Trading stories for feathers - a working title

 Waking up is the hardest part. 

Not the leaving sleep part, but the part where the inside your dreams is abandoned for whatever is happening outside your body. 

When I found myself warm on one side, cold and wet on the other... it wasn't unexpected. The shallow scraped out hollow was warm where I had laid. My backside was pressed firmly against the ewe, who was also solidly asleep. My eyes were just about ground level, scanning across the rough dirt. There was a frost last night. Not brutal cold but still cold. 

Every warm bone in my body argued with the chilled side that faced out of the byre. There was work to be done. In a few hours, the sun would be up. But first it was time to go and talk to the birds. I had been mocked for talking with the birds. Folks generally didn't get it. The conversation went both ways. In the hours before the dew saw the first rays of sunshine, we would gather near the hedge. Some mornings it was just a few of us, the birds and I. Other mornings it would be so crowded with everyone trying to get a word in edgewise. 

I sat down atop a flat stone near the hedge, forgetting for a moment how cold it had been last night. The rock was quick to remind me. With my eyes closed, feeling for the last stillness of the not-quite-broken-dawn, I reached out. It was really nothing more than listening with more than my ears. Holding the silence close while spiderwebs sparkled and held nothing more than diamonds in their webs, I waited. 

The first warm beam of light came over the hill gently. I felt it first as the leaves behind me turned to listen too. Even the flat rock craned to listen. 

Waiting is always the hardest part. There is always that fear that today will be the day when no one comes. The day when the birds act like people. Worse, maybe today they will mock me too. I never really understood why people in town felt like they had to tease me. If someone had told me that they couldn't hear what birds and trees were saying, why didn't they tell me that? So instead I assumed innocently, that other kids would want to share their stories they had heard from the birds and leaves and stones. Maybe other kids' parents told them not to talk to birds or maybe they were afraid of the things the trees had to say. I just didn't know.

By the time the light mist had started to lift, the smallest of birds had found a spot to perch beside me. At first, they were content to just stare across the field with me. We exchanged a few looks back and forth, but after each glance, we would return to looking out into the wet grass of the field. A sharp chirp from behind me made me turn around. A chipmunk had decided to come join in the conversation but will still trying to work up the courage to explain everything they had seen this morning. 

MORE TO COME - 

Revisiting Thirteen Years Ago - another introduction to the coma dreams

 It is such a strange thing to reflect on. Thirteen years ago, I was dying in the ICU. The surgery that was supposed to fix my diverticulitis had gone sideways. The anastomosis had failed, allowing fecal waste to enter the abdominal cavity. This led to sepsis and peritonitis along with about a dozen other catastrophic issues. I was dying. They had done an emergency surgery, performed a lavage, and given me a colostomy. They sent me back up to the ICU knowing full well that I was still dying. 

How do you reflect on reading the notes from surgeons who you trust/ed with your life, when their very notes clearly indicate that survival was not guaranteed. By the time I read the surgical notes five days post first surgery, the notes from the surgeons and ICU intensivists read like a very confused teenager being asked to write a book report that they forgot to read. Thirteen years later, it does not inspire confidence.

So I was dying. 

I guess we all are, whether or not we choose to recognize our mortality as being far off or imminent. It is the other side of the monotony of living. The abruptness of dying. 

I hadn't done anything wrong. I wasn't in the ICU because of a car crash. I hadn't overdosed on drugs. I hadn't fallen from a ladder. Nevertheless, I was dying. That's what the notes all said. Five days post-operative emergency. Yesterday I sat here when I should have been off to bed. I put on music I hadn't listened to in thirteen years. I let myself get carried back into the eddies in the current of time. I pushed against the double doors that opened onto the ICU, where the lights were all set low. And there I saw my dying.

I have looked at my death from myriad perspectives each time it has come to greet me. Always curious, slightly confused, always hyper-aware. Those memories have stuck like tar on a hot day. When I was in first grade, I was riding my bike to school. I was crossing one of the busier streets in Hialeah, in the crosswalk, with the light red and cars stopped. A white Camaro ran the red light. There was no sound of brakes until after I felt my bike torn from under me and I was on the hood of the car, pressed against the windshield. My mom had followed me to school that day, driving just behind me. I don't know if I imagined it, or if I really saw her over my shoulder... but I remember her face in a rictus of screaming fear as I entered the crosswalk. I was dying in that instant. By the time I came to rest on the asphalt, my bike nowhere near me, I was alive. I've been told (or maybe I remember) that I wanted to get up and go to school so I wouldn't be late. My legs refused to obey. My shoulder hurt. I couldn't find enough air to breathe. I don't know if I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. I remember being in the hospital, on a gurney... waiting for x-rays. Might have been my first x-rays. I was sure that I had brain damage. Brain damage was what my child mind was certain had made my brother David unable to communicate. We didnt know anything about his autism at that point. We didn't know that he was a chromosomal anomaly and that his failure to speak wasn't caused by any damage done to his brain after his birth. But I didn't know it that day. I was sure that my injury was going to make me like David. 

I didn't die. I injured my collarbone. Nothing broken. Just the spell of childhood innocence. 

Reading the surgeon's notes from my failed surgery is similar in many ways. 

In my mind, there is the last memory before the coma. It is a strange disconnected memory. The heated air was being pumped through the gown I had put on in pre-op. I was so upset that the air was hot. The nurse was trying to explain that I was going to be cold otherwise... but I hate being hot. I remember being wheeled into the operating room and being so unhappy about the hot air blowing through the stupid gown. 

After that, there was blackness for a moment. Much like the time I spent in the air after connecting with the white Camaro in the crosswalk. It was a time when I was released from all the tethers that tie you to here and now. For everyone else in the world, the day continued on. I stopped. Due to the insane concoction of drugs (fentanyl, Propofol, and morphine) that they used to keep me in my sedated comatose state, I was gone. I stepped off of the merry-go-round and fell into a different stream. I was dying. 

If I am honest, I knew I was dying. I just couldn't figure out why it was taking so long. Let me back up. For the next thirty years or so, I experienced time pass just as I had for every day of my thirty-seven years up until that moment. I know now, that they didn't happen the way everyone else talks about time. But I also know that my body and mind experienced thirty years of strange, horrible, boring, wonderful, lonely things... and I also know that I was dying. In many of the coma dreams (as I euphemistically call them) I tried to die. There were all sorts of weird stories about me trying to find a way to either die or to be released so that I could die. Each time I would fulfill the task, some new revelation would make it such that dying wasn't possible. 

But I knew I was dying. I just didn't really understand how to do it properly. Through the perspective of thirteen years, I think the hubris is slightly more amusing. In the coma dreams, I tried to do just as I do out here. I tried to fit in... to blend. I tried to follow the rules as I understood them. No one explained shit to me. No different than out here. 

To this day, I think the most interesting aspect of the coma dreams was the idea of waking up somewhere, fully formed, at a seemingly random age, sometimes not even male, in a place I had never been, as though it was just another Tuesday. Sometimes I woke up in a barn, asleep against the side of sheep. Other dreams had me waking up in old abandoned houses whose basements connected to underground caverns where people raced illegal cars. Each time I woke up, I was there. But most importantly, I had never been anywhere else. I didnt carry with me any of the memories that we all carry. I wasn't Alex from Miami. I didn't have my parents or siblings. I hadn't been married. No history at all. Whenever TV or movies depict a person suffering from amnesia, there is always that mythology about how memory vanishes. Far stranger for me was to lose that entire sense of self that connected to past self. I was fully there, just as real as today... but I had no day before and somehow, that was just fine. Would you remember yesterday if you weren't trying to remember it? Life without rear view mirrors and windows. Just straight ahead. None of the experiences in the coma dreams carried from one dream to another. I was always someone different, somewhere different, a different age, and usually lonely. 

And because my body outside (in the ICU) refused to let me forget, I was also dying. Periodically the coma dreams would toss me into a blended Frappuccino of hospital and Salvador Dali. If it was an easy coma dream, it might almost make sense. Other times the coma dreams would take a real-world physical setting in the hospital and just play havoc with it. I'll get to some of those stories soon. I needed time to write this preface (again). Probably just for my own sake of understanding. 

I was dying thirteen years ago, and I did it badly. I failed miserably. Instead I ended up living thirty years or more, in ways, places, times, and people I could never have been. Those experiences have changed my understanding of what it means to be alive. So many of the negative associations I had previously held about death, don't apply anymore. There was never a "white light at the end of the tunnel" moment. It was so much more mundane and prosaic. I was dying inside a Burger King where I couldn't find a bathroom to pee. 

Like I said earlier, I really struggled to die any differently than I have lived. 

Between now and October 10th when I first woke from the coma, and which we celebrate as my second birthday... I try to reflect on the bizarre experiences I went through. When I can free up my hands to type and convince my mind to untangle some of the threads of the coma dreams, I will write more of those stories. 

Writing in my Sleep

 A few nights ago I found myself writing in my sleep. I woke up at 4am, unwillingly, but convinced that sleep wouldn't return unless I managed to get some of these crazy ideas down. So I got up, dressed and came downstairs. By the time I had turned on the light and powered up my computer, the urge had passed. Much like waiting at the toilet to pee when nothing manifests... this felt like a false alarm.

So what was so compelling?

I first half-woke with thoughts that it was imperative that I write an article about various methodologies I had used for testing glazes in our studio. No idea why... but it was imperative that I write it immediately. I quashed that idea, or I thought I had. The next idea sprang into my head with wet feet. I was sure that I needed to jot down the latest ideas for the garden. (To date, I havent written a single thing about the garden... don't know that there are any readers out there that would give a rat's ass). 

Sitting in my shorts downstairs at 4am, staring at my computer screen with a profound case of writer's block was ironic considering the imperative nature of the impetus. But there I was. Dry as a bone. Empty as could be.

I've been contemplating the nature of writing without an audience. Not sure how I feel about the idea. In some ways, I have always written for someone. It started in school with classmates who I wanted to "feel" whatever it was that was racing through my head. If I couldn't bash their heads in with a guitar (I couldn't even play spoons!)... then I would use my words to flood their minds with tides of surreal imagery and emotions I was struggling to contain. It didnt endear me to my peers. It never occurred to me that it might not be very approachable. Hmm. 

Tonight I am writing with half-baked ideas, late enough that I should be in bed. I had been listening to a Newfoundland band called The Fables for the last hour. The last time I dug out these tunes was before the coma (pre-Sept2009). I had forgotten how rich and intimate these songs are! It feels like they are playing right here in the kitchen. I wish they were still making new music. I struggle with finding ways to play my "old" music (stuff on MP3 on the hard drive) as opposed to the convenience of listening to streaming music on Spotify. Spotify goes everywhere with me on my phone and connects to all my bluetooth devices. I wish there was a simple way to push music to an app on my phone from my server in the basement. Seems like it should be an easy thing... but I havent figured it out.

So, as the written equivalent of breadcrumbs, I leave these notes here in hopes that I will be able to come back, another time to flesh them out. I think some of the ideas about the studio might make for interesting articles for one of the ceramic magazines. Who knows? Maybe as I start getting those ideas out of my head and onto paper I will find myself better able to write about the garden. After reading other gardener's works, I am loathe to write "another" gardening book. I have ideas, dreams, about our garden... but it isnt like other gardens. We'll see if writing about it helps illustrate just how different it is.