Can you do it?

Can you do it?
Still — after all
Or is it already
All in place?
It’s happening
Every moment
Here and now
Life and love
Pleas’ no hate
Or judgment
Just being
In the arms
Of the divine
With the current
Light and sound
Consciously
As possible
Not startled
By opposition
Giving strength
To stand up tall
And move ahead
Peek ’round corners
Like a small child
One curious soul
Finding what is
In silence.

“Doula’s song and silence” — for a new generation

Near-death experience — can you do it?

“There is nothing unique or special in a near-death experience. They are not rare; everyone, I would venture, has had them, at one time or another, perhaps without even realizing it. The brush of a van too close to your bicycle, the tired medic who realizes that a dosage ought to be checked one final time, the driver who has drunk too much and is reluctantly persuaded to relinquish the car keys, the train missed after sleeping through an alarm, the aeroplane not caught, the virus never inhaled, the assailant never encountered, the path not taken.

“We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall. As Thomas Hardy writes of Tess Durbeyfield, ‘There was another date . . . that of her own death; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?’

“If you are aware of these moments, they will alter you. You can try to forget them, to turn away from them, to shrug them off, but they will have infiltrated you, whether you like it or not. They will take up residence inside you and become part of who you are, like a heart stent or a pin that holds together a broken bone.”

— “I am, I am, I am — Seventeen Brushes with Death”, Maggie O’Farrell, pp. 31-32

Near-life experience — you can do it!

“I consider myself steeped in luck, in good fortune to have avoided the fate the doctors decreed for me. I have been showered with shamrocks, my pockets filled with rabbits’ feet, found the crock of gold at the end of every rainbow. I could not have asked for more from life, to have been spared what might have been. I could have died there in that hospital but didn’t. I could have been condemned to a life of immobility but wasn’t. I dodged a bullet–many, in fact.”

— “I am, I am, I am — Seventeen Brushes with Death”, Maggie O’Farrell, p. 241

Three-legged, proactive dreamer Luna