New Years Eve 2004 I felt ill.                                                                                                                   Really ill.

Fatigued and in breast and under arm pain, ringing in my ears and sore gums. I was djing in Barcelona for a spiral tribe squatted warehouse party.

Now, August 2017 I feel ill.                                                                                                         Really ill.

With intense pain in my sternum and breasts that is almost unbearable, total fatigue, ringing ears and an ulcerated tongue.

The circle has come full circle. 13 YEARS and I am back facing the pain I have tried so hard to bypass, avoid, heal from, dance around.

In the last 13 years I have gone to California where I met some amazing people, qualified in sexological body work and stayed in a women’s tantra temple. Gone to SOAS and got a BA hons in Ethnomusicology as a mature student – my first visit to university. Held down the women’s café until 2012.

Travelled and taught in Berlin, Amsterdam, and at festivals : Glastonbury, Fusion. Ozora, Radical Herb. I conceived and taught a 6 week Interval Oracle programme. Seen the beauty of a small part of Italy and visited Budapest. Twice.

Helped a couple of women conceive, helped a couple of women and their partners give birth, gave some pleasure coaching. Ran a Reiki clinic by donation. Trained in some Tama Do modules, qualified in Taoist meditation practices. Trained to be a professional doula (and decided to stay a laywoman.) Shared my ideas and inspirations freely, generously for other to build upon and profit. Been rejected because of my hidden disability from a sexual priestess course. Been an active member of the amazing Women’s Health Project, and have also set up a not for profit company – which is nascent and waiting to get started.

I have lived in the same house for 25 years.

Trapped but safe.

I am holding it together.

Stubbornly. With a feeling of deep curiosity. And hope.

Believing that true hope can only be borne and have meaning when issued from the depths of despair. Otherwise it is not hope, it is wishful thinking.

To wish for hope that doesn’t acknowledge global pain and suffering is a blindness.

I hope, I trust, I hold tight.

I believe my body has its own wisdom and I witness the putrid stink of a large mass collapse in on itself, growing every day. The exudate intense. The colour black/grey/brown. Radiotherapied tumour flesh rotting and melting away.

I tried for medicinal maggots a year ago but the tumour was deemed too pink and healthy. Now in my hour of need with a situation growing more intense by the minute I wait weeks for an outpatient appointment with a hospital – to request again agents from the worm world to help me help my body/support my body get rid of this mass that is now starting to be on its way out.

I have no idea what will happen. I think it will be done and dusted by the time the appointment comes through. I will deal with it alone.

I simply stay quiet, immobile, witnessing the pain, encouraging my body to shed this load in a relatively safe way. The Chinese gunpowder wound care is on standby for the inevitable bleeds. I have no idea how this is going to work.

It will be messy and smelly and painful.

All this is an inevitable fact of life. We buy comfort through sanitization. We hand over our agency in order not to face the body’s fallibilities and weaknesses, not to be fully integrated smelly beautiful human beings.

I trust

I hope.

I embrace it all.

Love Calliope xx