Near Death Revisited
I follow the lead of Sandstone in announcing the anniversary of my first NDE. It has now been 9497 days since the accident and the subsequent celestial journey occurred. To calculate the day count I used the widget Peter Russell provides on his website, which is dedicated to providing a count of "Your age in day". It's a perspective thing, no?
My age in days is, as of this writing, 20198. So I deducted the 9497 from 20198 and came up with 10701 as the day count in my life. Here's the fun part! Those digits remind me of two eyes with a uppity nose between them, and the accident that launched my NDE precipitated through an impaction "right between the eyes". Make your own analogies here, friends, it's just part of the service we offer here today!!
On February 3rd, 1984, at sunset on Windley Key in the Fabulous Florida Keys, I lost the front wheel of my bicycle during the onset of an impassioned and joyous sprint toward the brilliant red sun setting over Florida Bay. The wheel left the forks and rolled on without me ("Ya picked a fine time to leave me loose wheel!" ~ to be sung to the melody of the old Kenny Roger's song "Lucille").
Without the wheel, the front forks dropped to the ground. The gear shift levers on that Raleigh were mounted conveniently on the handle bar t-stem, so from the downward momentum, my face was slammed against the t-stem and shift levers, thus initiating a Shift of a whole different sort. My face was torn severely, but I missed that part. The good folks at Jackson Memorial Hospital Trauma Unit stitched me back together right nicely, but by that time I was more concerned with what had happened to me during the fifteen minutes I lay unconscious on the asphalt road.
Our local Fire Chief found me there and started the ball rolling, ending up with my entry into the Emergency Room at the University of Miami Trauma Unit, just minutes before someone was shot right there in the ER, so my surgery got delayed while they tended to the gunshot victim.
During the NDE visionary journey I was catapulted through the setting sun, on into a celestial valley of translingual beauty, where color and sound and life were all an interplay of frequencies. There I was met, within a dome of golden-white light, by an entity I have come to regard as Brigid, the Celtic Goddess Brigid. For years I called her "the Lady of the Lake" because of the undeniable ancient Celtic vibes in that place, but I at long last came to realize that the accident happened within the 3-day cusp of Imbolc, a Pagan Sabbat devoted to Brigid - on the mundane level, a celebration of the lactating of the ewes, thus marking the turning point progression of Winter's intensity.
For you noetically inclined readers, I am well aware of the plasticity of perception with which we create stories that may relate our experiences to others in a manner that is both in harmonic resonance with the past, but also in that those stories reach deeply, double-dipping into the rich Inner Worlds we all share. This is what Stephen Levine calls Medicine Stories. Now, on to the big natural synchronicity!
Long story short, the Totem entity Coyote became a part of the tapestry of lore pertaining to my NDE and the subsequent unfolding of the NDE, from Implicate to Explicate, over the years. Coyote was also related to the second NDE, which told in the IONS Digital Library in the Member's Stories section. Also, Coyote is known, in some Native American legends, as the One who brought death into this world. Soooooo...
Yesterday was Imbolc. As I was driving south into town, to take care of errands and shopping, I spied a coyote trotting along through the buffalo pastures across from the Rumsfeld Ranch. Morning rush hour traffic was thick and swift but I executed a daring u-turn, then another, to circle back and pull over to the shoulder. The coyote was trying to drink from a hard frozen ditch and was left with only chucks of ice on which he chewed to get water. Camera always at hand these days!
I airbrushed the blood from his fur because it was kind of disturbing. I could tell he is an old animal, and has some injuries to his hindquarters, but his gait proved that he is still fairly limber, considering.
I have scheduled an appointment with an otolaryngologist to go over the CAT scan I had done of my sinuses, and the damage done back in 1984. They will be able to perform a septoplasty on this nose and open it up after all these years. There has been nearly no ventilation in the right side of my head for quite some time. But the big thrill for me will be when the PTSD from that old "fatal" accident begins to fully surface. It has already begun to emerge: note the coyote on Imbolc!
I am excited, and I wanted to share this with y'all.
Bright Blessings ~ Ken
