The chapter that changed everything (and no thing) 

An hour after the crash my eyes open to a circle of panicked faces staring down at me. Their features, distorted with fear, resemble circus mirror deformations. I taste fright and smell the commotion circulating around me but feel entirely detached from it. ‘It’s a miracle she’s alive! It’s a miracle she’s alive!” screams a man, his voice vibrating with terror. I feel protective of the supreme sense of calm I’m uncharacteristically feeling and as the chaos continues, a pull to be elsewhere. 

I am. A gentle force of loving light envelops me.  

Instinctively I allow an upward passage, sensing immense support, though not clear why it’s needed. A feeling of guided ascension ensues and the next thing I know I’m viewing the wreckage from an aerial vantage point. I’ve entered a dimension where my essence is alive and pulsating, more peaceful than previously known but without its physical casing. Serenity reigns. I notice the backs of people far below bent over an immobile body and gradually realize… it’s mine. They move in frantic spurts while attempting to summon help, their distress distant from my blissful elevation. I feel at home, yet know it’s not where I spend my days. Time isn’t; my whole life feels as if it’s taken place inside a nanosecond.

Welcoming Presences offer a kinship of kindness. All communication is understood without words or effort, collective attunement the norm. I feel matter-of-fact and ecstatic, wholly surrounded with love and a quiet assuredness I am where I’m supposed to be. Such ease never occurs to me while in my body, where I often feel out of place.

Below me a rectangular image forms on the right side of the horizon. Its proportions look like a child’s railroad set seen from above. As it moves towards the center, instead of a train I see an ambulance with several large numbers on its roof, striking me as an odd place to put paint. My being follows the siren’s vibration and without transition I find myself viewing the world again from within my injured body, whose cuts now burn as I get placed onto a stretcher. Scorched dirt and charred rubber saturate my throat. Authoritative bodies strap me in and my sense of expansion shrinks to the boundaries of my skin, claustrophobia and searing pain now filling the contours. Each movement leaves a pile of mashed glass in its wake.

Return to form was a shock. It came with brain functioning that was challenged to replicate its previous feats, and void of vocabulary to articulate what had transpired. My attempted explanations recalled an earlier memory of snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef, trying to describe the sensation of putting my head underwater and discovering a parallel world of spectacular beauty and grace that had been there all along, but that seemed to vanish as soon as I pulled my head up. I wanted to convey the vibrancy of my out-of-body experience (OBE), but my lexicon fell short. The only available language was inaccurate and misleading.

I was near death, but felt more alive than ever.  It was considered an emergency, but something Divine had emerged. Medical records declared me unconscious for fifty-two minutes, yet never before had I experienced such Loving Consciousness. Instead of making sense, I sensed a Maker. What felt natural was called ‘supernatural,’ and ‘super’ meant less-than-great. Reuniting with Love felt normal but had to be described as ‘paranormal.’ Prefixes locked away the possibilities within each adjective.

I began to see how Words create worlds… how language, like taste and touch, is a living sense.

It has become my mission to incite – and ignite – permission to be our sacred selves; to reawaken our sense of the Eternal. In my view, words are key! They seal what’s real, and can reveal what heals. May we reclaim them as divine resources for creation and connection and resurrect  language as a medium for the soul.