Winner of the PR for Poets Giveaway, The Light in August with Otters and Unicorns, and Looking Forward to Fall (and Working While Ill)

Sylvia posing with PR for Poets

Winner of the PR for Poets Giveaway!

Congratulations to Jan Priddy, who won last week’s giveaway of my book, PR for Poets! I’ll be sending it out really soon. Thanks to everyone who entered!

I’ll wait to do another giveaway til the first week of September, when it will be Field Guide to the End of the World.

A bouquet of dahlias from my garden

The Light in August

Both metaphorical and spiritual. As September approaches, the days here get shorter, but the light between 6 and 7 PM is so beautiful and golden. As I continue healing, I find my spirit lightening as well. My husband made a concerted effort to try to cheer me up this week – as you’ll see in pictures, this included a visit to Lake Washington where we got an up-close visit with otters, and an inflatable unicorn sprinkler. It may seem silly, but sometimes in the darkest days we need to make an effort to embrace the light.

For me, being out in nature, flowers, wild animals and even inflatable unicorn rainbow sprinklers can be part of healing the inside as well as the outside. After all, life can’t be all doctor visits and medication schedules. You have to remind yourself of why you bother fighting by doing things that remind you of the joy of living, the beauty of the world. (The ugliness of the world is easy to see – but the beauty often takes a little more searching.)

Sunflowers in late August light

Looking Forward to Fall – and Working While Ill

As we turn towards September, it feels like my energy for writing (and sending out work) is increasing. I’m feeling more hopeful about my manuscripts too, which I worked very hard on editing during the summer, along with writing new poems. Do you find the fall is linked in your mind to increased productivity and happiness, even with the pandemic? Summer is definitely not my season – I’m allergic to the sun, and MS makes you sensitive to heat – and anyway my personality definitely tends towards the “wrapped in a sweater, reading by the fire with a cup of tea” rather than “beach bunny” type.

I know some of my friends who are parents are struggling with having kids at home while working full time, and friends who are teachers and professors being forced to be in the classroom, which brings risk and more stress than usual. How are you adjusting to the coming fall?

Pileated Woodpecker takes flight

I thought I’d write a little bit about working while ill. Chadwick Boseman’s death – may he rest in peace, such a talented, beautiful actor –  came as a surprise to many, even though he had been fighting colon cancer for four years – almost all the time playing starring roles in major movies. Chadwick was the same age as my little brother – way too young – and by all accounts was a sweet, kind, upbeat guy – as well as a terrific actor who didn’t get enough time to showcase all of his talents. It seems unfair. I saw a lot of people raising the issue that he didn’t make his cancer struggle public – though he often engaged with children with cancer in charitable ways. But working in Hollywood while ill is a fraught issue – studios might not want to cast you, insurance companies might not be willing to insure you while filming and getting health insurance means you have to keep working. (Actresses like Selma Blair have discussed this in terms of going public with MS, as well.) I think also there’s a psychological aspect. If you admit you are fighting cancer, it becomes more real to you, and people will keep bringing it up in interviews or even strangers on the street will probably address you about it. Maybe he wanted to focus on the positive, and not be constantly reminded of his cancer. I can understand why he kept it private, for professional and personal reasons. His work, his radiant spirit, will live on his movies, not just the iconic Black Panther’s King T’Challa but also icons like Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and James Brown. (He also was pretty great on his stint as a host on SNL.)  Director Nora Ephron also kept her cancer a secret even from her family almost right up until her death, even while working on her last film, Julie and Julia, probably for similar reasons.

I hope people will respect these kinds of decisions, among ill and disabled people in regular life as well as Hollywood – because even though I talk here about working while disabled and chronically ill, I’m not a celebrity and my work as a freelance writer really isn’t impacted that much by whether I am sick or not. Also, I’m the kind of person who feels better venting, and when I was dealing with my own disease journey (including being diagnosed with terminal cancer a few years ago, gearing up for chemo, getting multiple oncologists’s appointments, getting radiated) – I felt okay reaching out to friends and family for support, even though some of them weren’t all that supportive (some people feel cancer is maybe contagious, or maybe talking to you might remind them of their own mortality – and while those friends’ and family’s reactions were disappointing to me, they weren’t the end of the world). That’s the way I deal with most of my problems, but other people’s decisions on how to deal with theirs are equally valid, and I hope you will try not to judge them if they don’t disclose their health struggles with you. I hope for a future where being disabled or ill would not result in discrimination at work or in personal relationships, but that future, sadly, is not here yet.

Roses in August light

That was a somewhat somber way to end a blog post about embracing the light and otter encounters. Doesn’t it seem like every bit of light these days has a little shadow cast over it – whether by the pandemic, politics, or personal losses? We do not get to choose to live without loss, stress, difficulty. But I hope we can look to Chadwick – who reached out to others to improve their lives while confronting his own mortality at such a young age – as not just a positive icon in his role as Black Panther, but a person who embraced the little joys of life, and cared deeply about others, to inspire us to help bring joy to others, and to appreciate the little joys along the way, despite our struggles. Also, this is a reminder that if someone you know seems tired, loses or gains weight, or even if they seem completely fine, they may be dealing with something hard that they have chosen not to make public. It is a reminder to be kind, to cut people some extra slack, because we never know someone else’s true story.

Onward, towards September! Remember that one of Boseman’s last tweets of a picture of him hugging Kamala Harris, and urging us to vote this fall. Write. Vote. Plant a tree, or a bunch of trees. Leave flowers for a friend. Try to change the world, a little bit at a time, to be a little bit better.