My immune system runs away with itself. It’s like it has secret love affairs with my insides, with my joints and eyes and anti-nausea controls and temperature regulation system, where it attempts to destroy everything that crosses its path. Then it takes away my abilities to sleep properly or makes me sleep too much. Instead of a fire in my heart, like most love affairs, it lights fire to parts of my body then radiates all over the place, like out of control flames. Like a wild love affair gone wrong, gone too wild. One that cannot be reined in, the display of energetic activities beyond of all versions of control.

When I think about my life and who I am in the world, I think about wanting to become all the fire I have in my heart without letting it consume me. I want to own it. Sit with it. Contain and tend it, as love is tended. This is in my drive to change the world, in my drive to make the futures better for my children, in my drive to live within loving community. But this immune system fire, it’s almost wilder than any I’ve ever known. It’s bigger than misogyny, patriarchy, or capitalism. It’s bigger than health care systems that serve institutions instead of people. I can’t catch up. I’m fighting smoke inhalation. There isn’t enough water. My vision has gone foggy.

All this, and then the car accident: concussion, whiplash, torn cartilage, totaled car with a bent in front axle, some PTSD. And then there was breast cancer.

My body grew proliferous cells that replicated broken and only a surgeon could remove them. My body couldn’t stop it, like the wild fires in Australia or California.

It’s March of 2018. I am sitting in the surgeons office. We don’t know how advanced my cancer is. I’ve had three different types of imaging, biopsies, and none of the information agrees with the other information. My nervous system is wrecked, off the charts. If it weren’t for the pain in my hips, the stabbing in my chest that has remained since the biopsies, I don’t even know if I would be in my body. My pain is actually keeping me here. I haven’t told my kids yet. My person is taking notes, has a list of my questions because I can’t think, I can’t breathe. Ultrasound shows my tumor is around 2 cm, my mammogram is normal, and MRI shows a locally advanced 6.5 cm tumor. Not through the chest wall. Suspicious area on the other breast. They don’t want to name a stage, but we drag it out of them. Stage three. Suspicious lymph nodes. Two different types of cancer in the same breast. The surgeon talks us through all the surgical possibilities, but I am unwavering in my knowing that I cannot try to keep my breasts. They are trying to kill me. They have fed my babies so beautifully, for nearly four years for each including 19 months of tandem nursing. They have been a statement, a dare, tattooed, cleavage in tight low cut shirts, as I grew into confidence in my version of a fancy, wild, womanhood. I don’t need them anymore.

Then the surgeon recognizes me. As I am gowned on the exam table, she tips her head to one side and asks me where I worked as a midwife. She asks, are there other tattooed midwives with wild glasses there? Of course there aren’t. I delivered her God-child. I take a deep breath, the smoke clears for a minute as I come up for air and all the moments that brought me here flash by: I was at the hospital for a meeting. In heels and a fancy dress, I wasn’t planning on birth that day. But the hospital is a beautiful team, and when I hear a code called in an OR, I go to the nursing station to help if I can. Yes please, the nurse says, there is a delivery happening in one of the birthing rooms and will I please attend. It is a beautiful, normal, spontaneous birth, and I attend the delivery and post-birth care until the physician team are done in the OR. My future surgeons God-child is born. My first birth in heels and a leopard print dress to boot.

She examines me and I need to see Medical Oncology, a tumor this large means chemo first. Chemo is scheduled, but when I see Med Onc they say surgery first, maybe the MRI is seeing a shadow, or hematoma. Suddenly surgery is scheduled with barely a weeks notice. Back and forth, back and forth. I can’t count how many doctors have examined my breast. They all squeeze the tumor, trying to hold it in their hand to try to decide how big it is and each time it’s like a punch that causes me to feel winded. I can’t touch them anymore, they are trying to kill me. Forward to moms wine night.

The moms on my street all know about the cancer. They are amazing, a breath of fresh air through the fires burning. I show up at wine night late, and am welcomed with such open arms. We talk about all the things, and then one of them asks me how I found my cancer. How did I know? I tell them about how I found it myself, about my self-exams I’ve always done, despite the recommendations from the Canadian Task Force on Preventative Health Care that self-exams are not recommended routinely for low-risk women. I have been believed to be low-risk. But I don’t just know how to do self-exams as a patient, my clinical knowledge is embedded in how I know my own body.

One bold friend asks if she can feel the tumor, then another, and another. They line up, wine glasses in hand, and I teach them all how to do breast exams while they feel me up one at a time, laughing and learning. They remind me I am so alive that my breast can teach whole communities new ways to know their own health. Alive is catchy.

Connection helps tend the wild fires, keeping them managed. Beloveds and the moms and community feel like the long trickle of rain down on hot earth across my everything. A dear friend sent so much food, others came and tended my children. I remember back to lessons I learned so young, at the anarchist collective bookstore I volunteered in just out of highschool: how very much we need each other. We need each other in interdependency and mutual care. As wildfires necessitate whole companies of firefighters, life on this wild earth requires a deep network of mutual aid. Kropotkin reminds us in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, that “Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral,” and this I take to heart. We survive, thrive, and evolve in connection. As wild fires are caretaken by massive teams of humans and water and equipment, so we humans need webs of caretaking, keeping balance within our deep ecosystems.

And so, I paint, to remain in connection with community, my beloveds, with this changing earth and its fires. When I seek to be in storytelling of my resilience or survival, I paint. Usually I deeply need to remember myself, and know telling my story through paint and creating reminds others as well, that their own wild fires are extraordinary. When I need to be nearer to my places of rest and yet seek to be in the world, I paint, my body keeping me from the interwoven world of community only physically. Paint has become healing and liberation and as vital as air, a facilitator of transformation. From the deep urgency to communicate from a life within a body within which I feel trapped, I paint healings and courage from the sacred places of reinvention, the same place from where new worlds are born.