Car Crash
How precious everything is. How fragile, and yet how resilient the workings of nature. How delicately tuned. It’s Boxing Day and I’m sitting in my Dad’s bungalow in Essex on a magnificent sun-stretched morning. My head still hurts a little. The inside of my skull is a padded cell, and the contrast between the sky and my brain isn’t lost on me. Out there it’s clear and crisp. In here it’s a world of slow drifting mist. A place one drives with dipped headlights.
As I sit in the back room, gazing onto a sierra of pointed roofs and television aerials. I see it’s taking me far longer than usual to write this. But at least I am writing. At least the words are still there. I hug them like the white lines in the middle of a rural road. Too bad I didn’t hug those lines a little tighter a couple of month’s ago.
As I sit in the back room, gazing onto a sierra of pointed roofs and television aerials. I see it’s taking me far longer than usual to write this. But at least I am writing. At least the words are still there. I hug them like the white lines in the middle of a rural road. Too bad I didn’t hug those lines a little tighter a couple of month’s ago.
The crash
It was late November when I crashed in the most bizarre set of circumstances that has since called into question everything I’m doing. I have no idea why I hit a wall on a rural road. I haven’t crashed a car in about 25 years. It wasn’t a tap either. One minute I was cruising along an empty B road, the next minute there was a huge bang. If you’ve been in a bad car crash you’ll know; you never forget the sound of that impact. It still echoes in my head and body like a gunshot.
The smell was awful. There was powder everywhere. I coughed and wheezed noticing the airbags deflating. All I could think was, “How? How could I have hit the wall?” I fumbled for the door handle, and threw myself outside to asses the damage. The brain, that great perception management system, functions very differently in moments of extreme stress. Our sensory feedback is filtered and the world as we know it changes. We lose the big picture while the details are magnified. I can still see every rumple in my car wing, the front wheel torn loose, and the buckled passenger door. The remains of what had five minutes earlier been a rather nice stone wall are recorded in high definition in the peeled eye of my mind. I can feel every shudder as I walked to the edge of the road and looked at my front wheel perched on the gravelly rim of a steep gully. Yet other things are mistier than an Asturian morning. I have no idea when the people appeared who put a triangle in the road and called the police. I can’t even remember what they looked like. And what happened the minute before I crashed is but a yawning black void.
It was late November when I crashed in the most bizarre set of circumstances that has since called into question everything I’m doing. I have no idea why I hit a wall on a rural road. I haven’t crashed a car in about 25 years. It wasn’t a tap either. One minute I was cruising along an empty B road, the next minute there was a huge bang. If you’ve been in a bad car crash you’ll know; you never forget the sound of that impact. It still echoes in my head and body like a gunshot.
The smell was awful. There was powder everywhere. I coughed and wheezed noticing the airbags deflating. All I could think was, “How? How could I have hit the wall?” I fumbled for the door handle, and threw myself outside to asses the damage. The brain, that great perception management system, functions very differently in moments of extreme stress. Our sensory feedback is filtered and the world as we know it changes. We lose the big picture while the details are magnified. I can still see every rumple in my car wing, the front wheel torn loose, and the buckled passenger door. The remains of what had five minutes earlier been a rather nice stone wall are recorded in high definition in the peeled eye of my mind. I can feel every shudder as I walked to the edge of the road and looked at my front wheel perched on the gravelly rim of a steep gully. Yet other things are mistier than an Asturian morning. I have no idea when the people appeared who put a triangle in the road and called the police. I can’t even remember what they looked like. And what happened the minute before I crashed is but a yawning black void.
It took an hour for the tow truck to nudge my car from the verge and scrape it off the road. I flinched as the front wheel dragged over the tarmac like a giant mangled fingernail. I loved my car and it hurt to see it so crushed. As the winch strained and metal scraped, I saw my neighbours who’d come to take me home, negotiating with the road block police.
Apart from shock, it didn’t seem I had sustained any injuries. But as we pulled away from the scene, I became aware of the jelly of my brain. It was a high protein shake in a blender that someone had left the lid off. Later that night my head began to hurt. Again my neighbours came to the rescue. Julia drove me to the Urgencias, an eerie fluorescent place where people with clipboards ticked boxes, doctors held fingers up at me and stared into my pupils, and Xrays and samples were taken. Two hours later I emerged with a collar for whiplash.
The days trudged into weeks as I pottered on my hill, carless and immobile, unable to participate in consumption on any level. Silence seeped out of the dirt and drifted over the slopes. Robin redbreast took up guard duty on my veggie patch post while the Egyptian vultures circled overhead. A hawk took to hanging out on the rocky fringes of my acreage at this time. She drifted in and out like a brown speckled spirit. I moved in sync with the land. Building slowly again was a therapy in and of itself. Even so, an inauspicious cloud was fermenting along the ridges of my mind.
Something was awry in my noodle. Brain fog, headaches, and an sharp intolerance of screens. Then there were the dark emotions erupting from the storm drains in my psyche’s streets. The effluent spewed erratically along the normally sunny lanes of my awareness, sullying them, and making them impassable at times. I began to feel the only time I recognised myself was when I was building. Slowly I found out. I was labouring under something they like to call post-concussion syndrome. It felt more like a demonic possession.
Apart from shock, it didn’t seem I had sustained any injuries. But as we pulled away from the scene, I became aware of the jelly of my brain. It was a high protein shake in a blender that someone had left the lid off. Later that night my head began to hurt. Again my neighbours came to the rescue. Julia drove me to the Urgencias, an eerie fluorescent place where people with clipboards ticked boxes, doctors held fingers up at me and stared into my pupils, and Xrays and samples were taken. Two hours later I emerged with a collar for whiplash.
The days trudged into weeks as I pottered on my hill, carless and immobile, unable to participate in consumption on any level. Silence seeped out of the dirt and drifted over the slopes. Robin redbreast took up guard duty on my veggie patch post while the Egyptian vultures circled overhead. A hawk took to hanging out on the rocky fringes of my acreage at this time. She drifted in and out like a brown speckled spirit. I moved in sync with the land. Building slowly again was a therapy in and of itself. Even so, an inauspicious cloud was fermenting along the ridges of my mind.
Something was awry in my noodle. Brain fog, headaches, and an sharp intolerance of screens. Then there were the dark emotions erupting from the storm drains in my psyche’s streets. The effluent spewed erratically along the normally sunny lanes of my awareness, sullying them, and making them impassable at times. I began to feel the only time I recognised myself was when I was building. Slowly I found out. I was labouring under something they like to call post-concussion syndrome. It felt more like a demonic possession.
The next month unravelled alarmingly fast. I tried to fly to the UK to take refuge with my dear dad. A hurricane was flattening the trees at the airport and the flight was diverted to France. After a three hour bus ride and a five hour wait, the airplane from hell took off, battling through turbulence and high winds. I was surrounded by children, most of them screaming. As we came in to land, the toddler next to me threw up. It was too hot, too crowded, too noisy, and my head began to hurt in ways I’d never experienced.
Once at my dad’s house, I took up residence on the sofa. It was here I understood I’d lost the ability to write. I felt as though my mind was disintegrating.
“We could go to the walk in centre, but I fear they won’t be able to help you. Waiting lists for a scan will be months long. And then there are all the ill people there...” said my Dad from over the top of his newspaper.
A great storm of panic blew through me. But it’s a funny thing the mind. As someone who meditates, I could clearly sense the difference between the workings of the brain and the soul. My CPU was damaged, but my internet connection wasn’t. Although I couldn’t function neurally, I had access to other pieces of me. Drawing on the well of consciousness beyond thought and reason, I grabbed onto my will to recover like Ariadne's glittering thread. I simply refused to lose my capacity to write.
It was hard to research as my head hurt after ten minutes. But over the course of a couple of days I understood I was suffering some sort of concussion-induced inflammation. I changed my diet immediately and drastically, removing all inflammatory foods; sugar and carbs mainly. I feasted on fish and vegetables, ginger and turmeric. The results were fast. Within a week the windshield of my awareness began to clear. Unfortunately, it's a bewildering tendency of life that problems, like municipal buses, never arrive in ones, but rather all turn up at once. No sooner did the mist in my head start to clear than I was assailed by the flu. It was an illness pernicious enough to drive me to bed for days and days. With both head and body out for the count, and feeling the world stacking cards against me, I sank into an underworld darkness.
Once at my dad’s house, I took up residence on the sofa. It was here I understood I’d lost the ability to write. I felt as though my mind was disintegrating.
“We could go to the walk in centre, but I fear they won’t be able to help you. Waiting lists for a scan will be months long. And then there are all the ill people there...” said my Dad from over the top of his newspaper.
A great storm of panic blew through me. But it’s a funny thing the mind. As someone who meditates, I could clearly sense the difference between the workings of the brain and the soul. My CPU was damaged, but my internet connection wasn’t. Although I couldn’t function neurally, I had access to other pieces of me. Drawing on the well of consciousness beyond thought and reason, I grabbed onto my will to recover like Ariadne's glittering thread. I simply refused to lose my capacity to write.
It was hard to research as my head hurt after ten minutes. But over the course of a couple of days I understood I was suffering some sort of concussion-induced inflammation. I changed my diet immediately and drastically, removing all inflammatory foods; sugar and carbs mainly. I feasted on fish and vegetables, ginger and turmeric. The results were fast. Within a week the windshield of my awareness began to clear. Unfortunately, it's a bewildering tendency of life that problems, like municipal buses, never arrive in ones, but rather all turn up at once. No sooner did the mist in my head start to clear than I was assailed by the flu. It was an illness pernicious enough to drive me to bed for days and days. With both head and body out for the count, and feeling the world stacking cards against me, I sank into an underworld darkness.
Refuge in the hills.
Damage
Two months on, I returned to my Spanish mountain. I’d love at this point to be able to say, “and then it all changed.” But it didn’t. It was as though that dark day in late November I drove into the valley of the dead. The ghoulish highwaymen of adversity carried on appearing. One after another. My land no longer looked alluring, but a penance. I was still in the grip of influenza, and even the smallest task was colossal.
“Bad weather is coming, get ready.” My neighbour Julia said to me when she met me in the road. I’d been back just a day.
There’s always a nadir in a calamity cluster, a point that almost breaks you. This was it. With no energy to cut the wood I needed, and feeling cold to the core, I wondered what to do. Glumly I dragged my bedding back into my tiny stone chicken coop hut, because it was easier to heat. Even so, climbing down to the barn for firewood used every kilojoule of energy I had. I was cold. I was sick. And my mind still wasn’t my own.
In the end, I booked myself into a warm room for a few days to try and recover. Snow came and went, and freezing rain took its place turning the slopes into pea soup and the sky into cold, grease-flecked dishwater. And my car? It was still stranded in the repair shop, crumpled and broken, waiting for some pen pusher in the far reaches of insurance Gehenna to make a decision.
The underworld. How dark it is down there. How glutinous and chilly. How difficult to clamber out of that place once we fall into its unforgiving bowels.
Two months on, I returned to my Spanish mountain. I’d love at this point to be able to say, “and then it all changed.” But it didn’t. It was as though that dark day in late November I drove into the valley of the dead. The ghoulish highwaymen of adversity carried on appearing. One after another. My land no longer looked alluring, but a penance. I was still in the grip of influenza, and even the smallest task was colossal.
“Bad weather is coming, get ready.” My neighbour Julia said to me when she met me in the road. I’d been back just a day.
There’s always a nadir in a calamity cluster, a point that almost breaks you. This was it. With no energy to cut the wood I needed, and feeling cold to the core, I wondered what to do. Glumly I dragged my bedding back into my tiny stone chicken coop hut, because it was easier to heat. Even so, climbing down to the barn for firewood used every kilojoule of energy I had. I was cold. I was sick. And my mind still wasn’t my own.
In the end, I booked myself into a warm room for a few days to try and recover. Snow came and went, and freezing rain took its place turning the slopes into pea soup and the sky into cold, grease-flecked dishwater. And my car? It was still stranded in the repair shop, crumpled and broken, waiting for some pen pusher in the far reaches of insurance Gehenna to make a decision.
The underworld. How dark it is down there. How glutinous and chilly. How difficult to clamber out of that place once we fall into its unforgiving bowels.
The Spiritual Battle
Sometimes though I remembered the other world, and the other me. It would often come to me when I did my morning yoga and a shaft of sunlight hit my cheeks. Sometimes it was the tap tap of the woodpecker in the tree behind. Sometimes robin redbreast caught my eye. One day I wondered if Mr Fox was still alive, and within ten minutes he trotted past me, haunches wiggling, bushy tail bobbing. At these moments I could sense that the underworld was only a small dark corner I had become stuck within, while the real me was out there in the landscape waiting for a return.
It was a freezing night in late January, a night with gleaming eyes and frost crusted stars. My stove was roaring like the Chimaera, rearing up every time I threw some wood in its mouth. With the fatigue still dragging at my lungs, I opened my door and peered outside. The coppiced ash trees were monumental woody sculptures that had come to life in the starlight. With their arms raised aloft they seemed to be channelling the planets. There in the perfect stillness of the pitch, they all began speaking at once.
“Be discerning dear one. Something is with you that shouldn’t be. Cut away the poisonous branches, they are leeching your life force.” The words reverberated about my land, on and on.
Something was with me that shouldn’t be. What?
That night I took a sprig of dried sage and lit it. I let the musky smoke search out the darkness in the ancient stone corners and the doorway of my hut. Next I boiled the rest of the sage into a tea and drank it, feeling its anti-pathogenic magic cleaning my cells. Finally I closed my eyes. I sensed into my body, into the painful areas and the darkness, and then outwards into the space beyond. Who was with me?
Scanning the field of my consciousness all sorts of faces popped up. Crystal beings, golden faces, creatures and trees. The great mountains rose like white wizards, and the rivers were glassy messengers. Yet I saw the dark smoke coiling out from within that landscape, and the poisonous entity that had burrowed into me. It hunched there, a victim-eyed Gollum. Staring hard at the pitiful image in my midst, I slammed the door on it, and watched it scuttle away. Immediately the atmosphere around me changed.
All of this is imagination of course, but imagination isn't what we've been told. It's not a bunch of ineffectual figments, but the keys to recreating our worlds. Whatever is happening in our lives, it’s the spiritual battle that is the most fundamental, however we like to describe it. Or whichever concepts we use to explain it. If our psyches are clear and aligned with the light of our being, it’s only a matter of time before the physical world follows suit. Whereas if we begin identifying with the dark in any of its forms from self-pity to rage or cruelty, trouble just keeps on coming. Our choices become poor, our perception clouded, and predators of all kinds are attracted.
Sometimes though I remembered the other world, and the other me. It would often come to me when I did my morning yoga and a shaft of sunlight hit my cheeks. Sometimes it was the tap tap of the woodpecker in the tree behind. Sometimes robin redbreast caught my eye. One day I wondered if Mr Fox was still alive, and within ten minutes he trotted past me, haunches wiggling, bushy tail bobbing. At these moments I could sense that the underworld was only a small dark corner I had become stuck within, while the real me was out there in the landscape waiting for a return.
It was a freezing night in late January, a night with gleaming eyes and frost crusted stars. My stove was roaring like the Chimaera, rearing up every time I threw some wood in its mouth. With the fatigue still dragging at my lungs, I opened my door and peered outside. The coppiced ash trees were monumental woody sculptures that had come to life in the starlight. With their arms raised aloft they seemed to be channelling the planets. There in the perfect stillness of the pitch, they all began speaking at once.
“Be discerning dear one. Something is with you that shouldn’t be. Cut away the poisonous branches, they are leeching your life force.” The words reverberated about my land, on and on.
Something was with me that shouldn’t be. What?
That night I took a sprig of dried sage and lit it. I let the musky smoke search out the darkness in the ancient stone corners and the doorway of my hut. Next I boiled the rest of the sage into a tea and drank it, feeling its anti-pathogenic magic cleaning my cells. Finally I closed my eyes. I sensed into my body, into the painful areas and the darkness, and then outwards into the space beyond. Who was with me?
Scanning the field of my consciousness all sorts of faces popped up. Crystal beings, golden faces, creatures and trees. The great mountains rose like white wizards, and the rivers were glassy messengers. Yet I saw the dark smoke coiling out from within that landscape, and the poisonous entity that had burrowed into me. It hunched there, a victim-eyed Gollum. Staring hard at the pitiful image in my midst, I slammed the door on it, and watched it scuttle away. Immediately the atmosphere around me changed.
All of this is imagination of course, but imagination isn't what we've been told. It's not a bunch of ineffectual figments, but the keys to recreating our worlds. Whatever is happening in our lives, it’s the spiritual battle that is the most fundamental, however we like to describe it. Or whichever concepts we use to explain it. If our psyches are clear and aligned with the light of our being, it’s only a matter of time before the physical world follows suit. Whereas if we begin identifying with the dark in any of its forms from self-pity to rage or cruelty, trouble just keeps on coming. Our choices become poor, our perception clouded, and predators of all kinds are attracted.
Moving out of the clouds.
As soon as I’d cleaned the vehicle of my awareness, the fog that had hung about me for so long began to recede into the vales. It made me wonder. Perhaps it had never really been an outside weather phenomenon, but the rancid smoke from my exhaust that I’d procrastinated in repairing. My body was still so tired though. So I took control, booked a flight back to the UK, and parked myself yet again on my Dad’s ever-welcoming sofa.
I’m not moving fast. I’m not moving at all come to think of it. But the sun has reappeared in the skies of my soul and the outlook is clearer now. I can see the ditches at the sides of the road, and hear the voices rising from them beckoning me down. Today though I'm relentless, only focusing on the opening in the clouds ahead.
Car crash. It’s the perfect metaphor for 2022. One long protracted chassis-crushing mess. But I’ve learned my lessons, hard as they were. And who knows how they may save me in the months and years to come? I’ve learned, as we all do in a crisis, who are my friends and who are not. My doors are firmly bolted to the blood suckers and the negative, to the victims who so quickly turn into aggressors. Darkness, you fooled me for a while there, but your time is now up.
As I scan the horizon, I see who is still with me. I see my mountain in the snowy wonderlands and hear the haunting call of the wolves. Things have changed but my heart is still there, I’m still writing, and the trees are still whispering. All is as it should be. The road has cleared. So I reach beneath my chair for the map, and dream of my next adventure.
***
So many people helped me over the past two months in the kindest, most generous of ways. But I'd especially like to thank my Dad for his never-ending generosity of spirit, my neighbours, Brian and Julia for being salt of the Earth support these past weeks, and to all the dear patrons who patiently waited for me to recover.
I’m not moving fast. I’m not moving at all come to think of it. But the sun has reappeared in the skies of my soul and the outlook is clearer now. I can see the ditches at the sides of the road, and hear the voices rising from them beckoning me down. Today though I'm relentless, only focusing on the opening in the clouds ahead.
Car crash. It’s the perfect metaphor for 2022. One long protracted chassis-crushing mess. But I’ve learned my lessons, hard as they were. And who knows how they may save me in the months and years to come? I’ve learned, as we all do in a crisis, who are my friends and who are not. My doors are firmly bolted to the blood suckers and the negative, to the victims who so quickly turn into aggressors. Darkness, you fooled me for a while there, but your time is now up.
As I scan the horizon, I see who is still with me. I see my mountain in the snowy wonderlands and hear the haunting call of the wolves. Things have changed but my heart is still there, I’m still writing, and the trees are still whispering. All is as it should be. The road has cleared. So I reach beneath my chair for the map, and dream of my next adventure.
***
So many people helped me over the past two months in the kindest, most generous of ways. But I'd especially like to thank my Dad for his never-ending generosity of spirit, my neighbours, Brian and Julia for being salt of the Earth support these past weeks, and to all the dear patrons who patiently waited for me to recover.
