All my adult life I have been an astrologer. People make the mistake in believing that it’s about predicting the future. Not so. It’s about understanding the present and the inner-outer situation we’re in.
Lo behold, my situation seems to be evolving in tune with new and full moons. At these points, key decisions are made (such as to come to Devon for treatment on one fullmoon, and receiving the diagnosis around the next fullmoon), or health developments evolve in stages.
So, it seems to be that, around the recent fullmoon on Thursday, I seem to have been getting a bit stronger, a bit more capable, a bit less spaced out with medications and the shock of it all, and a bit clearer about the coming time. It’s a process.
Nothing miraculous is happening, and this isn’t ‘recovery’ or ‘getting better’ (people seem so anxious about that!). But, provisionally, I can report that something is moving forward. We shall see what happens as time passes.
I’ve been on chemo and steroids. The medications for bone marrow cancer are not as intensive and gut-ripping as for other cancers. It concerns life-blood and bones though, and it can disable and kill, so it isn’t less serious.
The chemo is not thus far affecting me badly – I’m not losing hair, getting nausea or suffering over it. The steroids are weird: they deal with aspects of the cancer, yet they also have a psychoactive effect that I would rate as close to cocaine. It makes me mentally buzzy, a bit heartless, assertive and more confident, and it gives me shaky fingers and a busy head.
I have to be careful with my behaviour, avoiding saying things too abruptly, bossily or directly, inconsiderately. I imagine that, for mainstreamer muggles who encounter this drug, there can be difficulties. But, as you might guess, I have plenty of experience with psychoactive substances, and these symptoms are not strange to me.
Some people press me to go along a holistic healing route, and this I am doing, partially. I’m following an integrated path, trying to exploit the best of both tracks. Many holistic methods are under-proven, and when people advocate them I ask them for actual experience and real information, not just advocacy and sales-talk. The same is true for conventional medicine – it assumes it is the only way, and it is not. We have to form our judgements on these things and get the consequences.
I am on colloidal silver, vitamins, homeopathics, CBD, am considering Essiac, and I’m also being helped by an intelligent, biofield-balancing E-Lybra machine which reads me off and sends me corrective subtle energy-fields in response. I feel that all of these are having a strengthening and transforming effect.
They might mean that I can modify my copious consumption of medications as time goes on. Because, frankly, I seem to be popping pills endlessly, rendered into a peeing, pooing, farting wreck of a man!
This brokenness seems to be a key question. I’m a broken man and I know it. Life has gone ‘wrong’ on me. I’m incapable of standing up and bearing a man’s load – like Atlas who dropped the world and went “Oh no, I’ve totally screwed up”. I’m dependent on the love and care of Lynne, the support of the taxpayer and the help of nurses and doctors. But that’s okay: this is the 21st Century, and we men need to get broken.
There’s another side to this. At age 69, I’m glad to say I’ve done some stuff, seen a lot of things, saved and changed many people’s lives, been places, written some good books, given loads of speeches, started a load of initatives, done some secret manoeuvrings… and, with some regrets, I am happy enough with what I’ve done.
It will be different for people who set aside their true life-path for security, fear, guilt, status or circumstances – they will have regrets.
So, if necessary, I can feel sufficiently satisfied that I did what I could – to an extent. It involves letting go of hopes and aspirations – after all, at age twenty, I did want to change the world, and fifty years have passed and progress has been slow, especially in my chosen areas of war and peace and community transformation.
But that’s life. We didn’t actually come here to fulfill our dreams, though we try. We came here to stand willingly between a rock and a hard place and to do our best with that – to learn from it and to contribute toward making things a wee bit better while we have the chance.
Because that chance evaporates. We do not live forever. We taste the chocolate and the blood, sweat and tears, and sooner or later find out that nothing is quite as we were told.
The most wonderful moments of our lives come and then they go. As you grow older more appears behind you than in front of you, yet there are opportunities for rebirth and transformation at every age – at some ages more than others. The Saturn Returns at age 29ish, 58ish and 86ish are critical junctures, for example.
So it’s okay. Being broken is not such a crisis – it’s an opportunity and a healing. If we take it that way. Live or die, it will be alright. But having this attitude arises from having made life-choices earlier in life that have at times cost me high – I’m ageing and broke, with no medals or gongs, a threat to some and a bringer of blessings to others, and that’s okay.
I’ve made mistakes, I’m an imperfect Virgo, I’ve been accused of murder and treachery, I’ve failed to make a million, I haven’t been the father, taxpayer or employee I should have been and, while in some people’s eyes I’m just a pile of crap and a burden, there’s a deep smile in my heart.
There’s more to do and, if I live, I feel this cancer crisis is bringing things into focus. If I pass away, transitioning to another world, I’m sure there will be plenty to do there too. Even the best of astrologers cannot foresee what happens next. This is the way of things. As my Tibeten lama guru in the 1970s, the Karmapa, said at the time, the final truth is simply like a fart in the void. Not long afterwards, he passed away too.
Bless you for being you, and thank you for being with me on this trip.
Love, Paldywan Kenobi
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