Marilyn Muses | On Life, Cancer, and other stuff

Management

I’m now managing the symptoms of my disease,And as you might expect, I’m feeling ill at ease.Prednisone shrank my lymph nodes, so it looks like I’m in remission, But the abnormal...

The Empress Within

The Empress lives within each of us. Though several Tarot decks depicts the Empress as a pregnant woman, the pregnancy itself can be seen as a metaphor of being pregnant...

The Golden Years

It’s unusually warm outside but I’m still very cold.One of the downfalls of getting so old. I was always so healthy, as to how I can’t answerBut now I am fighting my second round...

Free to Be Me

When I was 18, I went to live on a Kibbutz in Israel for 9 months. It was an elaborate way of running away from home and it saved my soul, which started me off on a path...

Groundhog Day

Sometime in January I read that the movie, Groundhog Day, would be having its’ 30th anniversary and that it will be on the AMC channel all day. I think I was the only one who...

The Wheel of Fortune is in Aruba

We were sitting in a resturant in Aruba, an open beautiful space overlooking a waterfall with big golden fishes, iguanas sunning themselves, and a glamorous black swan...

Well, this is unexpected

I’ve been a retired social worker for a few years now, and though retired, I was never finished being a social worker. I’m lucky to have found a profession that fills my heart...

Wanting

I have a yellowed, framed cartoon on my bookshelf that’s been there for many years. I look at it often and relate to its message each time I read it. I finally looked it up to...

I Imagine

I imagine a circle of love and support surrounding me all the time, with a loving energetic connection flowing between us, reaching our souls, where we all feel nurtured,...

Marilyn Published in “Light of Consciousness” Magazine , August 2022

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The Void

My aunt Molly would always complain about different ailments, some she had, some she didn’t. Illness consumed her and it didn’t appear necessary to actually be diagnosed for Aunt...

Time Heals All Wounds

It was a moment of slow motion — I was watching it all happen, helpless to stop it. It’s a vision that I see many times over in my head. I was coming out of a store with a spring...

I Am Not Comfortable in My Body

There’s an old photo of me by the white picket fence in front of our house when I was about 5 years old — I wore a pair of peddle pushers, now known as capris. They were black...

The Tarot Card of Strength

When I was diagnosed with cancer, in March 2020, I kept hearing “you got this” “you are the strongest person I know” and “you’ll make it through”. While that’s all true, It’s...

Feet

“Pick them up and lay them down!” Why was he saying that to us? What was wrong with the way we moved? Considering what he made us wear, it’s a miracle we walked at all....

The Wink

My dad was a devoted family man. He worked 2 jobs to support his 4 children and took us on vacations and outings in his Chevy station wagon. He had itchy woolen blankets for us...

Trust in the Garmin

It was somewhere in the 1990’s when my husband and I bought our first Garmin navigational system. We plugged It into the space for the cigarette lighter (now called the USB...

Gears, Bells, and Whistles

Growing up in our house on East 9th Street in Brooklyn, we had a desk that fit in the corner of our dining room - a caddy corner desk of white oak that I enjoyed sitting under. I...

Angels Among Us

When I was a child, the NYC public school system had something called release time on Wednesday afternoons. We would leave school at 2:00 and go for religious instruction. I was...

Out of the Cage

Sometime during the spring of 2021 I felt a protruding lymph node near my groin, the spot where lymphoma started over 2 years ago. I called my oncologist right away and they...