blue outside my window as a Stellar Jay flies by. Those are all doorways as well. Perhaps because of the gravity of cancer though this feels like a much deeper, broader doorway.

It feels as if it carries more weight than a fast floating pinecone buoyed by the flow of the river. But wait, another pinecone floats by. Perhaps there is something here trying to capture my attention.

Pinecones are seedpods, capsules of new life, yet these have already spread their seeds and moved into crone-hood. They have fallen from the branches onto the soil and somehow found their way into the river. Their outstretched wings have already released the seedlings into the air with the hope that their floating offspring would find their way to soft embracing soil and grow to be as large as the tree in which their mother grew and fell from.

Oh the places that crone of a cone will travel. The things she will see as she makes her way over mossy rocks and by tall riverbank grasses. She is finally free and her next adventure is just beginning.

Hmm I’ve fed my babies with these breasts. Is it now time to shed them for a newer sportier version that will allow me to jump into the river of life and begin a new adventure. Perhaps its necessary to shed these toxic hairball filled breasts in order for me to step into the fullest expression of myself.

Oh the wisdom of a pinecone.