How We Meet Our Challenges

I’m not special in my suffering. It’s one of the things I know I have in common with my ancestors. At some point, the universe has delivered us all difficult challenges.

My 10x great-grandmother Mary Chilton found herself orphaned in the new world at the age of 12 when both of her parents died the first winter. My 3x great-grandparents Bailey Harrison Whitcher and Ordelia Lozier lost two sons to the Civil War, a heartache I cannot imagine. My great-grandmother Hattie Eva Smith, had to go to work at the age of forty-eight after her husband died, due to his pre-existing condition that meant the government didn’t have to pay on his pension.

And I got burnt. Pretty f’ing badly.

It didn’t happen for a reason. No one was punishing me. It was no one’s fault. Just a freak accident.

My ancestress Mary toughed out the first few years at Plymouth under the care of another family until her older siblings crossed over. She made the new world her home. Bailey and Ordelia moved on, as much as any family can. And great-grandma Hattie worked as a nurse until she died.

And I’m going to walk.

I could let the pain and sadness swallow me. Or I could let the joy at breathing and opening my eyes every day wash over me. I choose happiness and love, which I hold onto on dark days, for their are plenty of those.

Would you confront a nightmare with more darkness?

I light candles on my ancestor altar and I call on their strength. Whether the answer comes carried to me on the winds or is borne from deep within me, I feel them, walking with me. I am not alone.

Skin

We are more than the skins we wear, and yet we are still these bodies we were born into. We're attached to them in both like and dislike.

The fire burned away bits and bunches of my flesh. Was I too far gone? Was their too much lost? How much flesh can you lose and survive? But medicine is miraculous and the doctors harvested healthy tissue from my back, torso, and even my left foot. They used it to grow more...

What skin was saved from the fire saved me, pieced together over both of my legs. A new sheath.

I am not the same person I was, and my skin bears witness to the change.

It took seven procedures to complete the grafting. They used cadaver flesh to fill in the negative space while fixing me. The flesh of the dead helped heal me. Those dead had families and loved ones. I feel such gratitude for the lives lost that enabled my rescue.

I light candles and leave offerings to their spirits, and those of their ancestors.

Guardians of Dreams

Photo by David Tipling.

In the beginning, every night, I had horrible dreams, induced by the heavy drugs that kept me in the coma, induced by the sheer fight to survive, and induced by the awakened demons in my psyche. I have always had a vivid and memorable dream life. It was nothing compared to what I experienced those first few weeks.

I needed help.

I asked friends of mine who also did dream work to act as guardians for me, in my dreams, to break up the horrors I was experiencing. We came together under the banner of the owl, a spirit totem for me, and a symbol of crossing from life to death, as well as dream workings.

Men were chasing me through the woods. I could barely walk, let alone run. They were almost on me and I broke a clearing onto a lake. My heart sank. If I was healthy I could lose them in the water. But I could hardly move my legs. They were right behind me when I saw a friend in her leather hat staring at the water. She looked at me and nodded and the dream shifted...

I was sliding down the stairs, pulling my useless legs behind me when I slid into a friend's living room. She and her family were all sitting around, drinking hot tea and coffee. Their laughter was infectious. I was so tired. The dream behind me shattered and they told me it was okay to sleep...

They were going to kill us all. I couldn't move my legs. I turned my head to see another friend crocheting snowflakes and throwing them into the air to cool it down and the landscape around me changed. I was outside. We were outside, her and I, and she was still crocheting snowflakes...

As I fell asleep each night, I breathed into the silence of the owl in flight and followed her into dream world, going in on my own terms. Our connection to nature is how we learn to navigate those spaces in between us, between life and death, between breath and not-breath, between water and fire.

Between awake and eyes open.

To Drive Away the Dark

When darkness finds you, the only way out of it is through it. You have to breath it in and push it out.

I've been talking a lot about love and forgiveness and interconnectedness, and all of that stuff is what I am bringing out of this darkness.

But it was still dark. I woke up on a vent and didn't remember what happened to me. And then in the next second I did. And I didn't want it to be real. I wanted it all to go away.

I woke up in the middle of the night in a darkened hospital and the drugs that kept me alive had me living the strangest, horrible things... One night I was on a leaky cargo freighter that was about to explode. I could hear the water dripping and I felt the damp splashes on my skin. I smelled the rusty metal and tasted the salty brine. I had ten minutes to get off the ship, only I couldn't move my legs! My heart was racing... I worked up a sweat swinging the unusable appendages over the side of the bed...

And then a nurse was patting my hand, reminding me that I promised not to try to get out of bed again, and I kind of remembered that, but I'd never seen her before and I didn't know if she was really a nurse or not. The night terrors filled me with a new appreciation for what the word 'terror' means and I hope none of you ever discover it. I held tightly to the call button each night, as the scene descended and I held onto the images of those I loved who were safe in their homes, thinking of me...

Every night was a different horror. Not that the day was better. Dressing changes meant five people pulling and flipping and debriding me as I tried not to cry, getting pumped full of fentanyl every ten minutes just so I didn't scream. And then they would want me to get out of bed on legs that didn't work and I couldn't believe them when they said it would come with time.

But I had to. I had to find faith. To get through.

At night I played Bach's concertos for the cello, as performed by Yo Yo Ma. I know each note intimately, using them to weave a tapestry of light, and I focused instead on building new skin cells, each a tiny filament blooming in the room and covering my skin until music and flesh created something new.

And the day came that I walked again. I am still walking out of the darkness, but every day the light I go towards is brighter.

Love is the Answer

It's so simple, it's often hard to grasp. Isn't it funny, that life's like that. The simplest things are the hardest to learn. But when I was in limbo, sustained by the heavy drugs and simultaneously tortured by the demons inside me, the only way to protect myself was to fall into love.

Who do you love? Who loves you? Who do you love so much that you hate them? Who have you pushed away that your heart aches for?

Because it's not too late. It's never too late.

Love wins. Love sustains. Loves heals. I'm going to be a broken record about it. In the aftermath of this horrible accident, I have watched love ripple out. Families have come together, and not just my own. People long separated have reconnected. Friends from different corners of worlds have met. Past hurts have been discarded in a choice to move forward... because the love was always there.

Love is the last to leave. In my darkest time, light is swelling and pouring out into the world. I carry the fire that tried to burn me and I have become that light in the world. Find your own way to be a light in the world. It's easy.

If you can love, you can be a beacon. You can be a change. We can all make the world a better place to live.

Edgewalking

I stood, an edgewalker, one foot in the living, breathing world, and the other foot in the unknown mist of whatever comes next. Some of you will know what I mean, because you've been there. It's a terrifying and powerful place.

I wasn't alone in my hospital room. Luminous beings gathered around my bed. They took turns touching me and praying... and guarding me against the demons created by the heavy drugs that were keeping me alive.

I wasn't alone, through the pain. I wasn't alone, in the foggy aftermath of seven surgeries. I was never alone, because we're never alone. This isn't just work I do. It's real. If you want to ascribe it to the drugs, feel free. You don't have to believe.

I saw their hands touching me while my parents worried over me. I saw them trading places beside me while my wife sat vigil. I was never really scared, because I was never alone.

What Matters

Fifty-nine days ago, I had a terrifying brush with death.

It was serious, but I'm going to be okay. I am still in the hospital, working on getting healthy enough to go home. It will be a long road to recovery but I'm already making great strides. For a while, I was breathing with one foot in this world and one foot in the other world.

I'm still processing through my experiences on the other side, but this side was full of overwhelming love. It seems to me it's the most important thing. It brought me back to this world. It protected me from the terrors of the other side. It has sustained me through my difficult journey, pouring in from all areas of my life, from all period of friendships, and even from strangers who pray for the health of the loved one of their loved ones.

I feel it, this web of prayers, thoughts, energy being sent my way. I experience it as divinity, as grace, as a safety net waiting to catch me when I don't think I can keep going. It illuminated what faith really is for me, and I have found it in humanity again, in the love that they can share.

We have choices, constantly, about what we feed the world. I like this world I woke into and I hope it continues to evolve, rippling out in waves. Love and joy are contagious. Pass them on.

I'm glad I woke up. I'm glad I'm still here. I plan to make sure those I love know that I love them, because it's the only thing that feels important to me. It's the only thing that matters.