I first met Maureen when she popped into my Recover Your Joy blog and left a comment. From that moment, a friendship was formed that continues to add light and texture to my life which I cherish.

A gifted writer, Maureen is the author of Neruda’s Memoir, a beautiful compilation of poetry that sings straight to your heart (visit her blog for more info). She is also the power and the voice behind, Writing Without Paper, her blog where everyday she offers up beautiful poetry that speaks of her warrior spirit and gentle soul as well as treasures from the arts — theatre, music, poetry, videos — you name it, Maureen provides her readers with a constant source of richness to explore — her finds are our gifts.

And in her guest blog today, Maureen shares another type of community that makes a difference to those of us affected by Cancer.

Thank you Maureen. Your spirit is bright, your voice strong and your beauty runs deep.

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A COMMUNITY THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE
By Maureen Doallas

No one ever wants to join the community to which I belong and, once in, no one can ever quite leave it.

You won’t find my community starred on any published map; it exists mostly virtually, though its members are very real. Each of us knows the other’s name, the names of loved ones and family members, even intimate aspects of one another’s life. We know how much we’ve paid, are paying, in membership dues, how much we’ll continue paying to belong, because leaving is not an option. We see the cost in the pictures we exchange, hear it in the words that erupt from places deep inside where only metaphors and similes are sufficient to describe what we experience.

What we experience often wants for clear-cut explanation. The science is complicated, the medicine more trial than error, sometimes working, sometimes
not. It can be a life-saving poison. We talk about its effects, the difference it makes to wanting to get up in the morning, to breaking open the cocoon of unspoken love.

We have a garden in our community that needs no special soil, no prescribed amount of yearly rainfall, no potting sheds or rakes or lawn mowers, no fertilizers save ourselves. It flowers with words that each day make a difference to someone newly initiated or stopping by for the first time. Those of us who’ve been in the community long enough know that the words prayed in the garden always come down to meaning the one same thing: how community is grace, how hope makes a difference.

Once, the community had a leader who had a tag line that held the gist of everything he penned: that above all else, life is worth living. To recall it, which all of us in the community do daily, is to understand that there is no price that comes close to reflecting the value we give to time with each other until we’re out of it.

We in the community break down together, bend down together, and hold out our hands to pull each other up again.

We lift. We lift as One; we lift as Community, never feeling the weight in the air of loss that hangs like a shroud in a place that makes a place for us all.

We laugh together. We share the greatest joys. We tell of the last breaths in the last hours of the last day of life, after we’ve said our goodbyes. We grieve even when the loss is not our own, because it is our own, because it is we in Him in whose image we are born and die.

We are flesh and blood. We are bones and ash. We are ghost and spirit.

We are the difference we make in the community we call Our Cancer.