Where We Go

There's a moment we all have as we watch those around us get sick.  We wonder if we are next.  We imagine ourselves as above the weakness.  Then we feel a slight tickle in our throats and start to work fiction stories in our heads.  I just swallowed wrong.  I didn't get enough sleep last night.  It's just a hangover.  There are as many excuses as there are symptoms.  No matter how the story begins, it usually ends the same.  I was wrong and I am sick.

Until that moment we drive our bodies as if nothing were wrong.  Work goes on as usual and play is the same.  In our minds the momentum of action is proof that nothing is wrong.  In fact, if there were some small sickness trying to pull us down, the fact that we stay up is attributed to the strength of our will and fortitude, separating us from the weaker among us.  

 And the moment comes.  I'm sick!  I am not a brave hero and I am no stronger than a 4 year old child.  I am sick and I must shut down.  We spend so much time denying this state or trying our very best to prevent it that we rarely wonder what is this?  Where do we go when we are truly sick?  To be sure, we are not our brave selves anymore.  We sleep and barely eat.  We close out the world and turn inward into this fight that requires nothing but time and acceptance.  Strongly held beliefs in science are swept away and we begin to embrace the mystical side of life.  Simple herbs, salves and potions grow in strength.  A brothy soup raises to the power of a potion, long worried over by a medicine woman and imbued with the essences of the woodland creatures and spells foraged from caves.  Truly a concoction that would kill a healthy man, but in our spiritual state we motionlessly dance and contort and ready ourselves for this strong medicine.  It fills us with bright yellow light and resumes a battle that began thousands of years ago when evil was first vanquished from the human body.  

A father will see his child in this fight and think, she's fine, she just needs rest.  But a mother will remember.  Her memory stems from her womb and follows a line through her mother's and grandmother's back to a time when children often died from the flu.  To a mother, the current survival rate is only a snapshot.  The larger war has claimed as many as it has spared and this one sick child rests on the edge of a knife, as likely to fall either way.  To a mother, every action is to provide an advantage to the sick one.  Her remedies gain the power of her deep remembrance and even her worry provides a shield.  Her imagination will seek all worst possibilities so that she may not be caught off guard and her vigilance is a spotlight to prevent those possibilities from becoming bold.

The first night of my fever I lay in bed and fell asleep quite quickly but dreams prevented deep restfulness.  Instead I was cast in and out of waking, all the times with visions.  The strongest vision I experienced was of kneeling on a patch of floor.  I was to find the very center of my posture and imagine a tape-line-rectangle outlining me.  Once I found my center, I was to take actual pieces of tape and place them on the boundaries.  I was easily able to get the tape close to where it belonged but, in the manor of dreams, before I could place each strip, I had to remove focus on the tape and the location.  Only then would it adhere.  This went on for much of the night as I sweat out poisons and worked to unclutter my mind as to precisely create my boundaries.  The sensation of placing the tape correctly was as if swallowing while at once being swallowed.  It was accompanied by a bright yellow-white light and was deeply satisfying.  That whole night was a series of fits and dreams and I woke up knowing that real restful sleep would take the shape of naps throughout the day.

The second night found me in bed exhausted but unable to sleep for hours.  My mind turned and stretched and squinted to see bits of the world that were mostly invisible.  My body seemed stretched across galaxies where different parts were pulled by gravity and others were free floating in empty space.  I was stretched and pulled and repelled so far from my feet that I could no longer be certain of their existence.  My head swiveled and swung around the universe like the second-hand on a mad clock.  One moment I was staring down at the whole of things and the next I was nestled inside of a single cell, staring outward.  I became aware that there was a key to all of this and I needed only to find the right perspective in order to unlock something.  I moved all night placing myself at angles that would create symmetry or perspective.  I hid behind a mote of dandelion fluff to stare through it at a great oak tree.  Behind the oak tree was a galaxy.  They were all the same.  I moved backward and into an atom and all four were like brothers standing, holding hands.  But they did not acknowledge me and I knew that I had not found what I sought so I went further back and into what seemed like a fabric.  Through the holes in the fabric, the aligned pieces of my dreams found their own borders, each surrounded by a rectangular boundary, itself centered perfectly in the middle.  As I scanned the fabric I saw that each and every hole contained an image of the exact same perceived size.  I looked down and my feet had found me and I was kneeling in the center of my own rectangle on a piece of floor.  I pulled strips of tape and while emptying my mind, placed them around me to a deeply satisfying yellow-white light.  I once more pulled back and saw myself take my place inside the fabric alongside all other things that are or could be or have ever been.