Distant sunrise

The darkness came in the dream.  All around the inside of my mind, there was darkness.  Deep within this darkness, my awareness spread, into a mind infinite, extending into pitch black.  The mind reached and searched but found nothing.  No body, no home, a formless labyrinth of darkness.  The body was there, but we couldn’t get inside the body.  The cells were not reachable, the muscles lay limp, the roots hang dead.  The same feeling we had on that tragic day in the water.  The medulla oblongata could not reach the spinal cord, the neural messages were left floating there, in their own special place of darkness there was a silence deep within the greater silence…. wrapping itself in a leaden sea of darkness.  As my awareness spread to the nothingness, to the lifeless body I could not touch, I screamed in horror, deep within the blankness comes my terror.  The silent scream awakens me.

As my awareness is blasted back into brain, like a comet falling to the earth, my body follows and as my bleary eyes open, my entire body simultaneously lurches from the hospital bed, as if I was just pulled from drowning waters.  It takes me a moment to realize my stygian dream is gone, and the day I lost my body is past me now.  My fingers curl, my toes wiggle, and despite the deep pain in the back of my head, my movements are with me, my body, tenuous as it was after the trauma, is mine again.  We are one.

Four months have passed, and I try to finish the story, but I cannot.  The words bring fear, and the fear buries the words.  Not now, not when I must calcify… calcification.  I must keep positive vibrations for the calcification. 

My emphatic ritual of gentle healing, ancient healing, begins with the ride along the wise cells as they begin their sacred swirl around the spine, up and within, integrating, accepting… fusing with the not completely unobtrusive titanium fixation.  Riding on the rhythms of time, the waves of galaxies pulse through me and the titanium cylinder that is filled with my shattered vertebrate comes back to life.  At least that’s what I imagine, so it must be true.  Stretching, bonding, becoming one with the other.  My vertebrate the neurosurgeons call C6 is broken, shattered, but the its resurrection has begun and that is my only true purpose now.  We must bring the vertebrate back to life…back to life….back… to … life… The expanse of my gratitude for the other vertebrate, above and below, is limitless just as the colors of these Brazilian summer sunrises.  Distant rays reach to fill my eyes – and the fusion continues.

Wake up, nourishment, fruits with calcium, pineapple, spirulina, coconut water, organic eggs, the almond milk I squeeze and make myself; my morning recipe for fusion.  Then to the yoga mat.  Staring out on to the swaying trees, riding along the wind I become one with the forest.  Standing firm, feeling the pulsating cells, the swirl of energy rising to the crown of my skull, out my third eye and into the universe.  Down to the mat, the Iyengar sequence I learned so many years before in Santa Cruz with Vanessa – serves me now.  My healing endeavor requires blood circulation, energy circulation and creation, all that I posses.  Open the hips, pull back the legs, the inflection of the body to open.  Meditate;  twenty minutes, I sit and I let the thoughts pass as the leafs in the great river spread to open to the clean flow of water, the waves in the deep ocean pass on by, and I find the rhythm.  There vibrating beneath the time, an ambient rhythm flows along the strata, beyond the cosmos.  I step out the window, on to the vibration—landing on my magic carpet, flying out into the star filled sky.  Strange moons with falling stars, I see the galaxy beyond galaxies.  I am both outside and within.

Yes, this how we heal, my body and me.  We go to the sacred corner of the beach, ‘Canto Do Morcego’ the Place of the Bat.  The verdant subtropical foliage rolls down the headland to find fifty feet of sheer slate cliff.  Beyond the cliff, nestled beyond the boulders, the bay tucks inward, and the secret beach lies hidden behind the lapping waves.  The water calls me – bring me back to the ocean.  I dream of surfing, and I dream of swimming. Endlessly swimming out into the open sea, the sun reflecting off the water, I can see down from above.  The languid movements of the turtles, flowing with the currents beneath.  With this I know I’m free.  So we calcify, because just as we need the water, the water needs us.  We are one and the same.