There must be a heart that keeps me here
Away from the panic and the fear
There must be a heart that keeps me here

So where is the good feeling?
Where is the lighting up?
Where are the thousand voices screaming, telling me this is enough?

-'Heart' Annie Stela

Cancer….home….

It will always give me perspective. It will always make me understand what yoga really means. Waaaaaaaay beyond a posture…beyond a shadow of a doubt, it is love. It is communion. Yoga is being present with what you are presented with.

I wrote friends before I went home to be with my dad…like a suicide note…I just want to let you know that I love you and what I need from you is to know you are there. Text me, email me and let me know you are thinking of me and my family. Even if for just a second. Just let me know you are there and that is all I need.
That will be what I need to get through. And it's true.
When I’m home, I don’t speak to anyone. I’m on immediate speed dial to my family and their needs. I hate driving but will go whatever miles for their needs. I have no money but will buy whatever they need. My family already knows the ropes and what needs to be done. With all of my training and work with the elderly or disabled I am not prepared. I come in and there is nothing but unconditional love that I can provide and it comes to me like auto pilot. There is no training for that. It is love.
I watch my masculine father accept help without a beat. I see him. Months ago...reticent to accept anything.
Now, he takes it.
He needs it.
I’ll wipe an ass. I’ll clean up urine or shit. I’ll take his puke even if it runs off the tissue into my hand.
Because it is my dad and I love him, There is no thought. It is there.
My mother and sisters have been doing it for the last few months as it’s gotten worse and the conversations scared me. But, seconds in and no time has passed. I’m here.
My family is my greatest joy. I feel lost in my life in LA knowing what is happening at this HOME that I once had long ago. Home is always home even when home is LA. Home is always family and noone understands when Cancer is involved.
I can’t speak to anyone until I am home and even then, I don’t say a word. It all, comes naturally. It comes naturally to…
take care.
I arrive and hit the ground running. I am a part of the family. I am a part of the cancer. I am a part of the terror and a part of the humor that surprisingly arrives like a sherbet at the end of a good meal.
The things my mother and sister only described on the phone, the things I feared, I picked up where they left off, added a hand to theirs, added a tear to theirs and there I was, ordinary to their extraordinary.
This experience isn’t new to many but is all new to us and especially new to me and I don’t belong because I live so far away but my heart is here. My unconditional love is here.
This is where all pain, memory, love, happiness begins, ends, remains.
Now that we have cancer as the main course in our lives and not the periphery appetizer, just something to deal with as we deal with the new normal, it is something altogether new and different and scary and terrifying and wonderful as we come together in a tattered mess of love and longing and memories and anger and frustration and wonder of where we all fit in and where we belong when we begin to lose what once was and make sense of what is.

I don’t know what to prepare for. I don’t know. I don’t know. I know that I love. I know that I can give what I can give and sometimes it’s not appropriate. I try to find where I fit in the healing, in the giving, in the helping. All I can see is the love and it hurts so much I can cry and laugh in the same breath. How could I have ever left the most amazing family, 3000 miles behind when everything I do so many miles away is for them?

I don't know. I don't know. All the training. All the experience and it’s never enough. It’s never enough and it’s all that there is. Enough is enough and it’s all you can give and all you can give is enough and all yoga is is what you can give in the present. It’s all there is.
And I don’t know the rest. I don’t know. And I don’t think any guru does. I don’t think anyone does. I think what it is is enough. It has to be. It has to be enough. Enough to be loved. Enough to give. Enough to be needed. Enough for right here and now and it might not be Africa and it might be the world, but what we can give to the person next to us and the student in our class or our teacher having a bad day or the guy that cut you off on the freeway for no reason, it all has to be that we are here for each other to love and to give. I don’t feel anything unless I love and give. Nothing. That’s life…right? That’s yoga…I think…no, I know. There’s no other fucking point. Be, love, serve, guide. That’s it.

There must be a heart that keeps me here.
Away from the panic and the fear
There must be a heart that keeps me here

~Laurie