On Wednesday, I saw three Eagles. According to World Birds the metaphysical meaning of spotting eagles (especially three in the same tree!) symbolizes, "new beginnings, resilience, and stamina for those who have been experiencing difficult passages in life" (Jan. 11, 2021). Amen to that!
My favorite part of bicycling into Friday Harbor these days is the opportunity to hear, and see, the diverse bird populations that grace us in the islands. Wednesday's weather featured a mostly cloudy sky, which provided some moderate protection from overexposure to the sun for us fairer-complexioned folks. My veggie and fruit stash was getting low and it was time to replenish my provisions! I left the cottage where I'm staying, near Roche Harbor, a little before 4pm and arrived back at just past 7:30 pm. It requires about an hour of pedaling each way. My bike paniers are still in my off island storage unit, so here is what my load looked like:
It isn't easy to see from the photo above, but another canvas bag filled with groceries hung on the far side of my bike rack, too. I wore a back pack as well, in which I had tucked the more lighter weight or fragile groceries.
For these ongoing, memoir-type writings, my plan is to focus my entries on what I have been learning about healing as it applies to my particular recovery. This is going to include the spiritual connections that are unfolding, as well as the physical and emotional bits. Perhaps I may find myself touching into a kind of mystical mastery?
I hesitate to write much more on the actual crash event. Speaking or writing about it, outside of a therapeutic setting, feels somewhat threatening to my current homeostasis. Because there is an active civil suit, it seems prudent to let direct crash details and issues remain the purview of my attorneys, my medical team, and my ongoing PTSD therapeutic process. That being said, I want to touch on my near-death experiences (NDE) with this post. The NDE aspect of the crash event is something I find myself integrating on a daily basis, at least as much --- if not more than (some days) the physical changes that the more serious injuries have caused.
When my Honda hit the rear wheels of the dump truck, the sound I recall most vividly is that of rubber grinding on metal. Lasting several seconds, it was quite distinctive before an overwhelming roar of sounds filled the interior of my car. My transition from within the rolling car was overwhelmingly auditory, compounded with the sensations of spinning out of control. As if I was traveling faster than the speed of light along a corkscrew path --- that unforgettable trajectory may be the only likeness to the experience of being in a tunnel, which many other NDErs often talk about.
I need to acknowledge that time, as I had known it, became quite distorted as I moved into a different dimension. It seemed, in fact, nonexistent. I've read through other people's experiences looking for some commonalities and have discovered that the awareness of timelessness, like gravity, depends on the dimensional plane one is in. That fits.
Simultaneous to having the air knocked from my lungs, I had a sensation of the car lifting. Or was it just of my spirit? Right now, I have no image or memory of what that looked like. Except for one instant of getting a glimpse of the crash from on high, and hearing a voice from quite near me, which said (in my head), “You don’t need to look at that,” which was all it took for me to refocus my attention on my mystical suspension.
I was standing, uninjured, as a light-body. My consciousness was so high above the crash site that no sounds of the rescue vehicles, or the people involved, ever reached me. A feeling-sound of whooshing lingers even now --- I can’t say if that was only sound, or only feeling. They are bonded as if dependent upon each other. I was completely knocked out of my body. And I knew it from being outside of it.
Even now, words and thoughts are failing to extract the sounds I experienced as separate from the sensations I can still feel in memory. Maybe it’s a Koan riddle, like the tree falling in the forest: If there is no one to hear it fall does it make a sound? If I had not survived the crash, there would no one to relate the sequence of events to because they were only important in the moment and how I experienced it.
If my life on earth had ended because of the crash, my friends and family would have been left to imagine their own worst versions of disturbing possibilities. I have my own real life example of this in relation to my father's passing.
On Friday, May 13th, of 2016, I was sitting on the lawn of the Orcas Island Public Library. While my head was bent over some research I was synthesizing for my university coursework, Budd (as my father was called by anyone on the planet who knew him), had fallen out of the seat of his antique tractor, while pulling the plow disc implement across the grassy pasture of his rural Iowa farm.
Budd was mowing near the edge of the ditch between his pasture and the gravel road, when the softer ground caused the tractor to dip unexpectedly. My father, in his barrel-chested 6' 4" frame, toppled out of the seat onto his back, no doubt becoming winded and dazed because he was 78 years of age. The well-maintained but old-time tractor meant there was no safety feature to cut off the engine automatically if the seat lost its occupant, so the tractor kept moving forward. Without him in the saddle.
When the disc-blades were pulled across my father's body, he had been unable to scramble out of the way. Budd lived another 45 minutes or so, due in part to the fact that his head and upper body were angled into the ditch, below the area where his body had been severed. On the plane of synchronicity (as Carl Jung would probably define it), Bud's wife, Sandy, who was in the farmhouse unaware of anything amiss, received a phone call from her mechanic at about the time the fall had occurred. The mechanic told her that if she hurried, she could come and pick up her car right away. Feeling a sense of urgency, Sandy left her cozy kitchen to locate Budd on the northern stretch of their 20 acres.
Sandy, a 4' 11" former truck driver from Portland, OR, and the mother of my three youngest siblings, immediately noticed that the tractor had no driver and was slowly progressing on its own, just shy of the ditch boundary. Somewhat bewildered and rather close to 70 years of age herself, Sandy half jogged toward the tractor. When she was able to get close enough, she navigated a quick hand-hold and climbed on. Sandy turned off the engine.
When all was quiet she then gathered the fortitude to look behind the bloodied disc implement and follow the trail it had left --- to where her husband, my father, had tumbled. Budd was on his back, making no sounds and not moving. Scrambling off the equipment, Sandy made it to Budd's side, calling my brother Ty on her cell --- and Ty then calling the paramedics. Less than 30 minutes passed before Ty and the emergency personnel arrived.
Amazingly, Budd was still alive but barely so. He could not talk but he had looked Sandy in the eyes and squeezed her hand at least once. However long it took to load my father and his limbs safely in the emergency vehicle, I know he was softly reminded of how he much was loved. Budd was declared dead en route to the hospital in Clarinda, where, 56 and-a-half years before, I had been born. My sister, Marcie, born 2 and -a-half years after me, just happened to be coming out of the hospital emergency room when the ambulance, carrying our father's body, was pulling in. An hour or so before this, Marcie had taken a nasty fall at her workplace. Her evaluation was over but an unexpected grief would meet her on the way out.
I was notified within the hour of Budd's passing, by our brother Stacy, who lives in Texas. When Stacy phoned I knew something was up because I had suddenly been feeling nauseas and unable to concentrate. I had actually been laying on my back in the grass, with my research papers fluttering in the breeze under the weight of my backpack. My eyes were closed and I was focusing on my breath. That is what I was doing when Stacy's call came though.
When I had been sitting up earlier, engrossed in reading, I began to feel as though the earth was spinning a little too fast. My memories of my mother's passing, also at a distance, were less than 3 years old, so I thought about her briefly and even said a prayer to understand what was coming up mentally or emotionally. I had encountered the same loss of equilibrium around the time of my mother's transition, and I soon discovered the connection to my father's passing. What had lasted about 2 hours or so with my mother's passing would be of a similar intensity and time lapse as my father's, too.
The only reason I believe I could make these connections is because I have kept journals consistently since I was twenty-nine years old. Otherwise, I feel that the physical and emotional evidences would have been long lost if I had not recorded them when they occurred. In addition, trauma itself has a way of making its own kind of memory. The bottom line then, for me, is that my capacity for awareness was enhanced by my spiritual receptivity, which had been adding up since just before the passing of my beloved great grandmother, whom I was closer to than my own mother --- but she had prepared me for her passing as well as gifting me with other spiritual insights.
Edna Olive Watts Caylor (1891 - 1965), known affectionately as our "Gomo," passed on the 75th anniversary of her own mother's death. I was less than a month shy of my 6th birthday. But my father had adored her after he had met and married my mother. Gomo came to teach me in dreams all throughout my life and as recently as July of 2020. I will share more about this relationship in a future post.
Part of my recovery energy has been spent learning the foundations of how to perform genealogical research. When I took up the task of creating a family tree as a legacy for my kids, I discovered that my beloved Gomo, had actually lost her own mother, Olive E. Mallow, just a month after she was born. Edna (Gomo) was then raised by her maternal grandparents.
When my brother Stacy broached the graphic details of our father's tractor incident, I became very restless and ungrounded. this lasted for several days. I prayed repeatedly to let go of my inner turmoil and made preparations to travel to Iowa, for Budd's celebration of life. My nightmares were rather unrelenting, though. I knew I would be seeing siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles soon, so I managed to talk our oldest sibling into making the trip from California. He had not yet met all of our relatives from our paternal side of the family. We met up at the Kansas City airport and shared a rental car from there to Clarinda, Iowa.
One of Budd's deepest longings had been to see all eight of his children in the same room at the same time. His celebration of life, with all the prefuneral gatherings and the impromptu pot lucks over several days time would be that dream fulfilled, I hope. For me, getting to see Sandy and Ty, to hear them speak of Budd's last moments, helped me put to rest the horror show my empathic imagination had been giving me for days. Human nature being what it is, I am deeply grateful that my children were spared something similar in regards to me.
My kids and my perceptions of eternity are not yet written in the same script, if you catch my drift. If I had passed from the earth because of the crash, I would have tried to reach out to them across the ethers into their dreamscapes, as my great grandmother had done with me. I would have wanted to confirm that I was free and unencumbered by what had happened. For their sakes, it didn't seem the right time to leave them behind. But something more is held in this story, as well.
I am aware of an inevitable choice-point in the NDE. A letting go opportunity of everything that was already lived. Simultaneously to this was the grace or invitation to be present to the as yet unlived opportunities of the future. This is where, in my NDE, I most definitely experienced the permeability and malleability of time, dimension, and circumstance.
Please be patient as I attempt to clarify things --- if that is even possible? From what I've read of other NDE accounts, this is unanimously agreed to be an impossible experience to describe. My first heavenly impression was of being surrounded by a low tone or harmonic vibration. So vivid and real was the whole episode that it supersedes what I would normally call human "reality" in realness. Like a dream that seems more alive than the moment of waking. To merge back into the mundane routine of how we normally perceive life is an encounter with a dumbed down but organic algorithm.
My essence or true self, which had a shape of its own, was enclosed in a protective field that held me in an active stillness. I moved instantly into a clear cocoon that was shaped like a Torus donut. When I looked this up later, I learned that the Torus shape is considered to be a highly-charged revolving geometric shape in science and a phenomenally potent one in metaphysics. This feels accurate to my impression of being within it. Perhaps a comparison to being in the eye of a hurricane might help with understanding the electrical charge and sounds I encountered. I knew a whole lot of motion was going on around me but I was floating within an inner calm, sustained by the way a Torus moves through space. Contrary to what might be imagined, although I had no ground beneath my feet, I felt securely held in place by no obvious means of support. There was no gravitational orientation.
Perceiving myself within an infinite consciousness, I felt warm and unharmed. Absolutely no sensation of pain was evident! But I knew my body was still in the car and was in harm’s way. I had no anxiety about it though. I was not only surrounded by an overarching love, I was somehow intrinsic to it. As a divine aspect of consciousness, I felt linked to God in a way that seemed familiar and solid, even though I was a temporarily inert presence. My mind was responding to a fast-forward like activity, as if a high-speed download was taking place of mostly future events. At least, that is how I remember participating in it. Again, the visual elements were minimal because the inner auditory was activated the most.
As the above elements were unfolding, I heard two phrases clearly: it is accomplished, and, it is complete. The images that filled my mind were of past experiences disintegrating. Abusive memories were flung away even as certain lessons were retained. Confusions were dismantled because there was no confusion! Hatreds held within humanity were being recalibrated towards remorse --- and I could see this energetically. And then they were recalibrated again, towards forgiveness.
Through these mystical encounters, I witnessed the collective distress being transformed. One very clear message was that a global event was going to force people to confront their fears --- but I didn't understand what the event was specifically. It just appeared total and complete, like a sphere that holds all reflections and motivations within it. It was of a universal nature rather than of a personal ego or individual identity. Yet both were true and present simultaneously.
If I could describe the audio-visual and cellular knowing of the situations I observed, you might also comprehend, as I did, that all will be well. The details do matter to our individual natures, but our collective connections operate quite holistically.
A thought that came repeatedly to me was: I am held in love. It was the thread of a mantra that burbled like the heartbeat of a fetus in the womb of its mother. There was no tunnel of light or other figures that I recall seeing specifically, like relatives that had passed over. And yet, I instinctually knew that they were present and aware and helping me energetically. I became acutely open to life itself, as an abundant, creative energy, filling the spacious expanse beyond my capacity to see specific liminal shapes. I was therefore dutifully filled with an awe that has not diminished now that I am back in time.
I became aware of breathing through an outer membrane, if you will --- or being breathed through --- rather than possessing actual lungs. I was momentarily an expression of light and color rather than of flesh. I saw my children’s faces in sequential snapshots, as if to emotionally punctuate my willingness to return to the earth plane. Within the vibrational space I occupied, something greater than myself was there. There was a glimmer of a voice, more as a series of thought transfers. No sense of gender was even relevant.
What had felt to be several intensive seconds in duration, had, in fact, been well over an hour in linear earth time. Weird but rather beautiful how time can be compressed or expanded or disappear altogether! Despite the limited focus of my awareness, eons of existence, past and future, had been revealed to me. This is the part that is essentially inexpressible. I am sorry to disappoint but I, myself, am not disappointed. Each person probably has some form of memory about the pre-birth planning and post-death transition. Such experiences convince me of the necessity to hold them sacred and avoid projecting them as revelations that would necessarily apply to others in the same way.
A second NDE occurred after I arrived at the hospital. I recall being wheeled from the emergency room toward the surgical suite, where they were going to obtain MRI and CAT scans. As I was moved very quickly in the gurney down hallways toward surgery, the ceiling lights passed rapidly overhead, making me feel dizzy. I closed my eyes and in that instant, I was out-of-body again. Just like that!
As I write this, I remember how glad I felt to be out-of-body. That second time I was more like an eight-year-old girl, out for a secret flight. I was aware that I was still a 59-year-old woman trying to reorient to life on earth, in a surgical room, but my spirit was much more playful and childlike.
My flight plan kept me close to the buildings and city blocks surrounding the hospital in downtown Green Bay, Wisconsin. A different sort of Being, familiar to me (but not a relative) hovered near by. It was wearing a hooded garment, similar to the cloaking shroud demonstrated in the Harry Potter films. I was gliding very quickly in the immediate atmosphere. I peeked in store windows and saw through rooftops with ease. Again, time was nonexistent. No pain or urgency was felt.
Momentarily free and lighthearted, I was eventually escorted back to my body. I reentered the hospital through a closed window and saw a woman hovering over my scalp with a magnifying apparatus between her face and my head. I recall thinking I could zip around the room but I was suddenly back in my body, coming out of the anesthesia in the ICU. The doctors were laughing at something I said but I cannot recall what that was. I felt like I had been laughing, too.
One physician took the lead in listing off all my injuries. Aaarrgh! I was way more interested in the encounter I just had traveling out of body. I was aware of the medical concerns over all the broken bits of my body, but not worried about any of it. The next 48 hours are a light sketch of blurry, undifferentiated pain and a few lucid moments. People were coming and going but I didn't make much effort to open my eyes. Being measured for a rigid brace, stands out as a strange, morphine enhanced affair.
A repeating whirlwind of hallucinations, in which I relived the spinning vortex of being catapulted, through the rollovers, to the alternative heaven-scape reality was rather unpleasant and uncontrollable at first. I assume that the morphine in my IV was part of the reason this was happening.
As a writer by nature, I wish I had been able to write or audibly record my first days of post-crash impressions. Most of my time was spent straddling the two worlds: out-of-body and in-body. I didn’t have hunger or bodily needs that I could even take care of. That was all being done intravenously or otherwise. Through each day of my hospitalization and beyond, an otherworldly sense of vibrational energy remained in my auric field. I never read or watched a film or listed to any music during my hospitalization (I almost wrote, my incarceration!)
One of my friends, upon hearing of these experiences a year after the crash, mentioned I had been given an angelic triage, in her opinion. I cannot deny that I sensed a lot was being done outside of normal human awareness. Through the early phases of urgent healing, my physicians and nurses were amazed at my progress. They, as well as friends and family, were wondering how I had even survived such a horrendously dangerous event.
I didn't wonder about how or why I had survived. I knew it was a choice to come back. I’ll write about this part of my encounter another time. Even though I have very little conscious memory of the sequence of body blows and impacts within my car as it rolled over, I cannot see crash scenes in films without falling apart. This is especially weird because it always catches me by surprise and seems illogical. Whatever protective measures were enlisted by my divine consciousness, my body is still letting me know it isn't over yet.
Many synchronistic events took place, ranging from the housing that friends provided to the minute confirmations that my life mattered more than I had realized before. How I perceive mortality and time has shifted dramatically. I wasn’t able to write about my NDEs until 7 months had passed. It took that long before I could focus my eyes properly to look at paper and pen or be able endure a computer screen for any length of time.
I obtained the book shortly thereafter, and I couldn’t put it down once I started reading it. Another important NDE resource I now have is: Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (2011), by Pim van Lommel, M.D.
As a cardiologist, van Lommel performed a systematic study of NDEs because the most common reports of experiencers are cardio patients, followed by children. I read parts of each book concurrently and became convinced of the value of my experiences. However, while I will never forget my encounters I found them hard to describe. Until I had a friend ask me to simply write out, to her, what I experienced, factually. Telling a friend whom I trusted, who was sincerely interested, helped me access some elements of that phenomenon.
After my first summary draft went out via email, and while I was nearing the conclusion of van Lommel’s book, I noted a reference to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, a 17th century scientist turned mystic, who himself had elicited conscious experiences of what some call the afterlife. I really don't like the terms other side or afterlife because my encounter was inclusive of all life, with past, present, and future all pervasive, simultaneous, and holistic.
I obtained a couple of volumes of Swedenborg's writings. By that time, it was February, 11, 2020. While sitting in a little cafe I was doing bookkeeping for in Algoma, Wisconsin, taking my lunch period to read and journal a little, I opened up my new copy of Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell. Something in Swedenborg's mystical writings sparked me, though I was barely passed the introduction of that particular book. The impulse to capture my NDE experience, in a form of synthesis, took over.
I have provided the synthesis below.
The Far Side is Nearer than We Know
Beloved,
A
moment in Your Presence,
a
vibrant love, an unveiled life
now
gather in my essence.
Suddenly,
I knew myself
as
You knew me – eternally,
past,
future, and present. In all
matters,
We All Matter.
No
intruder I, but welcomed
there,
held in the air
as
space within space. So safe!
No
guilt, remorse, nor anxiety;
pain-free, yet free to return
by
the Will of my Soul’s heart.
Which
I found loves what is good,
and
a fresh start, for its own sake.
I
can be no fake.
Opalescent
colors blew right though me
as
light. Intelligence breathed me in, too.
I
was tangible energy, reflecting
back
to You, then to me, then to Whomever
You may be. There was no time for doubt!
Even
Wisdom revealed Herself
as
sound; as numbers; as subtle vibrations
felt
more than heard. Oh yes,
my
essential atoms danced
a
choreography called redemption,
where
all forgiveness prevails.
Freely,
I was set to sail. Again.
Conceived
in Divine Intuition, I am
as
familiar as faith, empathy, generosity,
simplicity:
a single drop in Your Ocean
of
humanity --- a tiny beloved
to
Your Infinite Being. This gift
humbled
me in a particular memory:
of
wholeness; with only four tasks ahead ---
Re-member who and what I am.
Be
willing to Be: if only for the good
and
the grace of it. Adore life
in
all its forms. And laugh,
at myself. Often.
© February 11, 2020 Morgan L. Meadows, M. Ed.
Integrating the OBE / NDE of June 3, 2019
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