As Promised - the Stray Cat Strut Mandala

Gosh, has it already been two months? I think I posted at the end of July or beginning of August that I wanted to create a mandala entitled the Stray Cat Strut. I drafted out a design shortly thereafter, but I haven't taken the time to create the final version. (Partly, I lost the compass I'd bought in early July; I can't find it anywhere. Finally bought a new one last week.)

I finally took the time to create it last Sunday afternoon. Voila!



This is an abstract skeleton - there's the main blue t-shape that represents my arms, spines, and the beginnings of my legs at the bottom. Blue represents calmness, serenity, healing, and strength to me. There is a cat (looking at it from above) about mid-way down my spine. This cat is cruising through my bones, swishing out cancer with its tail. The cancer is represented by red - which is related to the anger that I was trying to release after I colored "Slow Burn". As you can see, the arms and top part of the spine have no red in them. There is red that's been knocked out of the arms and the spine, floating outside my body in a pool of healing blue. The cat has just flicked its tail to knock out another red cancer area. The bottom part of my spine and my legs are more purplish in color - this represents a mixing of healing blue and red cancer. Healing blue is already there since I've been on anti-tumor meds since February, but it hasn't quite conquered the red cancer - since my CT scan still showed calcium deposits in my bone marrow. My body and the knocked-out cancer cells are surrounded by a yellow, healing light, which then begins to radiate outward in the orange.

I'll be the first to admit that I can't draw well, but I think that the colors work very well, overall, even if I do say so myself. I plan to post this somewhere in my house and a copy in my office so that I can remember to take a few minutes to visualize this Stray Cat knocking out the cancer in my bones. (Remember, I first got the idea of using the song, Stray Cat Strut, to visualize knocking out cancer when I heard the song while laying on the radiation table.)

There you have it, folks. Enjoy!

The Stray Cat Strut

Several weeks ago, as I lay on the radiation table getting my radiation treatment, the radio station that was playing over the loudspeakers played the song "Stray Cat Strut". It was a song that just happened to fit my mood that day.

Every time I do radiation, I would visualize different ways that the cancer cells were dying and going away. Sometimes, I thought of it like a nuclear blast (sorta like that nightmare Sarah Connor had in those Terminator movies), knocking down the cancer cells in their path. Sometimes, the radiation was like a commando walking around corners and blasting each cell. Sometimes, it was a healing light, cleaning up the whole dang mess. Sometimes, with a slower song, I imagined sauntering along and sweeping away the cancer. (It's interesting, I think, that I used a war image at first . . . that mellowed as the treatments continued. Hmm, what does that say? I think perhaps that there were so many cells to be destroyed at first, and then it was finding and cleaning up the last stragglers, which required a subtler method.)

(Or maybe I'm just full of s#$t!)

But the day I heard Stray Cat Strut, I imagined myself dancing along, either doing a hip bump on each cancer cell and knocking it down and out of my system. Or, it was like Willie Wonka (Gene Wilder in the original) when they went into the Candy Room and he would do this skipping dance step and kick those large balloon candy-fruit things. I was kicking the cancer cells out of my way.

I've decided that I liked that image a lot and so when I remember and I'm laying in bed (trying to get back to sleep usually), I turn the song on in my head and imagine dancing through all the bones that had those bb-sized tumors and hip-bumping or skip-kicking them out of my system.

Now, I've decided that I'm going to design an abstract mandala and color it. It will be called The Stray Cat Strut. I will post a picture when I'm done!