Still Point Arts Quarterly has published my essay, Healing from Cancer in the Gardens at Pennsbury Manor, and I’d like to share with you the story behind its creation. For those interested in reading a copy of the article in their free digital download, you can click on the cover or link below to get a copy. Still Point Arts Quarterly is a respected journal of essays, art, poetry and photographs, and it was an honor to be included on the TOC for its Gardening as an Instrument of Grace Summer 2022 issue. It’s my goal to write more non-fiction, and I’ve improved my craft through research. You can read my insights on writing non-fiction by clicking on this sentence. Christine Brooks Cote is the founder of this salubrious literary magazine. It’s published by her art media company, Shanti Arts, founded in 2011.
Download Still Point Arts Quarterly Summer 2022 Issue
This is what she writes about Still Point Arts Quarterly:
Art is often a manifestation and celebration of the natural world, bringing with it a powerful sense of stillness and focus. In those moments of stillness and focus, everything somehow comes together, everything somehow makes sense. Indeed, art—be it painting, photography, writing, music, dance, and theater—helps people make sense of their lives by allowing the usual distractions and delusions to fall away. In this way, art is often a pathway to spiritual experience. Art helps us reach beyond the boundaries of the mundane world, awakening joy and contentment and a sense of oneness with everyone and everything. We are then compelled to share and use our sense of joy and peace to change the world.
nature inspires art • art reveals spirit • spirit changes the world
At age 18, I found a golf ball had grown under my ear. It grew in an hour. I know this because I had just shaved after showering in the later evening. I settled down to watch my favorite episode of Deep Space Nine: The Die is Cast. And I was checking to make sure I’d given myself a close shave on my cheek when I found the lump. It was a passing curiosity at the time. I was just getting over a long battle with Lyme Disease and was looking forward to getting my life back. Lyme Disease really messed me up. I called one of my doctors, and two days later I had major surgery to remove the tumor. The surgeon then had to rebuild my face. It was everywhere. It took two months to diagnosis it because it was such a weird cell type. Finally, the Armed Forces Institute identified it as a dual lymphoma: both large cell and Hodgkin’s disease. Incredibly rare. I’m the 10th person in the world to have it medically documented. And my prospects were rather poor. I began a regiment of chemotherapy (CHOP) that nearly killed me. Then I endured daily doses of radiation on the head, neck and chest. I thought chemo was bad. The radiation burned me to a cinder. I stopped eating, dropped to 80 pounds and lingered at death’s door before Samhain. But I held on.
Cancer burned me back to the beginning. I was essentially erased. In Celtic shamanism, we understand that disease affects not just the body but also the mind and spirit. As I learned how to function again, I had to become whole again emotionally and spiritually. Because it wasn’t repairing. I was rebuilding. At the time, no one was focused on life after. Really, my chances in that first year were pretty low. Everyone figured I only had an extension. It took me twenty years to learn how to life with the expectation of the future—something my wife Allison helped me to do. Everyone just expected me to go back to normal. They told me the cancer was in remission and I could just go back to my life already in progress. There were no facilities to rehabilitate a cancer patient back to their life nor were there any resources to teach cancer patients how to live with the side effects of the treatment or the potential return of the malignancy.
A quote from Summer 2022 Issue:
I am grateful that I followed the path of the gardener and reaped such grace and abundance. Gardening has given me perspective, humility, meaning, and purpose, enriching my life. If twinges of loneliness or the melancholy of aging strike, I have only to walk among plants, and their pure energies restore me. —Mary Preus
Doctor Giles Mckenna—the world’s third-rated radiation oncologist at the time at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia—told me that I could never consider myself cured. I would always be in remission and would require scans every six months to a year, along with medical treatment and support for the many side effects and damage caused by the cure—side effects that have disabled me.
I began my journey living with this, and it’s something that affects me every day. And I’ve had a couple of close calls. Twenty years later, it’s not a direct malignancy that concerns us. It’s the chance of secondary cancers forming from the radiation and chemo. For my oncologists, such secondary malignancies are not just possible, they are inevitable.
I may have gone into remission. But I never stopped being a cancer patient. And learning to live under its threat has been nearly impossible.
I was declared in remission on Halloween. I rebuilt my body over the next five months. And then I found my way to Fallsington Quaker Meeting House and started attending Meeting. That led me to the historical estate of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania. I’ve included a few links if you want to find out more. William Penn founded the Pennsylvania colony as a religious experiment where you could worship freely.
Americans don’t understand the context of religious freedom. We’re used to it. But there was a time in Europe when there were state religions, and the battle between Protestants and Catholics lead to war, bloodshed and terrorism. Quakerism evolved in that climate and was illegal, a persecuted sect and considered a cult. William Penn as a youth became a Quaker and found peace in his heart. He was the son of Sir Admiral William Penn who had served on King Charles I Stuart during the English Civil War that was fought between parliament and the monarchy. Admiral Penn paid for several ships of the line, and when Charles II Stuart was restored, he paid off the debt and got rid of the troublesome Penn by granting him a large territory in the wilds of the North American continent. Penn built a manor house and estate on the river—a farm, fields, a bake-and-brew house and a large kitchen garden that acted as their spice and medicine cabinet. In time, I would come to wear many hats at Pennsbury. I even became their 18th century doctor, doing programs with the school kids. They loved the gross stuff. But the best time, the healing time I spent there was helping to tend to the kitchen gardens: nearly an acre of herbs, vegetables, hops and fruit trees divided by stone paths and built with raised beds. Working with the plants from seed to their harvest taught me a lot about horticulture, and I was also trained in the art of herbal medicine.
Now I warn you: The use of herbs requires study and discipline. These are chemicals you’re working with. They can be potent and even interact with medications you’re currently taking. This is my standard warning. I had teachers. And I’m still cautious. My time in the gardens not only healed my spirit but also introduced me into a spiritual realm. I built a connection to the earth that I nurture now, and even though I don’t have a plot of land, I still fill my windows with herbs (mostly for culinary purposes) every spring. This year, I hope to harvest and then make herbal candles from scratch to give away at Yule.
And it’s a wonderful issue. Editor Christine Brooks Cote writes about the connection to gardens she had in her youth, writing about her father and growing up in San Diego. Photographs and artwork take the reader on a tour of various kinds of gardens and how they are perceived. I especially love the oil painting of sunflowers in an impressionistic style by Lynne Friedman. Barbara Blossom talks about her need for gardening in bucolic and descriptive prose. And there are many more personal stories, poems, photographs and art pieces about how gardens add to quality of life. It’s a gorgeous magazine rich with natural tones and spiritual prose celebrating the cultivation of the green world.
So please read the article and learn about my journey. I found healing, and so can you.
