The realisation of the length breadth and dimensionality of interconnectivity makes my breath stop for a second in my throat when I am at the farm.

You see the city is so loud. “Inner City Life, Inner City pressure”. But the countryside is Louder. Really. You know that expression the silence was deafening – well I am truly burst open with the resonance sound of nature.

Inner and Outer, private and public, boundaries boundaries boundaries. Sharing this blog has been liberating. The personal made public. Living on the farm has erased the need for a publicly constructed face. The trailer is a bit cold and damp in the morning. It is not a place to loiter in. I have to just get up and get out – into an already hot day: to go and wash, or go to the loo, or harvest early in the morning. It doesn’t matter if I am not clean and fresh, the smell of multishaped and multisized chocolate logs from many different animals pungently fragrances the air – top note goat poo, bottom note horse poo; it doesn’t matter if I look like I have only one breast, it announces nothing, betrays nothing, triggers nothing. I segue seamlessly from personal to public to personal – a multi species public composed of barking dogs, shy hens, approachable horses, flowers that greet me, truculent ponies, ducks trying to avoid the humans, humans speaking German, English and French and sometimes Arabic. Something deep inside me is fed. I look like a farm creature not a tame urban domestic hutch guineapig.

Talking of greeting me, Gabba and her dog Pixel came and picked me up from the airport. It was now mid August. We arrived back to the farm, the white trash trailer was waiting for me. Everything was as I left it but different. The dirt/soil was still there, but the flies were gone from the farm house. I went to pick the small white flowers but the flowers were drying up and shrivelling, only my beloved purple hollyhocks remained though not in their abundant glory as before. The Blue lagoon – the name for the outside compost toilet – was now in the throes of a hornet colony – the lone drone of the previous month, that I took pleasure in recording with my zoom had morphed into an electrical crackling of the multitude that was spine tingling and not conducive to conducting ones morning business in a smooth and easy manner. Squeak!

I started the 5mg of melatonin, breaking each tablet into 4 pieces as I am very sensitive to light at the best of times, and being contrary down to the last bone in my little gp body, find that melatonin has the inverse affect of its supposed nighttime slumber facilitation.

I started the iodine, after ordering all the supplements I needed – but then realised that actually the trusty Zell Oxygen (that has been my companion for many years, and will be the only thing that I will always take) has everything except the vitamin c in anyway – how amazing is that – no need for money to be spent except a £13 bottle twice a month.

And I started working with my new tuning fork of 111hz courtesy of Ashera Hart. I have used sound extensively over the last 12 years – and will write a blog entry soon detailing this – but I felt re-invigorated about the potentially of individual frequencies – despite my cultural musicologist head inwardly poo pooing that.

I had brought with me books by Cesar Milan and Barbara Marciniak. Good companions for the evenings and had taken Gabba the whole next season of Orange is the New Black that we watched intermittently.

During those first days for some inexplicable reason I was observing myself sulking (with myself) for not going on a family holiday on the Isle of Wight and choosing to come back here but after that I got in the flow. Luckily what looked like Autumn already when I arrived morphed into weeks of glorious sun and heat. I started getting more involved in the farm work, in the kitchen, got exposed to films and activist speakers from Syria, did a couple of gigs, had a super brief sojourn in Berlin, caught up with old friends, including sharing some Chi Kung with Swanhilde in a Berlin park, went to the Supamolly, visited some other projects, returned to the farm, was called upon to do some mediation, baked pies and cakes.

Gabba had wisely voiced concern that maybe the farm wasn’t the best place to take down the tumour, but after re-assuring her I wasn’t going to tackle the tumour head on, as I didn’t want full on detox symptoms on the farm the iodine started making my head and kidneys feel a tiny bit achey, and it felt right to stop it. The hornet nest in the loo had had a paralysing affect on my colon intelligence, temporarily affecting my ability to naturally release toxins and I didn’t have the tools that would have helped. Anyone working with cancer knows that constipation can be a side effect of detoxing and can be hard on the body – no pun intended – hence the reliance on enemas for protocols such as the Gerson technique.

There was still an option of getting admitted to the well respected anthroposophical hospital in Berlin to try and see Gabbas amazing doctor – but it would mean going in as an emergency on my own and staying in, having lots of tests, and then still not being guaranteed to see her, so I decided to just focus on getting some kind of daily morning routine so I could do my personal health care stuff.  Stuff like wound care, intermittent juice and cold showers within a time frame that still enabled me to contribute with harvesting and cooking, lightweight cleaning, laundry and clearing. Then by 4pm I could skidaddle off to the woods. Taking a blanket and a stick (made me feel safer as the forest is full of wild boars) I would walk to a  relatively secluded oak place by the cows or in my last week – cycle 3k to a magical lake. All this was building up my immune system. Being in nature, being part of a community, working, sharing and collaborating with others, and of course friendships – with my wise peers Gabba and Coost, but also by connecting with others on the farm. This plus my daily walks and meditation practice from 4-6pm.

Well readers as we all know all good things must come to an end – so other good things can happen and I always knew my time on the farm was finite. But so many amazing memories, so much gratitude, and a magical place now always placed in my heart to revisit when I choose too.

Towards the end of my sojourn on the farm the first time there had been some potato thrashing action. I had decided my left arm could be employed in this manner and enjoyed gleefully hitting big red bugs off the potato plants with fellow farm hands.  This natural and time consuming method is the most eco, sustainable and ethical way of knocking off the little blighters feeding on the potato plants to the soil, the reasoning being it takes them then a day or two to laboriously climb back up. One makes a weed brushel then walks along the rows of spuds twatting them. It is superbly satisfying and avoids using insecticides and poisons. Unfortunately one of the consequences of this action as we discovered later was that not only did the bugs get knocked off – yay – but the seed of an insidious potato weed got spread further afield – thus creating more weeding work. You see dear readers every action has a consequence. What we saved in money and harmonious ethical plant power we lost in time. But in a place where time is not money and profits don’t dictate the process the pressure is not on quite the same way. People before profit. Earth and her inhabitants before profit!

And this is an analogy as to how I choose to work with the cancer. I will take longer, make more work for myself, but ultimately try and protect and honour the body and the earth (despite my human flaws and air miles). Yes of course I am part guineapig and part flawed human who despite the best intentions will still hop on a plane due to practical considerations, but we choose our battles and as long as we don’t get disheartened we can learn to live more and more sustainably. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Just as I was getting ready to go home, Gabba came and grabbed me excitedly. “Calliope you know I went to see my doctor at that amazing anthroposophical hospital in Berlin today … well I told her about you… and your situation. She knows other women in similar positions, and groaned when she heard about the radiotherapy voicing that hospitals these days simply do not know what to do with tumours and freak out, anyways, Calliope, are you listening to me, she suggested something, and I don’t know how you will react to it …. so prepare yourself” “Erm, do I want to know this” I squirmed, “is it conventional horror?” She laughed. “No” she said – “she suggested using……maggots!”

I laughed wholeheartedly – “maggots! ”

“Yes Maggots! Apparently they are in a little enclosed pouch and you put the pouch on the tumour and they do their thing in a contained way and eat all the zapped tumour that your body can’t break down! ” I laughed some more – “what a perfect ecological sustainable idea! Right then I had better get on the case and see whats up with this maggot story.” I did some cursory research and established that in the UK there were a couple of companies supplying hospitals with medicinal maggots. This was the information I had been waiting for and now I could come home.

And that readers is the end of todays blog. Thank-you for reading, thank-you for your encouraging comments and remember everything is possible.

Tune in next week for more health adventuring.

Much love Calliope xx

photos and resources:

Swanhilde Maas: http://www.chen-taijiquan.net/swanhild/Willkommen.html

Ashera Hart: http://www.asherahart.net

Zell Oxygen by Dr.Wolz : https://www.wolz.de/en/products/vitality-regeneration-anti-aging/zell-oxygenr-plus.html