Walking backward out into the wild

This study explores what arose after I received my cancer diagnosis. Having the courage to find free spaces within which to live became vitality important. A cancer diagnosis enlivens the question of what it means to live well with the Earth and its multi dimensional beings and provides a necessary push to step out from the confines of a self and toward and into the wild fray of this life. I interpret my lived experiences through hermeneutics because it is a practical philosophy. Hermeneutics has helped me perform and write my lived experience which I hope will draw in readers and listeners to a recognition of their inescapable ecological interdependence. Cultivating an ability to listen and interpret the world and the human and more-than-human kinships became undeniable as I engaged in this study; I am learning to understand their deep importance in living. Listening to words that arose in my performances at conferences became my way of taking a journey toward learning to be open to the fullness of life, how life is lived, how life can be remembered and suffered and let go. Through this study, I am learning the necessary steps, forward and backward, to unforget what I think I need and what the Earth might need of me. I learn how cancer offers a place for the practice of interpretive inquiry—of making sense of being in the world and of understanding the offering that arrives when I nurture a commitment to care for the world and myself.