Joni: Hi, Ken! Welcome to Joni and Friends.
Ken: Hi, Joni. It’s great to be here.
Joni: Absolutely. Always love having you in the studio.
Ken: You know, Joni, a lot of people have been asking me how you have been doing on this cancer journey. Do you think we can give our friends an update?
Joni: Well, of course. Let’s see…Well, it’s been well over a year. Around about this time last year in fact I was just finishing up chemotherapy, so I’ve been a full year out and feeling strong. My strength and stamina are back -- on daily medication though. Once a day I have to take this pill that hopefully keeps that cancer back in remission, so in about four more years I guess they can declare me cancer free. But until then, it’s still a battle.
Ken: But you know, I think we need to talk about the positives that have come out of this journey.
Joni: Absolutely.
Ken: You know, it’s given us an opportunity to see things differently.
Joni: Well, you do it every single day, Ken, with me. For years, and I mean years, when I would leave Joni and Friends work every day, I’d get on the 101 freeway and go up over the hill and get off the exit at Calabasas and drive up on home.
Ken: But what do we do, Joni?
Joni: That’s not the way we go home now.
Ken: Absolutely not.
Joni: We go out of the building and get in the van and you take me down toward Malibu Canyon, make a left on Mulholland Highway and we go up around, over down through hills, vales, mountains, canyons. It’s the long way home. It’s the untrodden way home.
Ken: It’s the long way, but it’s also the way that we may not have discovered had we not been on the cancer journey.
Joni: And you always pull over on the side of the road because on the second farm to the left, there’s a field where there are a couple of little foals and their mommies. And they’re always out there, the babies and their mother horses there in the pasture.
Ken: I know the love that you have for horses and so it’s kind of fun to see the horse farms back there and to watch people having lessons in the ring. You know, it’s just one of those things where you realize that life is short on this side of eternity. And the time that we do have here we are able to perhaps do some things that we might not have done before.
Joni: Absolutely, Ken. Had I not struggled with that cancer, I don’t think you and I would have slowed down. I think we would have kept on the 101 freeway going 75mph. But now, that road home that we take up over the canyons and mountains past all those horse farms – and those beautiful vistas of Malibu Canyon, oh my goodness, it’s just gorgeous. I’m so glad that we take that way home. It’s the slow way home. It’s the inconvenient long way home. It’s the winding, twisting way home, but there are so many opportunities to stop on the side, pause, look, get out of the van, enjoy the scenery.
Ken: Enjoy the scenery.
Joni: Yep. Well, it reminds me, Ken, of a poem that I know you and I studied back in high school. That Robert Frost poem that goes: TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; …I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— [my husband and I] took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Thank you, Ken, for helping me take the long, winding, twisting, but yet very scenic way home.
Ken: Thank you, Joni. I love you.
Joni: I love you, too. I invite you to visit me today at our website at joniandfriends.org. Until next time this is Joni and Friends.
Used by permission of
JONI AND FRIENDS
P.O. Box 3333
Agoura Hills, CA 91376
© Joni and Friends