Do you try to live your life in the present? Or do you worry about the future and let the past take over the present? I wrote in my first book, Everything Special, Living Joy, about how we choose to look at life: the glass “half-empty” or “half-full.”

As I sit in a chair, hooked up to IV tubes with chemo moving through my body, the previous questions stare me in the face. I was recently diagnosed with ovarian cancer, third stage. As they say, “life turns on a dime.”  So now this independent woman has to learn how to walk the talk.

I always strived to live in the present. Mulling over the past seemed wasteful, as it’s so easy to get caught up in reevaluating one’s life.  Yet, reexamining is important. As a child I believed everything had a purpose.  Such belief helped me survive my childhood years in an orphanage after my mother died of cancer when I was five years old, and my father couldn’t care for me and my younger brother.

Now I face losing control of my body as I go through this process of treatment and healing. Relying on others is not easy for me. Nor is trying to enjoy life while ailing, or having to surrender control and trust the words and hands of doctors and nurses. Just as important, I wonder how to continue to write when chemo wears me out. However, I will keep trying.

I’m sharing with you a poem from my book, Everything Special, Living Joy, which feels appropriate to my sustenance, and hopefully to yours:

PASSION

This body I live in
breathes the joy of
its passionate nature.

When I listen, it wails and vibrates
The tunes of its Pied Piper.

The tunes are ones of pains and dance and laughter.

My body tenses and relaxes,
gyrates and giggles.

Its violin sways;
the drums pound.
Its harp flows;
the horn moans.

My body is the sounds of nature:

The trees swaying,
thunder pounding,

The river flowing,
The wind moaning.

My passionate nature
is the nature of earth.

2023 Roberta S. Kuriloff ©