Almaty in September

I have decided we are going to Almaty, Kazakhstan for the end of September.

We are going to listen to Ludovico Einaudi play Experience in a concert hall with the I Virtuosi Italiani orchestra and my heart is going to dance.

I'm lying here in my isolation room going through what is expected: severe diarrhea, nausea and a strong aversion to food. My blood markers have tanked, and it might take another week for them to start to grow again. In the meantime, I must eat, or else I will have to get a feeding tube through my nose to my stomach. This is not uncommon, I'm told, for auto stem cell transplants. But you must get nutrition to recover. “Eat for survival, not for long term health” the doctor said last week. Basically, eat what you can get down, even if it's a bit shit.

This is all a matter of fact and it's scary, but I'm not miserable: I've rediscovered the glory of cold orange slices, I get the best snuggles one could ask for, and I have Ludovico.

Ludovico makes me want to dance and cry at the same time. I can imagine each note being struck with lithe fingers, each new instrument layered upon the last, resonating, carrying me away from this room and into a concert hall in Almaty.

My psychologist told me that it is the arts that connect with our unconscious selves that get us through life, that we turn to and that speak to suffering, be it music, poetry, art, or religion. They speak to us things that we cannot access intellectually.

Right now, being somewhere else for a time is a wonderful thing, and is not something my mind can easily do.

A month or two back a friend shared, gently, this exquisite podcast with me. In it is Andrea Gibson, a poet and spoken word artist, and she has just been told that her cancer has come back, and is incurable. It is an hour thirty of pure gifts of words; I've never listened to something so honest, raw and beautiful before. In it, she talks about the moment she woke from a surgery to have her partner tell her she had cancer, and she wrote of this moment “anyone who thinks poetry is frivolous has never had to have someone tell them something unspeakably hard, beautifully”. This whole podcast is explorations of things unspeakably hard, shared through the beautiful grace of a poet's words.

So, we are going to go to Almaty at the end of September. Ludovico is doing a tour of the Caucasus, and plane tickets are only $3500, 36 hours. I choose Almaty over Azerbaijan because Mohamed used to live there, and he only speaks generously about the people, the mountains and the ancestral home of apples. September is also autumn, so perfect weather.

We will explore his old haunts, walk in the mountains, probably visit his parents in Lebanon and maybe add in a trip through the countryside in Italy. They say the Mediterranean diet is good for cancer recovery and gut health.

You are welcome to join; just listen here, with a pair of good headphones.