Month: February 2026

Quite a few people have followed my outpourings because I’m a cancer patient with some deep and wide perspectives on it. I’m one of those who was told I had perhaps a year to live (and it felt like it), and here I still am, six years later.

I haven’t said much about cancer recently. Partially because I’ve said a lot already and tend not to repeat myself. However, there are recent friends and followers out there who haven’t had the full story.

I’m mulling it all over… and that’s part of the reason for relative silence on it. My cancer book ‘Blessings that Bones Bring’, available on my site, is undergoing a revision, and a new version will come out sometime – here in Cornwall we say ‘dreckly’. It needs to be shorter and more focused on what matters most to cancer patients and their helpers. Some new reflections are brewing, but my psyche moves slowly nowadays…

If you need something now, then go to my podcast page and look for the ‘Cancer and Dying’ section. To get a sense of the progression from earlier to later days, start from the bottom and work upwards. It’s here:

https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html

There’s a lot about cancer here on my blog, but it’s all jumbled up. Here is one blog giving an overview of what happened for me and how I handled it: https://penwithbeyond.blog/2024/05/11/blessings-that-bones-bring/

I have an incurable blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma – it can only be managed and held at bay, medically. It affects the bones: the first sign, in my case, was that the four bottom vertebrae in my back collapsed and, from that day on, my life changed. Rather painfully at first.

I became a partially-disabled old crock. It was a soul-shift. I’m not sure whether I went down with cancer or went up with it. But it confirmed and tested a life-lesson I had already learned, that everything in life is a gift.

Repeat: everything in life is a gift. Especially at those times when it doesn’t feel like it.

Time spent in Palestine taught me that, though cancer took it to a new level. As a peacemaker, I distinctly disbelieve in the notion of ‘fighting cancer’ – and as it happens, I’m still alive, so there might be something in it.

Cancer is not a failure or an aberration – it is a gift. It is an awakener. It presents hard facts and profound choices. This is about free will at its deepest level. Surrender. Acceptance like you’ve never accepted before.

Living with cancer is very difficult, and that’s the point. It confronts us on why we’re here and what it’s all about.

I’m in a different life now, drawing on the mixed outcomes of the life I’ve had, but it feels like a different life. Funny, that.

Anyway, I woke up with this morning with the thought to reconnect with fellow cancer-experiencers, and something is brewing, and I just wanted to say that.

If you’re struggling through the darkness, just keep going. On a soul level, during times like that we make a lot of progress.

Love, Palden