A Daily Practice: Resting on the Earth During Treatment
While recovering from cancer treatments, I looked for a few minutes each day to relax into the wide hug of my yard—literally lying on the earth. One morning, my neighbor Sheryl called through the fence: “Barbara, come quick. You’ll never believe this!” Through the slats I saw the usual line of cats at their bowls—and, at the far end, in broad daylight, a raccoon eating. “It’s a female,” Sheryl whispered.
A Daylight Visitor: Meeting the Mama Raccoon
This mama raccoon, teats distended and red from nursing, foraged beside the cats as if we weren’t there. I imagined her exhausted and starving, driven to leave her cubs in a shed to risk daylight for food. When one cat hissed, she reared and bared her teeth—until Sheryl shouted, and the raccoon fled. Watching, I felt an unexpected kinship I didn’t yet understand.
Machines, Touch, and Feeling Disowned by Life
Radiation left me feeling disowned by life. In a narrow hallway, patients in green gowns avoided eye contact; techs arranged my limbs as if I were an extension of the machine. The door closed; “Star Wars” equipment glided over my breast; the high-pitched yammer filled the room.
Horse Hands, Human Back: Remembering the Animal Body
To counter the machine-touch, I booked a massage. The practitioner—new to humans—had long massaged horses. Her strong hands found the knots; my back became “flank.” Through her story, I risked imagining myself as animal—sister to the mare—and I remembered the raccoon.
Heroine or Intruder? Wrestling with Hunger and Belonging
Between treatments, I napped on the ground and peeked through the fence, spying on the mama raccoon. I felt opposing truths: her brazen courage in daylight—and her theft from bowls meant for cats. In her black mask I recognized the pain of the “intruder.”
After my parents’ divorce, I often felt like an intruder in both homes; in Berkeley, a gate-crashing New Yorker; in New York, an infiltrating Californian. I wept for the raccoon driven by hunger—and for my own hunger to belong.
A Neighborhood of Bowls: Seeing the Hidden Care Network
Parents at my daughter Katy’s preschool began bringing dinners—nourishment that reached far beyond the food. One mother said, “I imagined what would make you strong.” As we ate lentils, chickpeas, tomatoes, and carrots, I remembered her remembering me.
One morning I overheard neighbors coordinating cat care. Bowls for feral cats dotted yards across our neighborhood and beyond. When the raccoon fed, she tapped a network already there. I wondered: Was I tapping into such a net? Could I rest in this connectedness that needs only to be recognized?
Mother-Fear: Who Will Feed My Child if I Can’t?
The image of many bowls comforted me—until I worried about my daughter. Would she know where to find nourishment if I weren’t there? I imagined the raccoon returning to her nest, nursing her cubs, teaching them routes to food—and I feared the dangers that could keep her from returning.
A friend told me, “I have to believe that if I weren’t there, the universe would take care of my children.” The trust felt risky, yet briefly comforting.
Mammal to Mammal: A Crisis in My Mammaries
Back in my napping spot, heat rose in my belly. Mammal to mammal, I felt the pull toward this impassioned mother turning food into milk. The key to mammalness—mammaries. With breast cancer, my crisis was in my mammary.
Katy and I shared baths; she poured water over my raw, radiated breast and the hard contour left by surgery. These bathtub blessings softened me with love and memory.
Distrust Upon Distrust—and the Slow Return to Trust
For years I doubted my body’s knowing: menstruation, kissing, making love, conceiving, nursing. Even pregnant, I worried I wouldn’t carry to term or give birth. Yet when Katy was born, rosy and vigorous, she rooted naturally. Milk flowed. Grace arrived.
Still, distrust returned. City fears kept me feeling outside life’s cycles. Five years after recognizing myself in the mama raccoon, I still cleave to this soil, often feeling barred from the primal rhythms—yet sensing a shift each time I lie on the earth.
Lineage and Home Terrain: A Sense of Belonging Returns
Beneath the dawn redwood, what I mourn begins to well up: a lineage of mammal mothers—the raccoon among them—and me among them, too. Through this mother, I knew the pain of exclusion; through her, I glimpse belonging—to this yard, this home terrain where, for millennia, life has germinated, suckled, foraged, died, and reseeded.
This article originally appeared in the February 2015 issue of Mindful magazine. Subscribe to support Mindful.
