How I Became A Hippy

I’m embracing my inner hippy and moving to Hawaii. If I had heard this sixteen months ago, I’d’ve busted a gut. But sixteen months later, and massive amounts of self-reflection—or morphine—see me taking a forward step that would be otherwise inconceivable. When I decided that New York wouldn’t be the best option for at least the next year, if not next three, I reexamined my options. I didn’t want to stay in Utah. I didn’t want to continue chemo in cold weather. But I also wanted to reinvent myself, preferably somewhere undefined by what my past lives looked like. My heart has longed for adventure. My spirit has understood something deeper, more of a pilgrimage. Susan Sontag, in her work “Illness as Metaphor,” inspired by her own experience with breast cancer, exposes a need those who have survived this extremely life-altering disease have to reclaim their humanity on their terms, to retreat, as she puts it, from a world marching to the beat of a significantly different drummer.

I was nervous penciling together my wish list. It’s one thing to dream up ideas, another to make your desires concrete. My list included general items: sunny weather, tropical climate. But there were also some more specific needs listed: I have two years of treatment remaining, so I wrote “close proximity to a hospital.” I’m still energetically unable to work full-time, so I wrote “room and board covered without $$$.” I wrote “a place where I feel inspired to create and perform again.” Finally I wrote “a community.” My mind shuffled through the terrible people I’ve met traveling. Scratch that. “A really kick-ass community.” A healing community.

Hawaii seemed far from the answer: Disney cruises filled with angst-ridden yuppies and their sunburnt, snot-nosed kids. The iconic surfer dudes, the sort who used to shove kids like me into the trash bins in junior high, when they weren’t too baked to think straight. I laughed the first time someone mentioned Hawaii. But then I heard it again, and then again, both times more specific: Puna, Hawaii. I researched. No Disney cruises, mostly eco-friendly locals (read: hippies), and a vibrant gay community...? Pink frosting on the cake. I was out to lunch with a friend who had been helping me formulate my wish list several months earlier. A friend of his had loved living in Hawaii. I knew better at this point. “Where?” He cut through his burrito and replied, “Puna.” Three times the charm. I called the retreat in Puna his friend had volunteered at as a first point of reference, Kalani Honua (meaning the meeting of Heaven and Earth in Hawaiian), an artist’s and yoga lover’s nature resort on Puna’s rural ocean-side. If any spot was bound to turn me hippy, it was surely here.

Stepping into the abyss has never felt more nerve-wracking. I keep waking from anxiety dreams: I reach the Honolulu hospital and I’m told by grinning, menacing orderlies that I can’t get chemo. At heart is a deeper fear. I survived this ordeal by turning inwards, by hibernating. It’s terrifying to step back into the world, albeit a smaller-scaled world, and to have to be a semi-social creature again. It’s terrifying to be held accountable for myself again, by my peers and those I’m working with. But this move is meant to take that step. There is no Lonely Planet guidebook for cancer (although I've been tempted to make one). No one explains how to navigate and stay afloat. No maps, no trail markers, not even the vaguest idea of direction most of the time. The only option is to step forward, blindly and boldly, knowing that ultimately you have no idea what is just ahead, no idea if the ground you’re even walking on can support you. It is the ultimate pilgrimage, a journey no one can accompany you on. There is your heart, what some call intuition. Listening to it takes a great deal of quieting your mind. And trust. But a secret I’ve learned—the next step is always there. Cancer shook me and knocked me far off my center, sure, but as I’ve stabilized myself, I’ve discovered a remarkable thing: I’m still supported. The ground is still beneath me.

It makes me laugh sometimes, seeing how much time people spend worrying and wondering if what supports them now will support them in the future. It won’t. And it will. Every step in life—cancer or not—is a risk, a prediction that because the last step was there, the next will be too. I stepped more boldly and with more grace the day I realized that even when there is no next step, it’s actually a hell of a lot more fun to screw the steps altogether, and just stick to free falling. Aloha.