Becoming Love: A Conversation with Andrea Gibson, Part I

On dog's paws, cancer, loving our bodies, telling the truth, extended bliss, healing protocols, self-love, and truly meeting the present moment. Plus: Beyond's first book giveaway!!

Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.

Andrea and Winnie

Andrea Gibson is a wildly (wildly!) gifted spoken word poet. In fact, they’re Poet Laureate of Colorado. They’re also wise, funny, tender, visionary, badass, and big on love. They’ve published seven books, most recently You Better Be Lightning and Lord of the Butterflies. And they write the gorgeous Substack Things That Don't Suck.

In 2021, Andrea was diagnosed with incurable cancer. Their healing journey has been filled with twists and turns, unexpected delights and some profound challenges. But the greatest surprise has been the extended state of joy they’ve shifted into. A joy that surpasses, well, everything.

Andrea and I spoke for about two hours during which it was clear their heart has indeed blown open and they have become love. At the risk of sounding too woo-woo, there were moments during the interview where I felt I was gently merging with that beautiful love vortex, something I usually only experience with animals and nature. It was an astounding experience. One I’m happy to bring to all of you.

It was impossible to whittle all this wonderfulness down into one interview, so I’ve split it into two: Part I is what you’re reading now and Part II will post tomorrow. The craft portion of the interview will post next Thursday. Each word of each interview is pretty much mind-blowing. And heart-blowing, too.

Andrea lives outside Boulder with their partner, Megan, and three darling rescue dogs.

⭐️ I’m thrilled to share that today’s interview includes Beyond’s first book giveaway! Andrea is generously gifting three readers a signed copy of You Better Be Lightning. If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “Lightning” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, March 26th and notified by email. I’m excited for all of you! The book is astoundingly beautiful. (Shipping is limited to the United States)

Enjoy!

xJane

⭐️ In another first, I’m delighted to share this recording of Andrea reading their gorgeous poem, Tincture—which is from our giveaway book, Lord of the Butterflies.

I wanted to start by talking about dogs. I’m always so curious to learn more about people’s relationship with animals. You and Megan live with three rescues. Can you tell us about your relationship with them?

I love that! I wish every interview started with, “tell me everything you feel about dogs.” We do have three dogs. Squash, who’s now twelve. I adopted her when she was three and a half months old. She’s this little terrier that came with me all the years of touring. She was a miracle. For every show that I did, she would sleep in the sound booth. She would know when I was reading my last poem and would wake up and walk around and be like, “Okay, it's over now.” Even if I changed the last poem, she always knew it was the end of the show. It was wild.

She’s also the one who knew I had cancer before I did. A couple of months before my diagnosis, she started following me everywhere. I couldn't take a shower without her standing outside the shower. I think of it as the real PET scan.

Oh, how tender.

We have two other dogs. Iggy. She's a little chihuahua and such a rascal. She kind of bullies the others. She’s really smart and so she's jealous. I never knew to attach smartness with jealousy.

And then Winnie, Winnebago. When he was a little baby, he had no use of his back legs. He ended up in a cat rescue. He was raised by kitties and they were really struggling to find anyone to adopt him. We adopted him and got him surgeries. He can run as fast as our other dogs now. He used to pull himself around like a baby seal.

So we've got these three dogs. They are the loudest dogs in the world. I've never met other dogs like this. They bark all day long. But they are such medicine to me. In any moment, I could pick them up and smell their little paws and immediately be in a peaceful place.

I love the paw smell. Do they all sleep with you at night?

They all sleep in our bed. They're all always with us wherever we are. They insist on being in our laps.

Have your relationships changed at all as you go through everything with your health?

When I first got diagnosed, I used to take each of their faces in my hands, and I would sing Sade's song with the words, “you think I'd leave your side, you know me better than that.” I was singing all these love songs about how I was still here. Because especially my older dog Squash, it seemed like she didn't expect me to live very long.

Winnie is our youngest. I adopted him specifically to care for in his old age. I knew that by the time he was four, he was going to probably have arthritis, and so sometimes I have grief around the possibility of not being the one that's holding him while he's old.

But I'm madly in love with them and always have been. Every day I say, “I couldn't love you more than I do, but I'll keep trying.”

Yesterday's newsletter from you was wonderful to read in certain ways and then sad in other ways. I wondered if you might share an update on what you’re experiencing in your body.

The news that I received was difficult because the treatment that I'm doing right now is in many ways considered my last line treatment. When it works it typically only works for about nine months and I’m at nine months right now. I have a tumor in my pelvic bone that has just been treated with radiation but on my last scan there was no cancer in my organs. That's very good news.

I had Chronic Lyme disease most of my adult life, and I sometimes think chemo has been easy for me because I've been backdropping it against having so much pain in my past. I have not had Lyme pain during this time. My doctors think there’s a chance that chemo killed Lyme disease. But where my body is right now—I just finished radiation and I'm in some pain when I'm mobile but not when I’m still. I just did another chemo infusion and I’ll know in a few weeks how well it’s working. This particular chemo treatment is easy to manage. It's quite mild.

As you mention, you’ve had Lyme, you struggle with anxiety, you had a hysterectomy, now cancer. That’s a lot of journeys in one body.

Yes.

If you feel comfortable, can you talk about your relationship with your body and this journey you've been on together?

I love that you say together because I very much like there are three of me. The one that is watching it all; the one that is sometimes tantruming within myself; and also the physical form.

The other night I was saying to Meg, “I've had health problems since I was young. I thought at some point they would stop and that living in some ways would begin when they stopped.” I’ve always had this expectation.

What it looks like now is that that may not be the case. But I don't shut down the possibility that I may one day feel an abundance of health. Celtic tradition believes that before a human is born, they choose the hardships that they will have in this life. When I relate to it like that, when I think at one point I chose to have to navigate sickness and illness throughout my entire life, it makes it far more doable to me, because then it lands me in curiosity instead of complaint.

Prior to cancer, I had a lot of shame about my body, a ton of anxiety. I also had a lot of mental health issues that I had a lot of shame about and that just worsened them. I was grateful when I could wear a pandemic mask everywhere. I was insecure about aging. I had all these qualms. I was almost never naked around my partners. I would hardly be naked during sex. Now I just cannot believe I ever had a day of not absolutely adoring my form.

I mean that not even in a specific way, When I feel as if I'm loving my body, I don't feel like my own body is the object of my affection. I mean, bodies in general. Falling in love with my own body feels like falling in love with everyone's. I truly feel that almost anything could change its shape on me and I don't imagine loving it less.

That's beautiful. Do you talk to your body?

Oh, yeah. My mother has an illness called hereditary spastic paraplegia, and it has gone down through our family line. I remember when I was first around her when she got diagnosed in my early twenties, she would always say, “Come on, body, you can do it.” There was such a tenderness to it. I do that often with my body.

Because I have a lot of amazing energy workers in my life, I've recently been doing that work with myself. I have no idea what I'm doing. Mostly I'm just putting my hands on different parts of my body and sending it worlds and worlds of love.

Are you using your mom’s words: “Come on body!” Or are there all different things you're saying?

I don't necessarily say, “Come on body.” I say, “Hey there, body. How are you doing today, body? I love you, body. Hey there, face. Oh, hello, pain.” Pain just wants our attention.

I see a number of different doctors and I see this one really far out doctor. He said, “The cancer thinks that it's wiser than you are. The cancer thinks it's a better version of you than you. And you have to tell it that you are a better version of you and tell it to go.”

And I said, “Oh, wild. I've been doing the opposite.”

And he said, “What do you mean?”

And I said, “I've been trying to send the cancer love.”

And he said, “Well, what better way to love something than to tell it the truth?”

I love the idea of constantly telling the cancer the truth.

By telling the cancer the truth, what are you now saying to it?

It's almost like speaking to a child. Tenderly and lovingly saying, “Hey, if you're here, that doesn't serve you either. Because if you kill me, you kill yourself.”

What is your relationship like with cancer?

I've had three recurrences in the last three years. At first, when the cancer went away and they stopped treatment, when it would come back, I felt so frightened of it. I would feel weirded out by that part of my body. It’s very different now. When I heard that it was incurable, I thought, “Okay, I may have this in my body for the rest of my life. I can't fear it anymore.”

A lot of the fear went away when the doctor said that by Western medicine’s standards they were not going to be able to heal it. I think that even a year ago if I had this happening right now, where it's in a spot where it could easily move to my organs, I would be frightened. But it's not scaring me. That's a new thing for me.

That's huge.

I think so. I've wanted to get here the whole time. In the first year after my diagnosis, I was in a state of bliss almost constantly. The days that would take me out would be lab days and blood work days, which were about once a month.

Every time I thought, “I know for certain that this cancer is not going away, at least as long as I keep fearing these tests in this way.” So for the last two and a half years, I've done so much work around trying to form a new relationship with those days. It’s way better now, so much so that I almost fell asleep in the scan machine when I did my scan.

What sort of relationship have you formed with the chemo, with the radiation, with all these things that are incredible lifesavers and also brutal?

What my acupuncturist calls poison. She said, “You can call it poison. You also have to know that poison has been healing diseases since the beginning of time.”

It was interesting to me, because I had all these different friends who, when they were doing chemo, would call it the magical elixir or healing potion. I've always had an aversion to Western medicine so I couldn't quite get there. Then one day, I read that the chemo that I was doing comes from the bark of the Pacific yew tree and was originally discovered by Indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest. Yes, there are chemicals they add to it and all of that. And it's a poisonous bark that they were using years ago to treat diseases. But as soon as I heard that, something changed my relationship with it. I felt a deep gratitude.

On a cellular level, perhaps, more connected and more…

Trust.

That makes sense. And I had no idea. I thought chemo was only chemical.

Me, too.

You have been given this incurable diagnosis. I wondered if that rings true to you with your body, your soul, your spirit?

It's complex. Sometimes it feels like the truth. I always had a feeling that I was going to get cancer at forty-five years old and that's when I got it. The book I wrote You Better Be Lightning right before I got diagnosed foresaw this happening. There's so much about death. There's so much writing in there that I didn’t know how to live by at the time.

I've never been a writer, until cancer, who wrote where I was. I would write where I wanted to be and try to use the poem as a roadmap in that direction. So that book is a roadmap for me. I wasn't actually living in those states. That's just where I wanted to be. So I was writing a book trying to get myself there. And then suddenly I was there.

But it's a great question: Does that diagnosis resonate as true?

I heard this thing once, and I don't know who said it, but he was talking about this yogi that lived long ago. The seed of his bliss was that he lived feeling like there was a sword hung above his head at all times and every second he felt that close to death. That was, in many ways, the garden that bloomed his happiness.

I've felt so much of that. I've not pushed that reality away. It's one reality. It's not all of them for me. I guess it would be my only reality if I thought Western medicine was the only answer. They currently don't have any answers that they think could save my life.

But I also live in the miracle realm. And I mean, the scientific miracle realm.  What we call a miracle, I believe, is a lack of understanding of how the universe really works. There are a lot of other things that I’m seriously considering doing. I'm considering flying into the rainforest and working with a man who has been treating cancers with plants. I'm willing to do anything. I’ve been doing so much this whole time. It would take me an hour to list every alternative treatment I’ve tried.

I am curious about how you’re caring for yourself if you feel like sharing some of it.

I want to say that prior to my diagnosis, I was an extreme hypochondriac. There's a local man who there was a movie about, who got stuck in a crevice while climbing and he had to cut off his own arm.

I remember that story.

My best friend teaches his children. I remember seeing that movie and I thought, “I would let myself die.” I thought, “I wouldn't even try.” When I saw anything else like that, I thought the same thing. I was so afraid. I had so much fear in my life.

With this diagnosis, I've done things that I thought I never could. For example, there's a fever treatment. They put you in a chamber for about five hours, and they induce a fever of 104 degrees with infrared heat. It’s illegal in the US. I drove to Canada to do that. I was terrified of it. I will say that it was the hardest physical thing that I had ever done in my life. And I did it twice in hopes of waking up my sleepy immune system. 

I work with a doctor who was telling me about the information that cancer is sending to my body, which is in many ways, “This is time to die. This is time to shrink. It's not a time for growing.”

So I'm trying to teach my immune system how to work better. What I do for that is I work out three times a day. I'm doing that right now, even with a broken pelvic bone. I lift weights for at least fifteen minutes, three times a day. Then right after I will eat a little piece of fruit, and then some protein to continually remind my body that it's growing.

I'm very strict with my diet. Because of cancer and chemo I haven't had much of an appetite for three years. But I make myself eat a lot to build my strength. I drink a lot of gross broccoli smoothies full of olive oil.

I do mistletoe injections, which is something that people do for ovarian cancer to boost immunity. I do high dose vitamin C IVs. I do B12 shots. I do every kind of herb that you can imagine. I do energy work. I do consistent acupuncture.

I have a friend who fortunately had this very expensive infrared sauna that she's lent me this whole time. So I do that daily. And a lot of cleansing things. As soon as I hit five days after chemo and I know that stuff has done its job, and the next two weeks prior to me going in to do my next infusion, I'm doing so much detoxing, like sweating and detoxing herbs to try to clear the toxicity out of my body before I put more in.

It seems like your energy is pretty good, right?

I have more energy than anyone I've ever known in my life. Even the day after my first chemo treatment. I don't know what it is.

Even the detox can be exhausting. Forget about the chemo. Just doing the daily saunas, that can be exhausting.

But now, I’ve acclimated to it. When you're first detoxing, it's like spring cleaning and messier at first. It can feel awful. But I don’t have that experience anymore. 

That's wonderful. It sounds like your day is structured around these healing protocols.

Yes, but I have to do it without attachment.  I also have to do it for the love of it, for the experience of just cherishing my body and not even necessarily to heal but to have as much health as I can each day. 

You’ve been so open about your experiences. A lot of what you're living through on every level is difficult. Why did you decide to share with all of us?

I'll first say that it doesn't necessarily resonate that it's been difficult, which is a hard thing to communicate because I always worry that it looks like denial. Prior to my cancer diagnosis, I used to think that I was sharing my poetry selflessly for the world. After my cancer diagnosis, I could see almost instantly how much need for approval was in my sharing, how much ego was in it, how much I was using each performance to fill holes in myself. But, it wasn’t like I was doing a terrible thing to fill holes in myself. I still loved writing. I still love sharing. And at that time, I was sharing a lot of really heavy stuff. I was writing a lot about mental illness. I was writing about my struggle to want to live. I struggled with suicidality and panic attacks and depression. And I shared that the whole time.

I always felt like, “okay, this is the line I wrote, but even when the truth isn't hopeful, the telling of it is.” That was my motto for many years of writing. When I got diagnosed with cancer, well, first of all, it was my biggest fear ever. It was a big fear because my aunt had died of ovarian cancer and my grandma, who I was very close to, died of a broken heart right after.

But something about my diagnosis…I woke up from surgery and felt like a different person. I had seen some things happen in the days before where everything was becoming more vivid to me. I was feeling more love than I had ever felt in my life. And then with the diagnosis, I realized that I had spent so much of my life fearing future emotions. And genuinely being in the future or the past almost all the time.

I woke up from surgery and felt like I met the present moment for the first time. I’d read books about living in the present moment and I thought it was a great idea! But I had never experienced it lasting forever: it's not going to go away, even when they tell me this bad thing; or it's not going to go away even when they tell me that the cancer is going to come right back when I finish chemo; or it's not going to go away when I wake up sick from chemo.

This makes me emotional to say: I felt like I met life for the first time. And it was so simple. It felt like it was a gift that dropped into my lap. I saw how easy it was. I saw how I thought the spiritual path had been so difficult and so grinding: After years and years and years of work, you might feel a little bit more peace in life.

But then I could tell that because it was accessible to me, who had more anxiety than anybody I ever knew, and who was living in the past and the future all the time, I knew that this was possible for our whole world. I had a new sense of sharing. Anybody going through any challenge in life, I want people to know this is possible. I don't want to hoard this feeling.

It was scary for me to share it at first. But the reason I have shared so much is because of the tone of my experience with it. But I also have people in my life too with cancer who have been raging the whole time. And that's fucking beautiful, because they never expressed anger in life.

It's like, “what didn't you do?” I think that often illness wakes us up to this new thing. For me, I had been pushing away joy. So I couldn't not tell people how much joy I was experiencing.

I had always thought about the math of emotion: this circumstance equals this reaction. That's what we're taught. If you get this diagnosis, this is how you're supposed to feel. Or if this happens, this is how you're supposed to feel. Then I realized that whole narrative was wrong. I felt saved by that. So it's been easy to share.

⭐️Part Two posts tomorrow. If possible, I love it even more. Andrea and I talk about truly being present, sustained joy, and becoming one another. See you there!

Thank you for being here, dear Beyonders! ❤️ Your comments (and hearts) mean so much to me. I read each and every one.