Today marks the 12th year anniversary of the time my heart stopped and I awoke in a flash of lightning, on a stretcher, in a helicopter on my way to spend several weeks in a hospital. One of my ribs broken and puncturing my lung causing it to collapse. My face was ripped open by impact, and my nose was laying in a grotesque position on the left side of my face. This amongst other fractures in my hips, hands, and feet.
I was yelling at everyone around me like a banshee even though blood would fly out of my mouth and drizzle from my ears when I did, and it would cause me to pass out for a bit because I could not breathe. This is how I remember my rebirth. Bloody, broken, and raging. I couldn’t walk for several months. I lost my sense of smell for over a year.
I often feel my body retelling this story, how I was too angry to die. Maybe I did die and everything since then has just been synapses firing during my last breath. A complex fantasy of the life I could have if I was just brave enough to pull through; because, to be honest, this second life I have lived has been many fantasies fulfilled. Many nightmares too but I grew up with night terrors as teachers. I’m still learning. I still hate driving late at night in cars and my stomach knots up at sharp turns. I still feel the impact on my face often in the form of migraines arising from the scar tissue in my brain and during those days I am in another universe where the world is turned upside down.
I have since fallen in love with the cultivation of scar tissue. The gash on my forehead, my lightning bolt, the first significant symbol revealed to me by my path in life, my first treasure. So many more since then.
I still visit this rebirth ritually every year I am able with hook suspension like I did almost exactly a year after my rebirth when I got my sense of smell back as I put my forehead to soil coming down from my first suspension. Maybe I’m a ghost imagining this second life with all of this love, with all of these beautiful people, all these beautiful experiences, with all of this beautiful art. Rage is divine, the way I can feel it; guttural, gurgling, and demanding my time here on Earth. Happy Death and Re-birthday to Me.
To you my Dark Mother, this rebirth, returning my Self back to Myself. To you Mother of All, I re-member Me as an offering.
