I was gone for a while, but not on purpose

I had actually just received good news here.

Where the hell have I been?

A lot has happened since Kara launched her Sparkle into other dimensions. I nearly published her book, then hit a roadblock over the cover art. I threw her celebration of life--an exhausting but magical production that still fills me with awe. I went back to her book, acquired better cover art (actually a LOT better, and without intellectual property concerns), and fleshed out a way to make Kara's story even more gripping and powerful. Besides book/funeral stuff, I wrote a fantasy story that appeared in an anthology called Profane Altars, started drumming again, visited some friends in San Francisco, sat as a judge in the Portland Air Guitar contest, connected with a documentary filmmaker, and formed an idea of the coaching/content project that will be the theme of my entire life if I can live long enough to push it through. 

Oh yeah... and on this site I published 42 blog posts.

Most of my time outside of work, I am by myself. But I am not a recluse. Nearly every week, I see my acupuncturist and have dinner and drinks with a couple of friends. Once a month, I host a gathering with my Hotspice team and subject myself to some truly dismal horror and sci-fi movies with another friend. Every few months, I visit my birth family who live near the Oregon Coast. I regularly Zoom with a childhood friend and even met him at our old grade school for our first Christmas bazaar together in over forty years. I also stay connected to people who share various grief bonds with me--relatives, friends, healers, artists, and other soul-tribe weirdos near and far. Workwise, I continue to be a chiropractic assistant and doer of odd jobs, from personal training to copy editing to packing role-playing dice. Then there's the Airbnb that Kara and I established. I am certainly not busier than anyone else, but I manage to stay occupied. 

In my spare time, I read, mostly nonfiction. Because of my experience as a cancer caregiving spouse, I have taken a deep interest in public discourse about health and illness. And because of the impact of Kara's separation from me in this life, I have become one of those people who are obsessed with the question of what happens to us when we die. Along that line, I tend to go down YouTube rabbit holes about the big spiritual themes, as well as about near-death experiences, caregiving, hospice, and terminal cancer patients' stories. Aside from those happy preoccupations, I mostly watch movies and TV shows I've seen before, many of them from my formative years. I haven't kept up much with new releases in popular entertainment or the latest strides taken by our government and others toward implementing human extinction. As a consumer I'm kind of boring, thinking a lot about death and childhood, whatever... I'm fucking old. 

Love is worth the painful wisdom of grief.

In the present political climate, this may sound like I'm sticking my head in the sand. It's more like I'm directing my attention away from danger signs that do not help me with the purpose I have discovered from being a cancer copilot and widower. This reminds me of a story that a friend once told me. He is an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan. One time on the road, he grew alarmed at the signs of trouble he saw all around him. Then someone in the vehicle told him that if he continued to read the environment the way he was taught, he would lose his mind. Similarly, I choose to engage minimally in the 24/7 doom-and-gloom news cycle. I hoard my energy so I can quietly chip away at making some sort of social impact, as opposed to being more externally focused. Fortunately, I'm lucky to know people who have an unconscious knack for apprising me of the downward trends I need to think about in my little bubble. I'm trying to keep my priorities straight--even if it means only looking six inches in front of me or forty years behind me, if that's what helps me to carry on.

In the end, I want to leave a body of work that I can look back on and know the pain I went through to be the person who created it was not only justified, but essential. What I watched as Kara took the helm in her hospital bed in our living room continues to fuel me as I work to increase the social value of her being a role model during the last years of her time on earth. Nothing matters more to me than to turn her story into a spark of change. I can do this by creating services and content infused with her legacy of leadership, so that her enthusiasm, advocacy, and raw and uncensored thoughts have a chance of spreading further outward in a cultural framework that worships the medical profession and sets unrealistic expectations for remaining disease-free and clear of death. If I can accomplish this even a little, whatever it looks like, then I will feel some peace about our hardships. Love is worth the painful wisdom of grief. But I want alchemy on top of the alchemy. I want more voices like Kara's showing us how we can more honestly speak about, and live within, our imperfect and impermanent bodies.

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Maybe I've said something similar in previous blog posts. If so, thank you for listening to another one of my self-pep talks. In a nutshell, I just wanted to say that I am still here, still working on shit, and still appreciative of anyone who reads her blog. As a reward for getting to the bottom of this post, here is an animated confection that captures how I picture Kara in her purest form, what she has always been and will always be:

AI-generated? Yes. But a friend came up with it and it makes me smile.

Don't look too hard for the danger signs or you'll go crazy.

Stay tuned, fellow travelers.

Until next time.

--Charles Austin Muir