The Autumn Leaves

And so the glory of the endless summer has faded and the nights are finally drawing in. In London there is that heavy earthy smell of leaves beginning to fall and gather in damp heaps. I love the smell of the Autumn here and the canal by my studio seems to echo the heavy scent and the leaden tone of the skies. A blue heron has taken up residence outside the window and the spiders are weaving large no entry webs across the narrow passageways between buildings on Johnson’s Island. You have to keep your wits about you not to run straight into one and meet its maker. There’s a little bit of death around and for some reason I like it. The rhythm of the seasons kicking in. Time to notice the detail. This little slice of death comes right before renewal. It suits my artistic pretensions. We turn inwards, hold ourselves in a tight constellation and begin to swaddle our bodies against the wind and the cold. The grey misery becomes us here. We dig in for the grey brown burgundy winter, I begin to paint in darker more intense colours. Thicker paint. Crusty textures.

I’m not sure why I have not felt like writing. I know you are supposed to keep up regularly with a blog or your audience goes away. Who cares really. I write through a need to write. And if I don’t need, I don’t write. I decided it was worse for it to become a chore. Or part of a need to perform my illness, although I’ll admit there may have been a bit of that. Nine months of bearing your soul takes its toll and sometimes we need to turn inwards and not share. It’s a rare thing not to share every damn thing we do these days. A joy just to allow feelings to percolate slowly. I spend a lot of time in my head these days. I think more than I do. Every day I try to make myself exercise, write a bit, paint a bit. And this bit of the cancer journey is somehow the hardest. The recovery. I remember this. The emergency has passed but the drug regime continues. There is only irritating debilitating joint pain, fatigue and insufferable whingeing. God I bore myself sometimes. My poor family. I’m in the midst of changing my chemotherapy pills because the side effects were too harsh to do ordinary life with. I’m on these drugs for life. Believe me you don’t want the detail. My mobility is poor because of the medication and oestrogen starvation. I hobble about with sore hips and knees like a twisted Chinese grandma muttering to herself. I have to time the new pills around food to manage the gastric burn and I get tired after about an hour of doing anything. And I am trying to be understanding and patient of this failing body of mine but god it’s hard because I my head I’m 21.

To put it mildly I have already forgotten to celebrate the miracle. This is the real sign that I am returning to my old self and am normalising. Constant moaning. Oh how I missed myself. You moany old cow. Where’ve you been hiding? Who was that positive shiny unicorn from lalaland and where did you find her? She was a bit fucking irritating wasn’t she but she did her job. I hope she’ll be back if things get really dark again because I did really need her – and god she put on a great show but she can rest her shimmering mane for now. I can’t keep up with her. No one can be that cheery all the time.

To avoid sharing my creaky knees and intimate issues with you I think I will instead share my current moral dilemma (actually another form of thinly veiled moaning). Maybe you’ll relate, This is the current question that keeps me awake at night and irks me all day long. What does it mean to live a good life? A moral life. And how should one go about it. Once you’ve experienced a moment of clarity that you are indeed finite, it focuses the mind. My cancer has backed down for now but like a vexatious neighbour it will probably pop its head up again at some stage. I want to know I have used the time I have left to have made some difference to someone. To finally do something not with myself in mind.

Last time I had cancer 7 years ago I went right back to working too hard in a stressful job in a slightly toxic environment just to prove that I was still in the game and it felt all wrong. Eventually I found a way to change the pace of my life through studying, working a bit, public speaking, finding things that resonated with my purpose. This time I am in a better position. My income is covered fortunately by income protection. I want to work. I like my work. It has meaning for me. But how much is enough? I feel I want to make impact. I want to live a moral life and do something that matters. But what? And now that I don’t have to work to live why do I work? Moral ambition makes me want to work but only in so far as I feel we should work to give rather than work to live. I appreciate these thoughts belong in a realm of privilege. For me it’s never even been a question. I worked to pay the mortgage and put food on the table and pay the bills like everyone else. But what comes next? How do you turn moral ambition into a new and more purposeful way of living? Can you simply find your way to it by having strong intentions and an opportunistic eye?

At the start of the summer I went on a retreat at Penny Brohn, a cancer charity with a spectacular house in Bristol. I met a lot of amazing courageous women there (and one even more courageous man who found himself in the middle of us all). I have been planning a couple of follow up retreats since then for a small group. Creative Cancer Retreats at the family farm with painting, sound healing, qigong, meditation and, of course, bonsai. The first is in a few weeks, just seven of us. I have invited gong healers, artists, other practitioners and they have all given their time for free without my suggesting it. It’s overwhelming. And I am planning the same in Ibiza back in the place I went in the summer. They’re giving us rooms for the week for the price of the average night in high season. And the same thing is happening. Practitioners coming out of the woodwork offering their services for free quite simply because so many people have been touched by cancer. I don’t think this is my new career but it is very enjoyable to organise them and to give people something to look forward to. In the meantime there are a couple of other things keeping me busy. An inaugural professorial lecture at the end of October. Another jazz gig at a beautiful club. This one much more of a professional challenge. Both kind of terrifying from here but they will happen whether I like it or not. It does me good to have to try and not to have a choice. There are days, most days at the moment to be brutally honest, when I just want to stay curled up on my sofa feeling tired and hide under a cushion but life and other people keep dragging me back on my feet to carry on. Thanks to all those annoying people for not giving up on me. There will be more moaning from the frontline soon. I promise.