"Randy Kidd was a polymath, naturalist and master storyteller. His account of how to live with and eventually die from metastatic cancer is remarkable. He sets his soul free to discover what is ultimately to know about everything." -H. C. Palmer is a poet, physician and veteran of the American War in Vietnam. His book, Feet of the Messenger, BkMk Press was a runner-up for the Balcones Poetry Prize in 2017.
Rejecting the typical cancer narratives of heroic battles and painful endurance, Randy Kidd, DVM, PhD offers a fresh perspective on living with terminal illness. He emphasizes that we are all on a journey toward the inevitable and this realization can motivate us to achieve our true desires and become our best selves.
Randy speaks: I decided to write my own version of how I would visualize and deal with cancer and its available treatments... and how I would approach the inevitability of death and dying. Here are some of the key points to consider:
We are all dying; it's just that some of us are dying faster than others. Realizing this gives you a certain amount of preordained time to achieve what you want to do, to acquire what you want to have, and to work toward being that person you always wanted to be.
As Yoda said: "Do or Do Not. There is No Try." Not a lot of leeway here for pissing away your time engaged in frivolities. On the other hand, being in action makes it easier to escape the dark and morbid, and it encourages any attempt to have some fun with our day-to-day predicaments and pratfalls.
Movement - both physical and mental - is vital for keeping all parts of or body/mind/spirit in healthy working order. And, since Nature is the ultimate healer, spending time walking in nature and using nature's healing energetics helps us create our own wholistic health.
Stories are the essential cogs that drive our inner wheels of memory and understanding, and stories of the animals, vegetables, and minerals of Nature are most often those stories we comprehend as the essence of our real Being. Nature Walking with Cancer offers stories of Nature designed to stimulate our human Inner-Selves.
