When I contemplate this latest benchmark in my life, my 15th year surviving stage 3b breast cancer, I confess there are times when I feel like it was just yesterday the Trickster Coyote – the Native American mythical creature of evil and bad omen – blindsided me, bent on taking me down in the one sacred place I felt I could take refuge from the world: my home.
PUBLISHED April 30, 2018
Carolyn Choate recently retired from the TV production industry to write full-time. Diagnosed at 45 with stage 3 estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer in 2003, she underwent two radical mastectomies - in 2003 and 2012 - without reconstruction. Carolyn credits Angela Brodie, Ph.D., and her discovery of the aromatase inhibitor, for saving her life and those of millions of women globally. In the summer of 2017, Carolyn and her older daughter kayaked from New Hampshire to Baltimore in tribute to Dr. Brodie. When not informing others about Dr. Brodie and the "living flat" movement, Carolyn enjoys gardening, cooking and RVing with her family and dog.
I marked my 15th year of cancer survivorship far from my New Hampshire home, soaking, once again, in the healing, hot mineral springs of New Mexico’s Ojo Caliente – the sacred and storied land of the Pueblo peoples. Miles from civilization, the Georgia O’Keeffe-esque red canyons reached for the clouds, while I was dwarfed in their shadow, up to my neck in the hand-wrought stone pools brimming with the medicinal iron, arsenic, lithia and soda-laced waters. I was keenly aware of life and again reminded of the unexpected detour mine took on April 17, 2003.
Fifteen years. What to say?
In Native American story-telling, concepts of time and space are so different from how we see them in Western culture. Something that occurred long ago in tribal history may be referenced as happening yesterday to have immediate impact on listeners as they seek to make sense of a traumatic and/or confusing event or situation.
Time can be circular, not linear, as we traditionally construe it. While we think of the past as a natural, rational route in molding and understanding the future, Native Americans strongly believe the future is a valuable route in molding and understanding the past. It’s a two-way street.
Fifteen years. What to say?
In Native American story-telling, concepts of time and space are so different from how we see them in Western culture. Something that occurred long ago in tribal history may be referenced as happening yesterday to have immediate impact on listeners as they seek to make sense of a traumatic and/or confusing event or situation.
Time can be circular, not linear, as we traditionally construe it. While we think of the past as a natural, rational route in molding and understanding the future, Native Americans strongly believe the future is a valuable route in molding and understanding the past. It’s a two-way street.
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