hello everyone ! this is Maryse at last. those of you who know about me and writing will smile and appreciate what it means for me to out there in written words...... scary. but your love, messages, support are so wonderfully compelling, I just have to and also so that Steve stops nagging me to.

10 extraordinary days - an earthquake full of shock shudders - each shudder giving a tiny tiny insight into sadness, grief, fear and loss. Some of those feelings come up as a wave on occasion and recede . Mostly I feel well as I recover strongly from the hysterectomy. It is the strangest feeling to be told that I am very ill when I do not feel it ... weird

I have to describe to you the experience of being the recipient of your love, concern, support - I wish everyone could have that experience just for a moment... It was like being the centre of everyone's universe... floods of light around me, flowers everywhere I looked, being looked at by you with eyes of utter tenderness, potent love, laughing in assurance, and so experiencing my own grandness because of it. Did any of you every play the game when a person is placed on their back lying on the ground and their friends all put their hands underneath them and gently lift them up high above their heads and then sway them sweetly back and forth? it is both like being free and flying while being fully supported in a web of love - just blissful. That is what you let me experience this past week.

Added to that was the beginning awareness that I have seeded this love too and that part of it is my harvest. It was as if every appreciation, every honouring, every loving moment, every listening space that I have given to anyone at anytime was returned back to me a hundredfold. That feels so good. I have been true to myself and I am now being gifted by your fabulously generous support.

Please keep writing and sending stories, jokes, images and metaphors. I love it all.
Also if you have information about different treatments etc we are gathering information and will discern what is for me to do. I am happy with my oncologist and will gather the team around myself so that I can move into this phase of my life wholeheartedly with the most accurate support.

My life and that of those close to me has changed track and it is completely different - it is no less challenging, inspiring, surprising and deeply touching! Steve and Talia and Deborah are absolutely extraordinary in their clarity of love - what a gift!

well done to you who have read to the end!!