Moving Blindly Forward

I’m still a blogging neophyte. I know. There is a fuckton of information out there, I’m sure, on how to craft an exquisite blog post.

Have I read any of it?

Nope! Not yet, anyway. I’m not worried about coloring my style with someone else’s advice; we can all learn from one another if we’re open minded. The information available is often from people just like me who have been doing this for years. I’ll get there.

Be patient, dear reader! Stumble with me through this world with joy in your heart and compassion for others. I say stumble, because we’re all going to make mistakes, paying attention to the ground then hitting our head, or watching overhead and tripping on a root.

And I know tripping. My disability, coupled with my medications, make me unstable on my feet. My walking stick is a crucial tool for my safety.

I write to express myself and make sense of the world and my place in it. Why have I made the choices I’ve made? Why did the accident happen to me, just when I thought I was invincible?

Truth is, we’re all vulnerable, young and old. Life and time have a way of eroding even the strongest mountains. I live in Appalachia and am learning to embrace it. These mountains I will make my own, even if my hiking is limited. They’re older than the Rockies and espouse a wisdom of Nature that rivals the sages.

Archaeologists believe that these mountains once resembled the Rockies. Time has turned them into a metaphor for my life—old and slumped but still bursting with life. I’m not able to run marathons like I used to, but I will not give up moving forward, blindly at times, but trusting in something greater than me to guide my way.

God is all around us. In us. Shaping destiny whether or not you believe. I was once an atheist. Then I died in a horrific meeting of twisted metal, glass, and wood. Maybe you’ve already read this about me, but bear with me: modern medicine brought me back to life, but not before I experienced a peace and joy beyond description.

Not an old man on a throne sitting in judgment. God is a presence. A peace. Nonbinary and transcending anything we can imagine with our limited perception. I’ll spend the rest of my life seeking to adequately explain what I experienced. I know I’ll fail.

My point is that I was an atheist before the accident. We’re born. We die. That’s it. I never took into account the physics of consciousness. The laws of thermodynamics and all that jazz. Schroedinger’s cat…

1st law: energy cannot be created or destroyed. Consciousness is, as a beginning, the electrical energy transferred between neurons. Yet neuroscientists and physicists are stumped as to the nature of consciousness. It’s greater than the sum of its parts, and scientists don’t know why.

Without understanding the details, though I continue to study source material, I know that my consciousness, soul, spirit, whatever you want to call it, survived the death of my body. Yes, it was a spiritual experience, but it wasn’t a sectarian, or religious experience in a traditional sense.

I was raised in the United Methodist Church, but I left the dogma behind in favor of “logic.” When electrical activity in the brain ceases, that’s it. Enter the first law: where does that energy go? I know it doesn’t simply vanish. Physics backs me on this.

This is where the cat in the box comes in: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. No, I’m not talking about Breaking Bad.

Is the cat dead or alive? Poor thing. The answer is both, until we open the box and observe. Quantum mechanics posits that the act of observation affects the state of the observed.

Without going into details about my experience— that’s for my forthcoming memoir—I can tell you that it was nothing like a dream. Too real. I could feel a breeze on my face. I remember details like how a lake smelled. The tilt of the boat as I came about. My mother’s laughter, and my brother’s and sister’s love. The comfort of a down comforter as I gazed out the window on a verdant springtime mountain valley…

But mostly, I remember the pervasive presence of God in my heart. It was, and continues to be, an undeniable joy and gratitude, a peace and love, all of it wrapped into one overwhelming bundle of divine energy.

Like I said, I can’t do it justice, but I know now that God is real, and this divine Oneness surpasses anything on the ceiling of any chapel.

And so I continue forward blindly, but I have faith that the steps I take have a purpose that defies my understanding. I don’t always know what to say. Isn’t that true of any of us? I do know that I write for a purpose beyond me.

We each have a story to tell. I’ll start telling a fragment of my story in the memoir I’m working on. Some tell their story through the action of their love towards their children. Others express themselves through music or painting. The point is that we all express ourselves somehow. It’s part of the human experience and purpose, the need to create.

And now .I’ll blindly stop…

But not so blind. I’m starting this writing career later in life. On some level it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. My problem was that I let the world and my upbringing get in the way. Being a writer was never presented as a viable career choice. I had to figure it out over a lifetime. Call me dense or slow on the uptake. Fine. I’m grateful I figured it out at all. So many aren’t that lucky.