Be Still--So Butterflies of Promise Can Alight Gently on Your Shoulder

Yesterday (Saturday) I wasn't sure I was up to going anywhere or not. Thursday my blood sugar and blood pressure both were so low that my IPT chemo treatment had been cancelled. The good thing about that was that I could face an extra long holiday weekend without quite as much queasiness as usual, though herceptin that I got Wednesday made me queasy, too. I was very happy about this turn of events!

If I could eat enough to get my blood pressure back up, maybe I'd be able to go with Jonathan to the Butterfly Pavilion which is half hour from us, an extension of our anniversary. Jonathan's dad and another friend had sent us anniversary gifts that we decided to use.  

As it turned out, I was able to go, though I kept wondering if I was going to fall over! I was glad for places to sit down often, like this spot!

We heard this is a world famous butterfly pavilion, but I thought I'd be just as happy to go sit in a Pennsylvania meadow somewhere, or in someone's butterfly garden! Still, it was a fun and relaxing experience, watching butterflies of many different colors wafting around and lighting on leaves, branches, flowers, and a girl's pink top. 

We wished a butterfly would land on us. 

This is about the closest we came to a butterfly landing on us.  That brilliant blue butterfly was our favorite one there. There were four of them that we saw. 

We knew that for a butterfly to land on you, you might need to wear a colorful top, and you definitely would need to be quiet and still. 

Butterflies don't tend to light on a shoulder or a hand that is bouncing around.

While we were there at the butterfly pavilion, I thought about our evening at the quiet pool a night or two earlier. After dark, when no one is around, Jonathan and I sometimes walk up and sit at the pool's edge and dabble in it, just sitting quietly, enjoying the quiet Arizona palms silouetted against the evening sky. 

I'd been sitting there thinking about how at the clinic, right along with their education about a cancer-discouraging diet, cancer-killing treatments, detox, and more, they also have a strong emphasis on being still. Relaxing. Meditating. Just focusing on breathing so your mind will turn off the negative things that often stress and bother you.  

So you can heal.

Friday while I was in the next room getting a blood oxygenation treatment, I got to listen in while the counselor had an hour of time with most of the rest of the patients and caregivers.

She had brought along a set of musical bowls--something I'd possibly never heard of. And she sat down on a pillow on the floor, and just softly played those bowls, 

circling her soft-headed mallet around the edges. She just played one mellow frequency after the other, talking quietly, or just being silent and playing mellow tones that bounced off the walls. 

I sat in the next room, with a tube attached to a catheter in my arm vein drawing blood from my arm through the oxygenation/ozone machine and then sending it back through another tube into my port. I watched the dark red blood going out of my body, and the brighter red, oxygenated blood going back in, thinking how much better the blood looked after it had been treated with oxygen and ozone. 

And I listened to the tones and the stillness in the adjoining room. 

The counselor was okay with often just sitting there playing tones on her bowls. 

Just being quiet.

Here at the clinic, time is taken to just be totally quiet.

 To focus only on our breathing. 

Deeply in, deeply out. 

To relax stiff muscles and tight jaws, to simply accept where we are right now instead of fighting cancer.

To not think.

To simply be still.

I sat with the tubes positioned outside my arm and chest thinking about how little I am really still.

I am busy.

Hurried.

Flurried.

Worried.

Scurried.

Busy doing... 

 --good things, I hope, like doing things for my family (some of whom visited Grand Canyon a couple weeks ago on their way back to South Dakota).

 Like blogging when I'm too weak to be doing anything else.

But just busy and moving and involved.

(This clinic emphasizes moving a lot, too, to keep your lymph system draining and your muscles built up so they can store good mitochondria that fight cancer. )

But being still? That's about as hard for me as lifting an 80-lb bag of quikrete in our garage.  

It's harder than spending a 12-hour day making applesauce

or spending an hour singing for a dying friend.

This time in Arizona has been a time for me to learn to be still.  

That evening after the musical bowls and the blood treatment and the last IV push of vitamin and heparin to keep blood from clotting over the weekend, I thought about being still--especially when the card our dear friends Olive and Elverne Asbury sent us came in the mail. 

Don't tell me!

Another reminder to be still.

But not just to be still and empty and ignorant.

The clinic emphasizes emptying your mind for a bit each day--simply not thinking.

But God wants us to be still and know.  

We do need to be still and empty for a bit, so that we can be still and fill up.

When I learned to stop thinking and be still and empty my mind and not think, I discovered beautiful thoughts filling it.

I was filled with thoughts of truth and beauty and love.

We can fill up with knowing.

Knowing God.

Remembering His promises.

Like the one that dropped into my heart the day I was getting a local hyperthermia treatment over one of my cancerous lesions, and I was dreading a treatment coming up the next day.  

It was the promise, "When you pass through the fire you shall not be burned."

And I was able to pass through that long and intense treatment with peace. 

Because while I had been still, a promise had lit gently on my mind, like the butterfly on the philodendron leaf.

I was filled up with knowing.

Filled up with knowing God.

Not just with the sounds of tones on musical bowls or the tones of sweet chimes from a nearby church,

but the tones of truth from God's Word.

Yesterday at the butterfly pavilion, we were still for a few moments at a time, sitting on stone benches and watching the butterflies wafting by--like promises and beautiful thoughts from God just waiting to land in the minds and hearts of those intentional enough to be still.