If this past year was a jump into a future I haven’t had yet—being 80 when I’m only 50—I thought I was trying to get out of the future and into the present.

When the cancer crisis pushed me out of the biggest event of my new job last year, I had to accept that I would have to wait to experience Coachella, the biggest music festival in America. I walked into the spectacle last weekend. In my mind  I’d be joining the life in the present that I’d skipped the track on last year.

I’m not a fan, or a customer of the festival. Of course I’m a fan, but in this case I’m a worker ant, moving the pieces to put the art puzzle together. My ant eyes could only see so much. Still- I looked through a wormhole—a tear in the fabric of my universe

The sensation of time doesn’t follow any laws. 

The stages, the clothes, the images and the music exploded my mind. 

Was I in a warped and fabulous future? was I so out of step with culture that the current moment was unrecognizable?

Maybe it wasn’t the moment, maybe it was myself that I didn’t recognize.

The reporting on this year’s festival declared it was a celebration of 90s music. Time warp to 30 years past. When am I again?

As the worker in this temporary carnival, I had access to the back lot. All the workers came through the mess tent—catering is what they call it in the entertainment biz. Care was taken to make it pleasant. Big speakers played songs for people as they ate.

I expected a playlist of songs from the performers that were scheduled for the festival. What I got was the hits of the 80s 90s and …nothing from today.

Which edge is the cutting one?

While I was fretting that I was out of step, the trend is moving back in time. It’s not that the latest music isn’t appreciated by the newest generation. But music from 30-50 years back is also popular. When the festival organizers picked No Doubt and other 90s acts, they were tapping into a real impulse.

Cover songs and retro originals are popular right now. Comfort culture perhaps? The streaming stats show that GenZ is a big consumer of 2000s music. More and more cover tunes come up in my media

The stagecraft at Coachella is new, but I am familiar with how music is being used and spread.

The way music is discovered and consumed has to do with the many ways it can be delivered. Background music used by content creators is moving toward nostalgic styles of royalty free music. 

This has happened before. There was a ASCAP strike in 1942. Musicians had to play songs that were public domain (royalty free) while things were beign worked out. That was the big band jazz era. They ended up finding songs from decades past that kept them working. The jazz standard “As Time goes by” was from that time. 

It’s new if it’s new to me. It’s also new if I am seeing it in a way I never have before.

New perspectives were pushed on me. Here I’m seeing new angles on thingd I’ve known for a long time.

This is rare. I make sure to write this essay every week. I’ve blogged for 22 years and sent out  this weekly wonder email for more than ten years. 

It’s part of my identity. I never missed it during my chemo treatments, and I am fairly certain I didn’t miss it anytime before.

And yet.

I have two hours to write something, and I’m not even sure what it will be.

I’ve been waking up and trying to get back to …normal?

This makes me think of what we were all saying during the COVID lockdowns: the new normal.

I spent this weekend working the Coachella festival event. Before I got this job, I would never have aspired to go to this event. It seemed like something that was too high above me.

But then I got a job at the company that puts it on. I was very thrilling with anticipation. Especially  to see the technical side, which is even more exclusive. I could hardly wait to get there.

Until I was surprised with cancer news. Surgery was scheduled last year on the very first day.

No Coachella 2023 for me.

It’s been quite a year. I had the festival on my mind as I tracked my appointments and timed when I would have my strength back to experience the festival.

What I didn’t properly account for what how depleted I would be the day after.

The entire weekend I was at the festival and was knock flat by so many things. What an event!

And the next few days I could barely function. This is the wednesday after, I realized I forgot to write this essay.

My mind was so full, and so physically exhausted that I couldn’t tease out the thread of a profound thought to explore.

Gravity has increased for me so that I couldn’t get out of bed.  I had so many experiences—sights, sounds, feelings and sensation—that I’m still exploring.

My world got so small—in COVID and then again last year. This festival reminded me of how big and beautiful the world can be, and that I’m invited to be part of it.

I’ve always been a systems person. Some people think of it as habits. I have systems and I work them consistently—even when I was very little. It makes sense to me, and I like getting things done that way.

But a year ago, I was shaking as I looked into the future of a big surgery. Then all the things that came after that. All the things that I put my body through.

In ways I never had before, I let go of anything that wasn’t necessary. It took all I had to do the basics. The minimum took all I had.

Old habits fell away.

And now I’m coming up from the depths. I’m still not sure which way is up.

I had to take an online class for work, so I chose one on time management. An easy basic that I could do without thinking about it.

Until I was hearing the systems the teacher was pushing. I knew all this!
This was basic, stuff I was already and expert at.

Except.

I realized I’d lost my expertise. I’d put these skills down on the side of this road.

Can I pick it up again? Am I ready?

Questions must be asked.

Last week I walked a labyrinth. I’ve talked before about the joy I have in walking the twisted meditative path I find in a labyrinth.  Last time I walked one was before this cancer journey.

And this time, I went into the labyrinth and walked layers of time. While in the present, I remembered who I was the first time I walked it. I remembered the push and the urgency I felt, the drive to get THERE.

What is there has changed significantly. The surroundings have added so much to the way. 

I am thinking, these new old habits are changed too. I’m seeing how things fit together, now that I’ve experienced a different way of attacking my basics. 

New systems could replace automatic habits. 

A marvelous part of my home is the gentle sunshine. Plants grow because we water them. Grass and flowers, vines and trees have a cycle I have watched for decades

My home in Alaska had plants, but not ones that we planted. The trees and shrubs came with. They self-planted and grew and watered themselves from the melted snow left behind over the summer.                      

Los Angeles County doesn’t leave water behind. We have watering systems.

And we have fruit trees we’ve planted. Citrus in particular, and I can see trees in neighbors yards and even my own. When they are in season, bright bulging fruit hang on the branches.

It’s still miraculous to me. Fruit trees were an impossible mystery to my young self.

Now I grow several different kinds. That means I have miracles within reach.

My orange tree is blossoming. It is covered with white buds, with a very few opened up into flowers that waft an extraordinary perfume.

I was there last season, when the blossoms came in. Then the petals fell and the tiny hard green spheres remained to swell all summer. Those that hung on to the tree became the succulent fruit for eating.

I look forward to those fruits. I talk to the tree and anticipate what kind of crop I will get each year.

I was there when the tree was planted. It was a slip of a tree, about 3 feet tall. Not a baby.

Not a seed.

I have grown plants from seeds. I think of cilantro seeds I’ve put in the ground. The tiny hard balls can sprout and grow into the leaves I like to put in my food.

It take a week or two…Or more…for those seeds to sprout. They come up in a two leaf combo, a little like arching rabbit ears. I didn’t expect that, because the harvested cilantro plants don’t look like that. The leaves look totally different. The first time I saw this sprout I pulled it because I thought it was a weed.

It didn’t look like I thought it would. I ruined the work I’d done in the intentional planting of the seeds because I thought I knew better.

I know they are miracles. An ordinary common miracle, and a miracle nonetheless. It speaks to me as I long for great things. I have ideas, dreams and desires. 

I’m trying to make progress toward those things. And I get in my way and ruin the progress. Hard as I try, I can’t know how everything will come out along the way. I have to leave room for what will come.

There are a lot of transformations between the seeds and the fruit. 

The cancer fight has left me victorious. I went into something like a fugue state. Yes, I did other things. But my priorities were extremely focused. I had a battle that sapped my strength, but it was important enough to be the top precedence in any situation.

Then it was officially over. Nothing but checkups and a few prescriptions. Let the battle stay won!

After battles, it is well known that soldiers have trouble returning to civilian life. That’s where I’m at. I have been used to a situation in which life and death were part of every choice. The simplest things like food water and rest had to be fought for.

And now.

But now?

What now?

It is easy. Mostly. Is this how it used to be? Do I remember how it used to be? 

The nights of insomnia wishing the die-ease would end. Misty fantasies of strength and endurance—dreams of long strides of thoughtless grace and competence.

Was I kidding myself? Was I every really capable and strong?

More importantly, will I every be so in the future?

I aspire to ordinary.

Flashback

As a homeschooled teenager in Alaska, I had no one to compare myself to. Was I keeping up? Was I behind where I should be?

Was I at least ordinary? Then and now I was hoping I would be better than ordinary.

The song comes back to me, still popping up on the radio—the radio no longer forbidden to me now that I’m grown—Duran Duran on their comeback hit Ordinary World

What has happened to it all?

Crazy, some’d say

Where is the life that I recognise?

Gone away

But I won’t cry for yesterday

There’s an ordinary world

Somehow I have to find

And as I try to make my way

To the ordinary world

I will learn to survive

For months the song has haunted me with it’s lyrics. I made my choices with the dream of the ordinary world.

It’s been a big week in my house.

It’s been an exciting week as I emerge from the poison into the normal. Normal life means I get to be part of the mass of humanity, rather than the dramatic star.

In the broader world, there were interesting days on the calendar.  Here’s the list

March 14^th

March 15^th

March 17^th

March 14^th as we write it here in America 3-14. That’s the first three digits of pi, that number we use to figure out the circumference and area of circles. Out town is a college town, and so we often have a pi day celebration. 

On thursday the 14^th  Chris did an errand downtown and reported: “There was a line around the corner at the pizza place downtown,” 

Oh Yeah! Pi (or pie..or pizza pie) day. 

With this reminder, my coupon king husband found that more than one pizza place had coupons to celebrate. The excitement has spread from the math department to the marketing department.

So we got a pizza with a free personal pizza that Veronica got to take to school the next day. Pizza for days!

Importantly, Pizza leftover to the next day: March 15^th.

That day in march known to the ancient romans as the ides of march. And to the slightly less ancient Elizabethan English audience of Shakespeare’s play Julius Ceasar, when they heard a creepy street oracle tell Julius “Beware the ides of March!” they understood. 

They knew that he knew what the oracle meant:

March 15^th

What J. Caesar didn’t know and Shakespeare was foreshadowing was that his BEST FRIEND was gonna murder him that day.

Et tu, Brute? 

Even you, Brutus? 

Tragic betrayal that echoes down the centuries.

My husband said 

“We should have a Ceasar salad.”

We hear them in my household still, but the echoes are getting fainter.

Ceasar salad would go well with Pizza. I went down to trader joes to get a salad kit. 

The women at the checkout asked me how my day was going.

“It’s the ides of March. I had to get a ceasar salad,” I said with a smile.

Her face crinkled up “what?”

Ahh. The echoes had not reached her ears.

I told her a bit of the story—Shakespeare, Roman calendars, betrayals. 

She was listened, nodding, and hearing this new information. I ended with
“..and don’t listen to street oracles.”

She replied “That’s so interesting. And true! That happened to me—there was a street oracle in San Francisco this one time…”

But there was another customer waiting his turn and I wasn’t able to hear about the San Francisco street oracle.

And this takes me to Sunday: St Patrick’s day. The activity of this day is my daughter’s karate tournament. Not very irish. 

Then again, she’s competing as a green belt.

Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, found a pattern in how new ideas come to be accepted.

First there is the idea—the accepted idea that everyone knows is the standard. Common knowledge is another word for it. The science that society had come to accept and teach. The codified unquestioned way things are

Until someone has another idea. An idea that can be demonstrated. An idea that has proof and science behind it.

But the first idea a has society behind it. There is inertia in continuing to believe it. It’s working. Changing things is too hard.

Until more people come to see the proof of the new idea—the revolutionary idea. There is a

REVOLUTION

After some struggle, the new idea is adopted, and becomes accepted and taught. When it is prepared to be passed on, it gets packaged so it can be absorbed.

I am in the middle of a personal revolution. My life was thrown into a new reality last year. I wrestled with the new idea of who I was and what I could do.

I re-calibrated my expectations. I made it through.

Until now. The old idea is overthrown. Both of them.

My world is not what it was before the cancer.

It’s not what it was during the cancer treatment.

I spent all last year in the land of medical poisoning. I’m 3 months into the new year. To be fair, I was radioactive until a month ago. I’ve been dumped back into my life that I longed to return to.

I’m in the revolution. I’m casting about for a way to explain myself to myself.

I remember Kuhn. I’d like to find a structure to the chaos I feel.

Revolutions are messy. That is well-known.

It’s a kid game. Pick a high spot and shove everyone else off that pinnacle. Get to the high point! Be the one on top and triumph in the victory.  Be the king!

Until someone pushes me off and then I am no longer king. The top position changes so rapidly.

I’m in the position I longed for more than a year, undisputed victor in the war over cancer.

I Won!

Until the next thing comes along. And I am jockeying for the top position in another contest.

As uncomfortable as surgeries and chemo have been, at least I didn’t wonder if I was doing the right thing. I was very clear on my priorities.

Now that I’m on the other side, that clarity got a lot fuzzier.

I am thinking of a TV show I watched for a while “the Riches” had a scene. In a complicated case of mistaken identity, the main character in the head of a corporation. He is a swindler, but he asks the employees what their dreams are. In comparison to his unearned fortune, their requests are tiny. “My own parking place.”

What are my priorities now? I want to spend this hard-earned life well.

It’s worth a re-evaluation. What did I go through all that pain for? 

I just finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into Values

 This is the second reading of this amazing book and I can’t sum it up. But I can talk about this part:

The narrator is trying to find a method of scientifically capturing quality.

Also known as goodness or excellence.

How can you tell what is of good quality? Is there an objective measure?

He’s wrestling with the disparaging evaluation of quality.  “It’s just whatever you like.”

This bumps into my personal style guide: avoid the word just.

And Pirsig (the author) corrects that almost immediately. 

What if quality is whatever one likes?

It’s a mashup of science and hippie ethos. I can almost smell the vegan chili at the potluck.

Since I fought for this life I’ve been given, do I really get to decide what is worth my time based on what I like?

My perspective has changed, and I am willing to make greater space in my life for what I like just because—no—I will make greater space for what I like without needing additional reasons. 

I climbed the hill.

I live in the suburbs. It’s very ordinary to me now, and it is the only thing my daughter has ever known.

But I grew up in the forest. Yes, a house with electricity, water and a road for us to drive on. It was even next to other houses. But across the street was the deep woods—the deep woods that didn’t have any houses in it.

This was Alaska after all, so they didn’t have to call it anything. It could just be the woods. Since we were on a road and therefore close to civilization, I think they did call it a forest preserve or some such.

We called it the woods. I spent time in the woods every day, so I knew a little bit about it. I knew how shallow my knowledge of it went. There was a lot more I knew I didn’t know.

When we drove to anchorage we crossed the rivers. In salmon spawning season the bald eagles would join the bears and eat the salmon that were dying in the water.  The eagles were impressive and rare.

But the ravens were not rare. They didn’t wait for salmon season. Now I think of them as huge. When I lived amoang them, they were just ravens. They were perched on the lightpoles in the grocery store parking lot, sometime speaking with their own caw or sometimes making eerie mimicking sounds.

They were smart and greedy. They’d find food and dive in. Or they might work together to get at what they wanted.

I’d seen the ravens on totem poles. It wasn’t until later that I learned to revere the sagas telling stories of the ravens and their wisdom.

It’s been a very long time since I lived close to ravens. 

I live in the suburbs.

Last week I saw a crow. Like a tiny raven, he hopped along the tame green lawn, poking at fallen tree branches—sticks—and keeping his eyes out for possibilities.

I wondered if he remembered his choices, and thought about his chances.

The suburbs have a thinner veneer of wild nature. But there is still a lot I don’t know.

The days have run out. 

I finished. I’m done with all the big cancer treatments. 

I am remembering the story of Jonah. He’s famous for being swallowed by a whale. But the whale wasn’t the end of the story. It was an interstitial adventure that happened while he was on his MISSION to go talk to Nineveh about how God was going to destroy them if they did not repent.

I’ve spend a year with very short horizons. Get through a surgery…Get through 4 doses of chemo…No, just this one dose. 

Ok, just this one day.

And then…

Jonah was in the whale for three nights. He didn’t know how long it would be. 

I was told how long my treatment would be. 

And now it’s over. I am cancer free.

Barfed up on the beach by my former prison, the whale.

What was I doing again? What was it that was so important that I lost sleep and plotted and planned? What were my dreams again?

That’s one story.

Then there was that other story, the one where Joshua got his army to march around the walls of Jericho. There was a formula for that one. He was supposed to march his army around the walls once a day, and on the seventh day go around seven times, blow the trumpet and THEN the walls would fall down.

I wonder if Joshua and his army were thinking about after the walls fell?

It’s a lot of tension. 

Will they fall? After seven days of nothing, and THEN they fall?

As the story goes, they walls fell down and they took the city. It was a bloody scene of victory.

I am now standing in the rubble of the wall. 

I don’t know if I’m the army or the rubble. Truly, I would like to be the victorious army. But I feel like a rubble.

When I was counting the days that remained I was imagining the feeling of victory. 

I knew I’d still be weak, but I was hoping I could shake it off. 

If I’m the rubble, I’ll have to have patience as I rebuild myself. If I’m the army, I can start yelling.

I really am both, so I’ll do both as best I can. It’s my story now.