Looking into the future

Yes.

There is hope and even love after cancer. I started dating and me and my breast seem to be doing it all good. All the fears and hesitations were just in my mind it turned out. Which is good news for those of you reading this who may think as I did. That there will be no more intimacy. Ever.

Somehow there is an aspect of grace in this.

That there was nothing I could do to make this happen except maybe be myself. It is quite a gift from the universe to feel that being your own, honest, hardly flawless person is good enough.

Korea – and a new normal after a cancer diagnosis

I have been off grid in South Korea on a small job in the human rights sector this past month.

You can read about it here.

I call this blog notonlyformyself because I don’t want to live only for myself.

It is a little bit about disobedient priests.

But mostly it is a blog about grace and love and non violence in action.

And unjust politicians, a naval base, a kidnapped democratic process and the beauty of the island of Jeju.

And about things like this. Things I can’t understand but acknowledge that it is ok just to enjoy the beauty of it.

It has been a year since I was sitting in front of the fire place and waited to start my radiation treatment.

Today I walk around with the C word in my back pocket. I rarely talk about it unless I know people well or feel it is appropriate. Some days I don’t think about having been sick but most days I do.

And life will never be the same.

I may live out my life as an old woman. Or it may come back tomorrow. Who knows. It is a very strange thing to live with.

I am happy and feel fortunate to be alive. I have friends who are very sick and probably wont live out this year. I wonder if I will ever really feel like being intimate with another person again and remember when I took being naked for granted.

We will forgive him

Grace hit me in the face the other night.

That was a sentence I thought I would never write.

It happend though.

I was watching a documentary about Amish life and they touched upon the lethal shooting in Pennsylvania back in 2006. The year a man went into an Amish school, let the boys go, tied the legs of the girls together after lining them up. And then he shot them.

Horror.

But then an unexplicable event happened. A religious care taker described being with the family of the shooter two days after the massacre. When two members from the Amish community walked in. They said to the family: we will forgive him. He described it as grace walked in.

For a while now I have been thinking about this. Trying to understand it. Understanding what they say when they say that judgement is not for them to pass out. It is for God. Understanding that while it is as hard as I can imagine for them to forgive, it is not unnatural. It does not take anything away from them but quite the contrary, it leaves them space to grieve and let go of the heavy weight of hatred.

Forget? No, of course not. And 40 members from the community also came to the funeral of the shooter, some of them lost girls at the school.

So, tonight. Writing this from a hotel room in downtown Seoul, South Korea I feel both small and hopeful. Small because my own addiction to a justice that I call even often include revenge and hatred, hopeful because I can feel it in my bones that they are right.