The results of my blood work were due to be complete within 72 hours.  That would have been the middle of the day this past Saturday.  Do labs have off on the weekends?  Does the 72 hours begin the morning of the following business day?  Are other things more pressing?  Has something come up with the recipient?  Did something turn up in the tests?

As I said in Post Number One, there began the questions, the symmetries, soul-searching, and ultimately, the resolution to go through with the process.  I also said that faith and trust weren’t my strong suits.  What a great way to practice.

So while the results of the tests are not in, I’ll talk about the resolution to go through with the process, and the title of this blog, still small voice.

While driving north to Del Norte County, land of the big trees mentioned previously, I spoke with a new friend I met at a Rosen Intensive in December 2010.  Subsequently, he invited me to do the Artist’s Way with him, a 12-week course developed by Julia Cameron offered in book format.  He and I kept in touch on a weekly basis to discuss each week’s concept and related tasks.  This became a transformative vehicle to solidify our new friendship.  And, I have confidence that the outcomes of the Artist’s Way will continue to manifest for some time to come.

During the drive I told him about the donation process, and kept reinforcing that I was committed.  He listened for quite some time before he reflected that he kept hearing how committed I was, but he wasn’t hearing ‘me’.  The ‘me’ that was underneath the recovery process afforded by The Artist’s Way, the one that is my advocate and ally, and he invited me to take the following week to still my conversation with others, and to listen for that voice.  A road trip through the wild weather of northern California was the perfect backdrop for this quest.

For most of the driving, I was pretty unconscious.  Indulging in sweet, crunchy, salty snacks while listening to a constant stream of music was a pretty good technique to keep the still small voice buried.  But on the twisty, hair pin turns along Highway 1 south from Willits to Fort Bragg in Mendocino County after days of constant rain, driving over and past swollen, muddy rivers, and mini-mudslides everywhere I decided to turn off the music and stop pushing down the emotions underneath my sweet tooth.  And I listened.  Arriving at the Mendocino coastline, I stopped at a vista point and watched the wild seas, full, on overload and overwhelm.  Something shifted.

Ultimately, the decision to proceed was selfish.  If I needed a transplant, or someone I loved needed a transplant, I’d want there to be a complete stranger out there that was willing to go through with the donation process.  My choice to go through with the process is actually waking me up to the life that I have.  That I have an option to help save someone’s life because I am healthy enough to do so is a gift.

And on the topic of symmetry, or maybe it is synchronicity still emanating from the Artist’s Way, this past weekend I attended a workshop titled Being Present to collect 12 continuing education units towards maintenance of my national massage license certification.  This workshop was the annual meeting of the Sensory Awareness Foundation which is work started by Charlotte Selver and Charles V.W. Brooks.

The attendees at the workshop were pretty attuned to the business at hand, a.k.a. being more fully alive to the moment.  Including a subset of people that happen to be neighbors in Oakland, and new friends.  Since meeting on Saturday, we’ve hung out Saturday evening, Sunday afternoon and tonight for dinner.

One of my new friends happens to be a feat of modern science, and one of the brightest spirits I have ever met.  He had non-Hodgkin lymphoma at age 4 during a time when it was so rare that his doctors didn’t know what it was.  The only way they could make this determination and figure out how to treat him was to do multiple spinal taps and send the draws to a center with the resources to do an informed analysis.  He ended up having such severe radiation treatments that it actually caused him to lose his sight, amongst other side effects, at age 4.

He has had one hell of a ride and there’s not one ounce of victim in him that I can tell.  In fact, he’s full of energy and advocacy and on the brink of starting an organization to bring awareness to the reality of being a non-sighted person in the United States where there are 20 million non-sighted people and only 35% of them are employed.  Not because they don’t want to be, but because there’s no commerce in it.   He wants to change that.

There were many elements that contributed to his survival, including two bone marrow transplants.  I’m so glad that he had a match so that he was around for me to meet him 27 years later.