Christine Cavanaugh > Recent Status Updates

“I’m a stack of hypersensitivities in a trench coat.”

“Making people like their inescapable destinies!”

I no longer want to protect my heart. You can't guarantee that people won't hurt or betray you—they will, be it a breakup or something as big and blinding as death. But evading heartbreak is how we miss our people, our purpose. I make a pact with myself and send it off into the desert: May I be awake enough to notice when love appears and bold enough to pursue it without knowing where it will lead.

What if I stopped thinking of pain (grief) as something that needs to be numbed, fixed, dodged, and protected against? What if I tried to honor its presence in my body, to welcome it into the present?

When we travel, we actually take three trips. There's the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There's the trip you're actually on. And then, there's the trip you remember. "The key is to try to keep all three as separate as possible," he says. "The key is to be present wherever you are right now."

The idea of striving for some beautiful, perfect state of wellness… mires us in eternal dissatisfaction, a goal forever out of reach. To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have.

But when the body betrays you again and again, it obliterates whatever nascent trust you’ve restored in the universe and your place in it. Each time, it becomes harder to recover your sense of safety.

“Everyone who is born hold dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the such,” Susan Sontag wrote in ‘Illness as Metaphor.’

“Write,” instructs Annie Dillard, “as if you were doing.” We are all terminal patients on this earth-the mystery is not “if” but “when” death appears in the plotting.

We don’t die, my love. Not really. We change, yes. We become other things—the grass and flowers, trees and wind and stars. We rejoin the Great Mother, and our souls disperse into the universe, and become a part of a hundred million other living things, forever and ever.

“In 1952 [my grandmother] returned to [Havana] to the start of a coup. US-backed dictator, military sgt & former president Batista refused to lose an election & installed himself as nation’s leader once again. This time he…jailed his enemies, censored the schools and press & allowed for rampant privatization…becoming a playground for the corrupt…a safe haven for the American mob…for a cut of profits.”

“I’ve grown convinced that when you swallow your pain it never does digest. I suspect that untreated pain curdles your blood and changes your code. It sinks into your bones, it blisters to the surface, and then it presents like diabetes, alcoholism, depression, obsessive compulsion, cancer… My father’s and his father’s pain likely have become my own unease and obsession.”