A Time of Miracles

Miracle number one is my friend Sally. I first met her in a dancing circle many years ago and we re-connected last year on the Winter Solstice at the Earth Clock in Burlington. Since then she’s become an intrinsic part of my group of dancing friends here.

 

Just over two weeks ago, on a Thursday, Sally’s heart stopped. She suffered a

massive cardiac arrest and fell down dead. Miraculously, in the room with her at the exercise class were medically trained people: two doctors, a nurse and an EMT. They sprang into action and began CPR. Someone fetched the AED from the reception desk and within minutes they had Sally's heart beating again. Someone had called 911 and the ambulance whisked her away to the emergency room.

 

Not Sally, but you get the picture.

Days later I asked her what she remembered: “Nothing” she said: “One moment I was in the gym, the next I was lying on a bed and some man was asking me to open my eyes. But I didn’t want to open them.” When she did finally open them at the request of a friend, Sally found that she was in hospital. Tests followed. The cardiac arrest hadn’t been painful, but the ensuing treatment was. The electric shock from the AED left her torso bruised, and then the doctors made an incision and implanted a defibrillator just above her left breast. That, apart from anything else, made driving impossible – she couldn’t wear a seat belt for a long time!  Now, she's a little tired but seems none the worse for her brief foray into the afterlife. She’s even being courted by heart charities as a poster child.

 

Sally always glowed with life and health, but now every time I look at her I see the very special rainbow glow of a miracle, the glow of a person who has died and come back to life. “I may change my birthday,” she says: “After all, I was born again that day.”

 

Thinking about this miracle moves my consciousness into a special zone, an elevated zone of feeling: sounds seem clearer, colors brighter, trees more beautiful, the world more marvelous. And it was in that heightened condition that I discovered the labyrinth I wrote about last week, a place of joy at the top of Church Street, just waiting to be discovered.  The labyrinth  spawned a story which I told last Monday evening at the Open Mic story evening run by my friend Recille in the UU church, outside of which the labyrinth lies.

 

That storytelling may have been preparation for the next night, when miracle number two, my own more modest miracle, manifested itself

 

Want to know about it? Read my next post.