Dreaming Awake

On June 24, I went into a hospital in Oaxaca for prostate surgery and the removal of two bladder stones. The surgery appears to have been successful. The prostate problems that had caused so much pain and discomfort have been greatly relieved. The stones (which I had no idea were rattling around inside of me) are gone, though my bladder has been through a lot.
I am grateful for improvements in my quality of life.

But sixty-seven days later, I am still in a strange place. The incision below my navel that was made to remove the stones continues to weep fluid, and there is pain. I need to change bandages three times a day. There have been various explanations, but no clear answer. Next week, in Santa Fe, I will seek a second opinion.

So I find myself in what feels like a kind of no-man’s land: no longer truly ill, but not yet well.

And strangely, this has brought me back to something I experienced while traveling around the world in 2008.

Somewhere along that journey, I came to a perception that felt profoundly true:

I am dreaming awake.

Not that the world isn’t real. It is completely real while we are here. Love is real. Pain is real. Beauty is real. Loss is real.

And yet this life is only a blink of the eye. The soul is eternal.

Everything matters.

And nothing matters.

That realization gave me a remarkable calm. I could let the dream unfold without constantly demanding that it be different. My task was simply to live fully and observe as if I was a witness. When we are dreaming, events have a life of their own. We surf the “big wave,” and it is best to enjoy every moment.

It is easy to observe the dream when it is beautiful.

It is harder when the dream hurts.

My body has become mysterious to me. Something was removed. Something was released. Yet a wound remains open.

I don’t believe my psychological history caused my prostate problems or bladder stones. But I do wonder what meaning I might find in the experience. The prostate, bladder, sexuality, release, the wound that will not close—touch places in the psyche that I have been exploring for years, especially as I write my autobiography.

Perhaps the question isn’t Why did this happen to me?

Perhaps it is:

Can I remain wide awake inside the dream when the dream has become difficult?

We will be in Santa Fe soon, for three weeks. First off, I will be seeing my urologist for a second opinion, and I have an appointment with my longtime psychologist as well. I want to approach this from every level: physical, psychological, spiritual.

Jim Morrison wrote:

“Strange days have found us

And through their strange hours

We linger alone

Bodies confused…”

Yes.

Bodies confused.

And perhaps this is simply another chapter in the dream.

The Wanderer has traveled far.

Now he has been asked to stop.

To wait.

To heal.

To remain awake.

Something Has Shifted.

I hesitate to say this too loudly, having learned during the past fifty-some days how unpredictable healing can be. But the incision below my navel is hurting less. The strange “wound weeping” that has required me to change the bandage three times a day seems finally to be diminishing. I am not healed. But I think I have turned a corner.

At almost the same moment, another long travail came to its end. I wrote the final lines of the epic life-poem that has occupied me for almost a year. It comes after the completion of my travel memoir, The Weight of Air.

Needless to say, painting, which has been my passion and given meaning to my life for many decades, bowed for a time to another creative pursuit—the making of words. I could not have planned it, but the current was so strong. And here we are.

Perhaps I have reached toward a wholeness I have yearned for deep down, a culmination of myriad forces. And being broken contributes to the deeper narrative. It is humbling. I look at the world around me in all its magnificence and see that the realm of man is broken too. The news is almost insufferable. The earth itself is warming before our eyes.

The poem began as an idea to write with a biblical voice: a third-person chronicle beginning before my birth, written in canticles, looking back across the whole territory of my life. The narrator who had been following the Wanderer through the decades, writing this blog, arrives at the man sitting at his desk in Oaxaca.

He had set out to render his life in third person, as the chroniclers of old;
Standing apart from the days to see them whole, offering them as witness.
Now he turned to face the work itself—the canticle beneath his hand;
Understanding writing was no mere record, but the journey’s final country.

—From The Canticle of the Open Horizon, last canto of Under the Brilliant Star

Yet the poem cannot end as life ends, for the hand that wrote it lives still.

My body, meanwhile, has literally been weeping through the incision meant to heal me. Three layers of dissolvable stitches have been rejected. For fifty days I have wanted my body simply to close itself and become whole again. Meanwhile spending almost a year writing a life in which the wounds, ruptures, deaths, departures, and failures cannot be removed without destroying the meaning of the whole story.

The manuscript is not finished. There are words to reconsider, proofs to read, illustrations to make, pages to design. And my body is not finished with its own work either. This morning there is still a bandage below my navel. But I have not needed pain relief as before, and there is less weeping from the wound.

Something has shifted.

The poem has reached its horizon. The body seems to be finding its way toward healing. And I am still here, curious about what waits beyond the next rise.

Chin Up

It has been forty days since my prostate and bladder surgery.

I approached the operation with more than a little dread, but there really wasn’t much choice. In the end, several significant problems were resolved, for which I am deeply grateful.

Still, the procedure itself was no small matter. There was gouging of tissue, suctioning and flushing, slicing and stitching. I remained awake throughout, thanks to an epidural that numbed the lower half of my body.

At seventy-four, recovery has been slower than I imagined.

The greatest frustration is that the incision made to remove the bladder stones has not healed as expected. By now I had hoped it would have closed in the first ten days, yet it continues to weep—a mixture of plasma and a small amount of blood. Suture reactions—where the body mounts an exaggerated response and tries to push the suture out or forms a small inflammatory nodule—occur in perhaps 1–5% of patients, depending on the type of suture material, the location of the surgery, and the person’s immune response.

Three times a day I change the bandage, and each time it is soaked. It remains tender and painful—24 hours a day.

My dear neighbor Marta, a retired nurse who has watched over me with remarkable kindness, does not believe I have an infection. I have no fever, no spreading redness, no foul odor at the wound, and no pus—only the persistent drainage and localized tenderness. Her calm confidence has been reassuring.

On Tuesday I return to the surgeon. I hope for encouraging news.

The emotional side of recovery has surprised me almost as much as the physical.

Throughout my life I have usually possessed an inner resilience—a kind of flame that continued to burn, even through illness and adversity, waiting only for the chance to blaze again. This time has been different. There have been moments when uncertainty has settled over me, and I have found myself wondering when that old vitality will return.

Healing, I am learning, does not always proceed at the same pace in every part of the body—or of the spirit.

Yet the blessings continue to outweigh the setbacks.

I have Amy beside me. I have Marta’s experienced care. I have good physicians. I have friends who write and call. I have faith.

And I have Naomi’s voice, still echoing after all these years.

“Chin up!”

I can almost hear her saying it.