Category Archives: multiple sclerosis

“New Hole” from “Frazzle”

I am stubborn, persistent, and determined and that can work for me or against me. My choice. In the case of medical issues, sometimes I don’t see the choice. I feel like I’m stuck and have to keep on, and yet… there’s always some kind of help I’m not seeing. My attitude about the whole thing is something I can choose. I know that deep insights and clarity (and poems) often come to me through health problems, from multiple sclerosis to cancer, hernias to kidney stones, heart failure to extreme allergic reaction to poison ivy, depression to panic attacks, I’ve learned I can heal from most anything. We are all fabulous healers, though the form of that healing may not be what we expected. Think back to every scrape and bruise since babyhood. All gone, the body-mind-spirit is wondrous! I forget, and then I am reminded. I’ve also developed skills to support this healing (or at least get out of my own way). A daily energy balancing practice is one of them, reducing stress and remembering to breathe deeply. I consciously clear away emotional debris from each day, in kindness to myself—on the good days. How about you?

So here is Poem 7 from Thrown Again into the Frazzle Machine:   https://youtu.be/L5fGv8RKrY0

Listen to more video poems from “Frazzle”

This Is the Moment I Have

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This poem has been in my head the last few days. A bit of context: I wrote it after healing from multiple sclerosis and then rehab. And then, at age 44, after diagnosis with two breast tumors, one in each breast. Followed by surgery, chemo and radiation. Appreciating the healed body, reminding myself of all I am grateful for. So here it is:

This Is the Moment I Have

not tomorrow
with its joy or sorrow.

This is the moment—
when I floss my teeth,
and stand on two strong legs,

smiling in the mirror
at a face topped by hair.
This moment of easy breathing

with husband and children
deeply sleeping nearby.
This moment with fresh, cool

spring air blowing in my window
from a dark, rich night capped by stars.
This is the moment I have,

not next week or next month,
however much time and energy
I spend planning them.

How often am I actually
here…
in this only moment I have?

Margaret Dubay Mikus
© 1997

From my book, As Easy as Breathing: Reclaiming Power for Healing and Transformation.

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And track 25 on my CD, Full Blooming: Selections from a Poetic Journal.

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Feel free to share. Thanks for reading. Do you know this feeling?

Space of Grace

After several years of working with health professionals, I healed from multiple sclerosis in spring of 1995. The body is amazing; it will do its best to adapt to any circumstance. It took years of additional rehab to undo all the adaptations in my body, to enable smooth, fluid walking for example, muscles and nerves coordinated and in balance. I learned a lot about how complex and interwoven these ordinary tasks are. And I had a renewed appreciation for the hard work of babies to learn to walk in the first place.

I did not set out to heal from MS, which I had been told was not possible. I set out to deal with depression as my physical symptoms increased and the life path that stretched out before me diminished. I am careful when I say that I healed from MS, and there is solid evidence that this is so. This is not the day I want to talk about that healing process, nor what I learned. What I do want to say is that healing from MS cracked me open creatively speaking.

Most of my life I had the impression I was not a creative person. In looking back, I can see some of how that misunderstanding took root. It seems ludicrous now that I have found my home in creating beauty, in poetry, photography, music, etc. For me it took MS to bring me home to my creative self. The symptoms most often affected my left side, controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, the creative center. In some unconscious way, I had cut myself off from my creative side. This is obviously simplistic, but has truth in it. Once the MS was gone, I had a creative awakening, with ideas bursting out of me as if they had been waiting my whole life for me to notice. I continued working on healing. I began a poetic journal, which has now been going for almost fourteen years.

Within a year (1996) I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two tumors, one in each breast, picked up on a routine mammogram, followed by further testing. I was 44 years old with a husband and two young children. It is not stretch to say that writing the poems saved my life. It was an integral part of my healing from cancer. Writing allowed me to express what was happening to me, to understand, and to share. It turned out that others were also helped by these poems.

Early on in my writing, I noticed that certain people seemed to stimulate my creativity. When I was going to my voice lessons or having a massage, for example. I started calling these times, my space of grace. A time when I could more easily draw from the universal creative well. I am sure you have these times and people in your life as well. What people or places or events open a space of grace in your life?

3/17/06

Space of Grace

There are some times, some places, some people
which evoke in the space before and after
like a cushion of rarified air—

a space of grace during which anything
can happen: insight, inspiration, healing, clarity,
answers to thorny questions asked, joy, levity, harmony.

This grace is unearned, unmeasured, unpaid for,
unencumbered by elegant expectation.

This grace is a miracle or
the environment for miracles to happen—
a little bit of heaven,

casually interwoven with
the apparent ordinary.

Margaret Dubay Mikus
© 2006