Finding joy on the PCT was part of why I kept hiking and made it my career.
Maybe I’ve been going about this year all wrong. Ok, I’m going to backtrack a bit…I don’t think I’ve done it all wrong, there have been a lot of beautiful moments, like when Amber opened up her house to us to have an exuberant birthday party with about fifty wonderful souls who rallied around me even when I spent the day puking. Like when Kirk and I went snorkeling in warm Gulf waters this May, or when I finished the Camino in Spain with two new friends. Is it this book project that’s tethering me to the pain of the year? What if I let that thread go for a while? What if I let the scab grow, which might be faster to do if I’m not picking at it all the time by trying to write too soon?
I’m going to choose joy for a while and see where that leads me.
And yes, that still involves writing, surprise!
Yesterday, I was working through an exercise from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft book, the one about reading your work aloud and having fun with the sound and play of words, and something blossomed inside. I was writing around a scene on one of my hikes, a day filled with laughter and play, and I kept returning to that story again and again over the day. I wanted to be in it. I wanted to keep that scene fresh in my mind because the feeling was so different than writing about how my radiation has made my lower back perpetually painful and tight, or how a different approach to the tumors that surrounded my brain could have left me with memory loss or cognition problems. I want to think about something else for a while.
The hangover from that joy has been growing. I decided shortly after writing that exercise that I wouldn’t feel guilty about having christmas cookies for breakfast. I did eat a few nuts so that I got the protein that I need while taking my morning medications, but I ate cookies. I ate cookies dipped in whipped cream and I didn’t feel guilty about it at all! I decided to take the rest of the year off from guilt as well. If life is indeed short, what would it feel like to search for and create joy while saying goodbye to guilt?
Anyone want to give it a try with me?
Let’s make this a fun experiment…because that’s what I like to do! Let me know how it goes for you: the seeking joy and forgetting guilt for a while part. Perhaps in this next phase of trying to figure out who I am now, I will write about how my experiment is going, and also tell some stories from some of your experiments. When I worked at the publishing company for four years, that time was primarily filled with writing profiles on artists and businesses around town. It wasn’t quite journalism; it was finding what was interesting, compelling, and unique about these community members and sharing that through my writing. What if we do some of that with these stories?
I’m posting this over at Substack as well where commenting is easier.All my posts are FREE. Just click ‘none’ on the subscription options.
In happier times…just a few days ago in fact! At the ONDA Christmas party with Phyllisand Mary, two amazing women.
I’m so tired. Maybe it’s the ghost of the impending anniversaries from December 2024 and learning the truth about my injuries, but what’s my excuse this year? I’m discombobulated. I’m depressed. I’m in pain, and I’m grieving for something. I think it’s for who I used to be.
Yesterday I sunk into the depths of a dispair that I didn’t know existed, but today I woke up determined to have a better day. That looks like standing up without bracing for the rushing pain of low blood pressure in my head and shoulders, and instead slowly moving through it, anticipating the other side of the dizzyness, not getting derailed by the dizziness. That looks like leaving the house to write at a coffee shop where I can type these sentences with the accountability of being a human in public.
I don’t yet have the words to explain why I dip into these deep chasms of weeping, but when I try to understand, when I type out the sentiment behind the feeling, I can at least distance myself from it enough to see it a bit more objectively. That perspective takes on more weight as I circle around and around the idea of writing a book about my cancer experience. “Write from the scar, not the wound,” author Cheri Kephart said in her workshop, and that makes sense for a book. My book will be written from the scar, but this blog is written from the wound. From the bloody front lines of a life torn apart and knitting itself back together. At times I think I’m healing and toughing up, but yesterday reveals that I’m still raw and bleeding. The wound is tender and sore.
Bits from this blog may end up in the book, but I imagine the book will look back on this experience from a larger scale (hello fractal, my old friend). It will be putting all the pieces back together as a work of art, with thought and craft and structure… but now I’m still discovering what the pieces are, and what shapes they take. Writing here is sometimes messy, unshaped, uneven, and scattered, but it’s helping me find the pieces far faster than if I were stewing in this malaise and pain without getting it out into the open and letting it breathe. Writing from the wound is completely appropriate to this phase where I’m trying to make sense of what it means to almost die, to get a second chance at life, to confront my limitations in this new body, all within the context of losing my Dad just a few months ago.
Saw this on Substack and thought it appropriate, is depressed almost the same as stressed? In dessert speak, that is.
In a way, remission has been harder than treatment. At least during the treatment phase, I had a reason for being tired all the time, I had an excuse for staying in bed and not answering my emails. But after? Maybe it’s the scanxiety (the anxiety of the cancer coming back…all to be revealed in my next scans in early January, and every three months after…for the rest of my life) or it could be PTSD from my close brush with death a year ago. Or maybe there is no reason, and it’s just one big pile of shit that threatens to suffocate me each day.
Some days I don’t feel better, and wonder, is this the new normal? Now I’m starting to understand why people give up, why they don’t want to be alive with cancer anymore. But just thinking that thought scares me into thinking that thought will invite it back. If our minds are that powerful, can thinking about it coming back open the door? (proceeds to tear hair out)
Writing here has been such a lifeline; that’s a reason not to tear my hair out. Fun fact: my hair was thinning during the chemo process, but now it’s growing back, and in certain mirrors I catch a glimpse of myself with 2 inch hairs standing up from my part line; it does make me giggle (actually, you can see it in the photo above!). Through writing, I’ve been in conversation with myself and with you, and these connections have been everything. I’m sending out holiday cards this year, and it’s truly overwhelming. I look at the list of people who donated to my go fund me, who sent cards and care packages, who dropped off meals and stopped by for a visit, and there is not enough stationery or stamps to write enough cards. Hundreds of you came through for me this year, and even if you don’t get a card in the mail, please know how important you were and are to me. I’m so rich in friendship, true connection, and love that I know none of this has to be faced alone, even when I feel alone.
So let’s end this blog post on a high note. Thank you for listening. Even if it feels like I am screaming into the void, I know you are listening and care. That helps so much.
For today’s walk I listened to music. It’s a simply wonderful combination: walking and song.
I want you to have an experience with these posts; there are links to songs, videos, other websites, and many various adventures. So here is your invitation to leave the tab open and return to find the link to the podcast or watch the movie. Take a walk and play the song. Think some thoughts and make some notes, or just leave space to let them emerge as the morning or afternoon unfolds. You may need an hour, or two…sometimes you might need a week for your brain to untangle and release. At least that’s how I work. You do you.
Today’s song is Frank Sinatra Jr’s Black Night. If you liked that one, you also might like The Ocean by Richard Hawley, The Rip by Portishead, or Empire Ants by The Gorillaz. The crescendo of each song echoes somewhere deep inside. You know how I wrote about using sound vibrations earlier this year to help kill the cancer? I think that’s what these songs do too. They vibrate something vital inside me, and the result is elation and joy. I hope for you too.
Today I want to talk about creativity as a force for survival.
When my neck started spasming last year, the aspen trees in the glaciated gorges of Steens Mountain had just started to turn gold. I was leading a trail maintenance trip for National Public Lands Day, and I knew something was very wrong. I was due to fly out the very next day to start a 400-mile thru-hike of the Pinhoti Trail, which I would connect to the Benton MacKaye Trail, turn east, and hike to its terminus at Springer Mountain (also the start of the Appalachian Trail). I planned to bookend the hike with a visit to Pinhoti Fest before I started walking, and finish with the Benton MacKaye Trail Association’s Annual Meeting and Hike Fest at Unicoi Lodge in Helen, Georgia. I intended to make further connections with the founders and stewards of both trail organizations to explore how I could add my expertise to their trails with my long-distance trail consulting business. This was a working hike, but also my vacation. Where do I stop and my job begin? I’ve never really known, having always (or most of the time) worked within a passion.
That beautiful fall day changed everything. Once my neck started to spasm on the last evening of the trip, the jolts continued to shock me, racing from my brain, down my spine. I had no clue what was going on, and quickly said an early goodnight to my volunteers as tears streamed down my face. I thought rest and lying down might ease the bewildering condition, but no. My neck spasmed about every five minutes during the long, late-September night. I cried with fear and pain, hoping the others couldn’t hear the extent of my anguish. Something was very wrong.
I avoided facing the truth even after I managed to make the five-hour drive back to Bend and directly to an urgent care. An exam showed nothing of concern, so we blamed the spasms on a few nights of a poor pillow. I could still hike, right? Meanwhile, on the East Coast, Hurricane Helen had just hit land, tearing up the communities, towns, trails, and mountains where I had planned to hike. I rebooked my flight for a few days hence to see how my neck and the storms would play out.
This wasn’t supposed to happen, to my body or the inland communities along the Appalachians, but one thing was clear: much of the region I was planning to hike in was devastated. On the bright side, the Alabama portion of the Pinhoti Trail was spared, but it seemed in poor taste to frolic down the trail when people were suffering just a short distance away in Georgia.
The east coast hike wasn’t going to happen, so I fixated on the Oregon Coast Trail. This 413-mile hike was close to home, had many towns (meaning I could find an easy out if my neck continued to give me grief), and I had already planned to be away from work for a month, so I threw myself into last-minute planning to walk a month along the sea.
I planned to travel to and from the trail all using public transportation; it would be a cool experiment! Since my passion is my work, I started to turn this trip into another opportunity to evaluate the resources and infrastructure of the trail to see how I could improve it from a hiker’s perspective. I decided to start my hike a week out from that urgent care visit, which would give me time to get a few sessions of acupuncture and massage, and push past the pain in my neck to keep going and hike anyway. I’ve done it before, hiked through fresh and recent injuries, that is.
The day before I started my October groundtruthing hike of the Blue Mountains Trail in 2020, I walked out of the house barefoot, and a stray nail sticking up from the door frame tore a fourth-inch chunk out of the sole of my foot. The flapper was deep enough that I had ripped through a significant portion of skin and callus. I panicked, immediately cleaned out the wound, put some antibiotic ointment on it, and elevated my foot until Kirk came home from work. I shook as I showed him the wound, but slowly convinced myself and him that I could keep it cleaned and protected as I hiked for a month solo on a difficult backcountry route in north eastern Oregon. And I went, and I was fine. So I’d be fine this time too, right?
After a week of treatments, I was convinced this Oregon Coast Trail thing was a go. Kirk and I decided to head up to Waldo Lake for the weekend in our camper so he could foilboard while I read in a chair in the sun. I still wasn’t 100 percent, but I had convinced myself I would heal on the hike, much like I had done on the Blue Mountains Trail. The morning we were set to leave, I was stretching when something twinged in my back and I instantly knew I wasn’t going hiking anywhere. All the progress I thought I had made was gone in that twinge. I didn’t tell the rest of my body, though, and I packed up my backpack and headed out for the weekend. Over the next two days, it was apparent that I was having trouble moving normally. Carrying much of anything caused more pain, and I finally voiced out loud that I wouldn’t be hiking the Oregon Coast Trail. I returned home in a slump. Two hikes had now been thwarted in the last week.
Now what?
It wasn’t until I was on a morning walk recently that last year’s hiking (or non-hiking) saga gained more shape. I headed out into the frosty morning with freshly charged earbuds in place and strolled along my normal route along the Deschutes River. That morning, I listened to Rich Roll’s podcast featuring author and fellow cancer navigator Suleika Jaouad, and I saw my decisions in the wake of my physical limitations in a new light.
Suleika has experienced survival as a creative act. I read her first book, Between Two Kingdoms, this year, shortly after my diagnosis, and quickly pre-ordered her second book, The Book of Alchemy. The more I learned about her story, the more I identified with her struggles. When I heard her leukemia returned for the third time before the launch of her new book, my heart just bled for her. For us.
Back to last October: when I realized that I would not be hiking the Oregon Coast Trail, I decided to go ahead and do it anyway, but from home. I decided to embark on a virtual journey and pretend that I was out plodding through the sand and feeling the rain sting my cheeks in groves of old-growth trees that rim the bluffs over the Pacific Ocean. I would virtually hike the Oregon Coast Trail.
Ever since I set foot on the Appalachian Trail back in 2002, I kept a daily journal. Those hand-written missives from the AT are lost, but from then on, I wrote and posted them online. From my hike during a break from grad school along the West Highland Way, to my thru-hike of the Colorado Trail and the culmination of my summer of leading trail crews, I chronicled the rain, sleet, and snow. The blisters, spider bites, and those few times I caught myself on fire from my beer-can stove. Yes, there were multiple times. Over the years, I shared my joys and struggles with a small group of loyal blog-readers, but more importantly, I found great joy in writing for the love of writing. I didn’t care if anyone else read about day 56 on the Pacific Crest Trail or day 5 on the Sunshine Coast Trail, I loved waking up in the early morning and capturing the feeling of the day before.
So when my body wouldn’t let me hike last fall, I decided to wake up early each morning, read the guidebook (shout out to Bonnie Henderson and her excellent resource), reference the FarOut app for real-time updates from other hikers, study the weather, decide how many miles to walk, where I would camp or find lodging, where I would eat, what interesting things I’d see during the day, and how I would navigate the many gaps in the trail. I wanted to turn this virtual hike into a visual journey as well, so I planned to create a story map that I would build on, publishing each new day on the story map as I would on an actual thru-hike. The Oregon Coast Trail is a logistical melange of hazards like high tides, which make certain sections undoable, or eroding cliffs from a perpetually stormy sea. I wanted to experience those hazards, even if remotely, and decide how I would proceed if I were actually there.
Story mapping had become another passion by this point, and over the past few years, I had been creating them professionally for other organizations. The medium harkened back to my college days where I dove into multi-media projects, combining images with prose, sounds, and even videos. And since my virtual hike was quickly becoming another work/passion project, I decided to add on elements from a second business I had started recently, called Intentional Hiking.
Yes, the title gives it away – with Intentional Hiking, I hosted several conversations a month about ways hikers could cultivate a deeper engagement with the world around them as they were out for a day hike, week-long backpacking trip, or a long thru-hike. I invited experts to talk about things like collecting data for Adventure Scientists, learning how to identify plants and animals to contribute to research projects on iNaturalist, or even how public land management agencies are integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge of indigenous peoples into federal planning processes. To apply this to the Oregon Coast Trail, I decided I would identify several aspects hikers (and I) could engage with as we walked. Those items were categorized and marked on the maps as: Fun Facts, Trail Stuff, Environment, Military History, Exploration History, Tribal Nations, Art and Culture, and Take Action. Each morning, I would wake at my usual 4am, spend the next 4-5 hours researching, writing, and adding on to my story map, and publish that day’s hike on my blog.
By the second week, my creative act had become a bit oppressive, given the sheer amount of time it was taking me to create each day’s exploration. The added weight of my painful body didn’t make things much easier. After my morning creation, my days were filled with appointments. They ranged from sessions with a physical therapist, massage therapist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, and my primary care doctor, with little result. I could barely move.
I kept going because that’s what I do. I finished the project on October 31 to reflect when I would have finished in real time. I remember my neck and back were feeling a hair better…in fact, everything was feeling a tad better, that is, until I slipped and fell on a wet floor while shopping on November 1. It was the kind of fall that you knew would be bad on the way down. As my feet flew out from under me, I had long enough to notice the “caution wet floor” sign by my right leg, and also know I was in trouble. I landed hard on my right glute, whiplashed my head, and passed out.
I will tell you the rest of the story another time, but needless to say, my troubles were only getting worse, and I was still about two months out from my cancer diagnosis. Life sucked, but it sucked less when I could focus on things like the virtual Oregon Coast Trail by ignoring my pain as much as I could to do something that brought joy.
I want to say many more things about how the creative act is survival. Many of you have seen it play out in real time through my blog this year, so stay tuned as I unpack more layers of pain and being so that I can continue to not just survive, but thrive through my creativity.
Slueika was in remission for 10 years before her cancer started growing again. The road ahead seems so long that I think the only thing that can get me through this is exploring what it means to be alive, creatively. And what a gift to the world that Slueika and her husband and musician Jon Baptist are giving to the world by doing the same.
Check out American Symphony on Netflix if you want to learn more about these two, they take my breath away.
2025’s Thanksgiving on the River Crew – Cindy, Kirk & Moi (photo courtesy of Cindy)
Kirk and I have had a Thanksgiving tradition of heading to water for the last 10+ years. It probably started because he just loves a flowing river, and even though my river time had been limited before we met, I quickly took to the eddies and riffles as he showed me the ropes of paddling, rafting, and floating downstream.
One of our first trips was a packraft adventure on the North Fork of the John Day River. You can read all about it here:
click for the full post…
We had many other adventures on the water, most frequently coming back to the banks of the Lower Deschutes River as it usually had the most water of any of Oregon’s rivers in late November. We would invite various friends, sometimes it would snow, sometimes it would drop into the single digits, and sometimes those friends never returned for another water-logged Thanksgiving trip…the cold really highlights how a four-day sufferfest can drive people indoors, even if we bring multiple pies.
This year my longtime friend Cindy decided to brave the unknown, and possibly rainy weather to accompany us on our float, and she was rewarded with mild temperatures and minimal splashing as I had asked Kirk to find the smoothest and driest lines through the rapids – my neck and spine still can’t tolerate much jostling.
We launched on Thanksgiving morning and pulled over a few miles later to reheat our feast. I don’t think it was the best of our efforts as my turkey cooking the day before was a bit too zealous and left the meat on the dry side, and we skipped the fancy side-dishes for instant potatoes, stovetop stuffing, canned cranberry sauce, and store-bought pumpkin pie, but it was all gravy. As Edward Abby says, “Hunger is the best sauce,” and the smell of the cooking turkey had started my mouth watering a full day before our dinner.
Dark comes early in late November, but I added some festive cheer with some battery-powered lights and hot cider.
The skies were blue and the nights dark, and we all got a solid 10 hours (or more!) of sleep each night.
It is such a gift to be on the river during this time of year. The blue heron was our steady companion each day on the water, and the sound of the current hushed any background noise that we carried over from day-to-day life.
She-ra Hikes 