THEN:

When I was 27, I discovered my third eye: It was an orgasmic angel that lived in the center of my forehead. I discovered it, or it discovered me, when I was riding the bus back home after going to a "church service" presided over by Pearl Shannon, a psychic who gave readings and "healings" every Sunday morning.

Somehow or other, when I went up to the front of the room (a renovated garage that served as the church sanctuary) to get my laying-on-of-the-hands mini-healing (given by one of Pearl's helpers, some guy wearing a lime green choir robe), my third eye got "activated" (that's the only way I know how to describe it).

At the time, I didn't know it was my third eye, and didn't know what a chakra was or that that particular forehead chakra was often referred to as the third eye. I was clueless, a wide-eyed small town girl from Utah, newly transplanted to San Francisco. I had gone to Pearl's service only on a lark, a silly outing with my new hippie-type roommate from New Jersey who had implored me to accompany her.

So there we were on the bus heading home when BAM!, the vibrating tingle (that had crept into my forehead during the healing session) crescendoed into an all-out forehead orgasm.

I will elaborate further, in some future post, re: the gradual evolution of my first forehead orgasm, but for now, given today's time constraints, I am skipping ahead to, well, NOW.

NOW: 

My forehead is no longer exploding, but four years ago I stumbled into the world of photography, and it miraculously became my one big creative pursuit outside of creative writing. My name on my Flickr photo site is My.Third.Eye, and the totally unexpected addition of photography to my life has been one of my primary "healing modalities" since being diagnosed.

I walk the dog (dear Olivia Bouchet), take photos along the way (often while loitering beside a tree trunk or telephone pole that has mesmerized Olivia), and enter a whole fantastic other, Visual World that I never noticed Before (back when I perceived the world almost entirely through thoughts and feelings).

I enjoy photograpy much more than I enjoy taking 75 pills a day or getting three Vitamin C IV infusions per week, or taking hellish tamoxifen or purgatory-ish Xeloda. It goes a long way toward helping to restore my sanity when interacting with the various reverberations of the Great Mystery of this dis-ease.

I have taken many pictures of decaying and/or graffitti'd city walls. Such beauty in the breakdown! And there's always plenty of urban disintegration to be found and appreciated.