We the Living by Jocelyn Rasmussen

Every bone and joint aches. My heart races, and my stomach is kind of seasick. The ground is unpredictable and might meet my face instead of my feet. Ignoring the side effects of chemotherapy, I risk the yellow morning.

The meadows have swallowed the late summer sun and offer it back to the sky in dense masses of golden rod, tall yellow daisies, tiny wood sorrel, brown-eyed Susan, milkweed and dandelion. They form an interlocking community with a subterranean puzzle of roots. Above ground their slender stems crowd together and lean on each other to avoid breaking in the weathers of change. Their scientific names sound like chemotherapy drugs, and the way they grow and support one another’s survival is like the abiding, expansive community I lean into as I live along the edge of days.

As the sun rises, the entire landscape sparkles with dewdrops that evaporate into slim wisps of fog and drift heavenward like smoke from prayer bowls. I pray with them as I sit meditation by the river, a sheet of living glass mirroring September on its way to Lake Erie. I breathe the sweet air. Inhale. Exhale. Receive. Release. Inhale an image of my sister in surgery being breathed by a machine. Exhale a prayer for her healing. Inhale an image of burning forests. Exhale a report of a suffocated child and dog holding each other. Break open and receive. Release and grieve.

What am I, among the living, to do? Since writing my last book we have collectively entered what many are calling unimaginable times, and my message of hope and healing is growing into my unshakeable belief in the power that remains to all of us no matter how precarious life seems. 

I believe with all my heart and soul that we are medicine for this day and for creation. It is a bold statement and seems ridiculous when the thoughts and actions of people are injecting poison into our world. But our medicine is in our radiance, our refined capacities for awareness and compassion. Healing thoughts and actions arise when this radiance is translated into the personality through life experience, learning and creativity. 

I met a young man raising money to house and educate abandoned, abused and trafficked orphans in Cambodia. As a young boy he had watched the execution of his family, had a gun shoved in his hands and was told if he did not do as he was told, he too would be shot dead. With tears streaming down his face, he told us he eventually lost count, but knew he had killed over 1000 people before he escaped. No one would have seen him as medicine when he was wielding a gun and killing without discrimination, but by the time we met him, everyone saw his radiance in action as he provided for the most vulnerable demographic in a country trying to recover from a brutal civil war.

Whether writers of memoir or fiction, stories brutal and beautiful matter. So does the choice to translate nature’s glory or the soul’s lament into poetry. The choice to retreat to the desert of a blank page and await the winds that blow our wild and wanted spirit to form an unexpected grace of words and meaning matters. 

I write books because I feel they belong to life and I should not die with them inside of me. I got stuck writing my first book, worrying I could not scientifically prove much of what I was sharing. I see energy around people and learn from what I see, but grounding that learning and trying to make it useful to others felt impossible. “Who was I to be saying such things?” A roar like thunder inside my head answered, “If you don’t, we have just spent 50 years preparing you for nothing.”

The voice I “hear” rarely roars. It is usually quieter than thinking, and always faster. Listening to it is the seed of my creative process. Some call it a muse, I refer to it as guidance, an integrated dynamic that inspires the personality to channel what it does not know until after it is expressed. 

Living with cancer, that voice has not had to speak so loudly. I wrote the second book without fear. I wrote because I am living and it is my medicine. As I continue listening I am learning the art of bite-sized writing. In these hectic, tumultuous times we seem collectively to prefer a few hundred words at a time. I am learning to encapsulate my medicine in smaller doses. 

I continue teaching voice where it is not about my creativity, but about helping others identify their gifts and develop the capacity to express them. I host conversations on zoom where we share from our roots to our radiance, and lean into one another to support our creativity in a dark and worried time. Like women who once wove exquisite rugs using images of nature now weave rugs with images of machine guns and fighter jets, our words may express the dark, but no matter how we are experiencing the state of our world, may we the living align our thoughts and actions with our most refined capacities. May we recognize and spend our best, whatever form it calls us to, and may we spill our wild and wanted spirits onto the page to bless this day and our humanity.

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This Day Won’t Come Again: Radical Presence and Life-Threatening Illness

For readers touched by Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and anyone with a life-threatening illness seeking healing of body, mind, and spirit, a fellow patient shares her journey of choosing to have the best day of her life by working as though she will live and living every moment as though she might die.

Waking to the stunning realization she had cancer, Jocelyn Rasmussen’s first thought was that she needed a miracle. Her second thought was that she didn’t want to die with any unspent love or grace inside her. Guided by this principle, she entered treatment with faith that she could accept any outcome—from a complete remission to death.

As Rasmussen underwent chemotherapy and radiation, she plunged into the mysteries and certainties of life and death. All of creation, nature and humanity, became fodder for her reflections about healing, time, hope, dreaming, and loving. The deeper she went, the more she realized she was already living the miracle she’d asked for. It was being revealed in every sacred moment of her life—she simply hadn’t always recognized it. Life, she discovered, was radiant with the light of wisdom, the strong and gentle touch of caregiving, the gratitude for another breath, and the surprise of all that was arising.

Tender and uplifting, This Day Won’t Come Again will encourage you to trust your own radiance and allow it to guide you into the unique meaning and purpose that is yours to share as you navigate treatment or caregiving for life-threatening illness.

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Jocelyn Rasmussen MMUS, LLWL, is a singer, teacher, composer, author and inspirational speaker.  Her first book, Meant to Be Heard, maps the human voice and its potential for transformational work. She has recorded two albums of original songs, Just Love Away and Singing Is Praying Twice. For over twenty years she taught singing and executive voice coaching in seminars and private sessions in New York City. Three years after returning to Canada she was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer and has been in treatment in London, Ontario for 13 years. The hope and healing she has experienced during this time have grown into her second book, “This Day Won’t Come Again”. She continues her work in Toronto and London, and lives in London with her partner, Doug. “This Day Won’t Come Again” can be found on Amazon.com and SimonandSchuster.com.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing