A Castle in the Water

Over 21 years ago life threw me a curve ball. I picked up my bald head, my five-year-old son, and with a raging fire inside me went on to build an organization to shelter as many of us as were willing — men and women — who had gone through the out-of-body experience from hearing the words, you have breast cancer.I was on a journey, headed to an unfamiliar place, and with me I intended to bring as many people as possible to experiment in this sandbox of our imaginations. In it I promised exhilaration, delight, laughter, thrills, but most of all the sense of one’s restoration and rebirth. I had a fight in my soul, I was devoted to my mission, and I would be contagious! The seeds of my work began in March of 1997 and in December the Two Abreast Dragon Boat team and organization! was born to a cohort of 21 wildly passionate souls. While today there are hundreds of teams around the globe competing and winning the races of their lives, it is with pride when I say that Two Abreast was only the second established in the world. A day does not go by when I don’t think about how my inspiration stemmed from hardship, and how that made me more driven and committed than ever to create a sanctuary of recovery, renewal, and regeneration. In 2005 @ Konrad Doerrbecker of Dragon Boat World magazine published an article I wrote about that experience. I share it again, with all of you here, today.

A Castle in the Water

Written by Robin Hornstein, Founder, Two Abreast Dragon Boat Team 1997, Montreal, Canada

In running marathons, I had to simultaneously explore the painful conflict between the overwhelming fear of failure and the desperate need to succeed.  Scavenging for courage, I whispered the truths to my demons and set them against unfamiliar challenges, the ones their egos were previously too blind to consider.  It was here, in battle, but in safety, where my hidden fortress of strength arose. 

Much later, but this time I wasn’t so safe, I found myself paddling, instead, toward those finish lines.  I remembered the lessons I had learned and so, with every stroke, I dug harder and harder because, just as I’d done before,  I knew I could diffuse the darkness and empower myself with a strength of mind and soul and force. Enthused by the research of a physician and kayaker, it then became my vision to found a collective of inspirational people, with a common history, whose individual riches would unite to fuel our thousand-pound castle through the maddening waters.

I marvel at the unusual crossection of characters who form the quilt of our dragon boat and it continues to strike me how the array of exotic personalities weave special flavours in and out of our paddling life together; as one glorious dragon joined with the sea.

I have watched the twisted, metastatic shoulders of our drummer as she defiantly beat the drum against the fires of the dragon raging within her.  I shared in her celebration as she victoriously drummed her team-mates to the metaphoric metallic and shimmering gold of racing for the very first time, the only race she would ever have left to win.

Our hearts stretch through their deepest emotions as we try so hard to help celebrate the life of our founding stroker, feeling the guilt of a life certainly none of us wish to know, by each preparing a feast for her and encouraging her through every morsel of recovery, regeneration and hope for our tired and weakening friend and team-mate.

I recognize the shocking awareness on the innocent face of a team-mate’s daughter when she returned what she knew, in her young experience, was a lost breast that she had found on the locker room floor…..and I applaud another team-mate who is working through her personal journey of replenishing herself with pride while we watch her dignity grow as she openly stretches forth her beautiful flat chest. 

I am tickled by the mind-altering enhancers we use to heighten our experience…fuchsia nail polish and dragon tattoos.

And I am grateful to listen to a neophyte dragoneer bubble through the lens of the child she is inside as she bounces her happy images off me.  When she paddles she is soaring with pleasure.

I feel the fury of discord within her troubled mind as another of my friends tries to find the strength to move beyond the incessant noise that breast cancer makes in her life.  She struggles with the loyalty to her dragon boat addiction because she cannot find another song to sing whose harmonies blend nearly so well with her own.  So, she too, paddles on. 

I am watching the brilliant courage of another of my heroes as she silently struggles through her own private hell.  Paddling through a mega dose of treatment and a broken rib, rooted in a remarkably quiet strength, bursting with a joie de vivre, she is an enigma of celebration and vibrancy.  She feeds the team, even now…in her absence.

I watch the growing pains of a young man as he struggles to understand the magnanimous warriors whom he is sanctioned to train.  We expect him to demand our excellence and in return we impose an early wisdom upon him.  He blushes at our awe of him but we know he is secretly flattered, particularly to be wearing the pink of our mission.

I am in awe of the privilege to have created, again, and to have singlebreastedly nurtured my child is testament of my potent will to celebrate life.  In the circle that is my life I have found all my treasures.  These are the blessings from the dragon inside me.  These are my privileges.

This salient crew of extraordinary women, and sometimes men, listening to the silence of peace and sweating into the Olympic basin as the sun dips over the Jacques Cartier bridge; alive women feeling the heat of our muscle fibres working out the kinks of a high catch, a reach…of influencing the paddle with an almost violent will to live, seated two abreast, just paddling our dragon boat together in celebration of ourselves.