Sue Vincent's Blog: Echoes of Life - Posts Tagged "hope"
Refuse to Lose
I have just witnessed a miracle. And no, that is not a melodramatic statement. Simply true. I just watched my son walk again. Unsupported. For the first time in three and a half years. Five steps.
Yes it has already made the papers. Of course he had been on the phone jubilant the first time, the other day. That alone had me in tears. But today I saw, with my own eyes, through tears I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried, as my son took five steps away from me.
This, we have always been told, is impossible. And when the impossible occurs I think we can safely call it a miracle. Especially when it brings with it such emotion. Such beauty. Such joy.
I don’t suppose it was wise driving home with tears streaming. They are probably not doing the keyboard much good either. The dog is already quite soggy.
For those who do not know his story, my son was stabbed through the brain in an unprovoked attack in 2009. The screwdriver was rammed through his skull, creating a depressed fracture with shards of bone lodged in the brain, causing extensive brain damage, dangerously elevated intracranial pressures and massive subarachnoid haemorrhage. He was in a coma with a GCS of 4 when he was found and, through brain surgery and other traumas, remained that way for a very long time. He had been expected to die.
He woke, weeks later, paralysed down the right side, unable to speak, coordinate any movement, swallow or see. The damage was so severe we were warned to expect little of his mind, language or personality to remain. Yet I had said from the start that he had always been so stubborn that if he survived and woke at all, Nick would be back. He has proved me right.
His motto was always ‘refuse to lose’. A year after the attack he adopted a variant of that and had it tattooed on his arm ‘Possum ergo facit’, I can, therefore I do.
It has not been an easy journey, nor is it over. There is a very long way to go before Nick could be said to be recovered. His sight, clarity of speech and coordination, balance and…well, I can no longer say inability to walk… We have employed everything from common sense to parcel tape and every shade of ingenuity and unorthodox approach that we can and he had worked relentlessly for his recovery.
His mind and his intellect are clear as a bell, though there are a few invisible issues, he handles them extraordinarily well. He has developed a wisdom far beyond his years in many things. He realised some time ago that he would not now change a thing as he has gone from a successful and ambitious young man to being a happy one who appreciates living.
After he had hugged me while I wept all over him, we stood in his garden talking today. He said that after all the biological and mathematical odds against any one of us being born, it was simply a matter of respect for life to do our best with it. He has a point. We spoke of the power of the imagination and how we create a reality in our minds that is mirrored in the world if we allow it to be and work for it. We spoke of the will and the determination to succeed, to hope and to believe in the impossible and to achieve it with all we are, against all odds and predictions. Against all logic. We spoke of having faith in the impossible being possible. His face lit with passion as he spoke of these things with great eloquence and I wished I could record it for you to hear, for it came from the heart.
Then my son spoke of his dreams, if he can now learn to walk. The places he wants to see and the things he wants to do. All the things he never thought he would be able to do since the attack. The things he could have done, perhaps, before but did not think to spare the time or the joy to do.
“You’ll get postcards from everywhere,” he said, “telling you about all the things I’ve done… not all of them sane.” The lunacy must be genetic, as my only response to that, through the mist of tears, was, “Good!”
He has refused to lose… and today I saw the most beautiful thing I have seen since the day I watched him take his first breath for the second time in his life. I saw my son walk.
Be glad with me.
Yes it has already made the papers. Of course he had been on the phone jubilant the first time, the other day. That alone had me in tears. But today I saw, with my own eyes, through tears I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried, as my son took five steps away from me.
This, we have always been told, is impossible. And when the impossible occurs I think we can safely call it a miracle. Especially when it brings with it such emotion. Such beauty. Such joy.
I don’t suppose it was wise driving home with tears streaming. They are probably not doing the keyboard much good either. The dog is already quite soggy.
For those who do not know his story, my son was stabbed through the brain in an unprovoked attack in 2009. The screwdriver was rammed through his skull, creating a depressed fracture with shards of bone lodged in the brain, causing extensive brain damage, dangerously elevated intracranial pressures and massive subarachnoid haemorrhage. He was in a coma with a GCS of 4 when he was found and, through brain surgery and other traumas, remained that way for a very long time. He had been expected to die.
He woke, weeks later, paralysed down the right side, unable to speak, coordinate any movement, swallow or see. The damage was so severe we were warned to expect little of his mind, language or personality to remain. Yet I had said from the start that he had always been so stubborn that if he survived and woke at all, Nick would be back. He has proved me right.
His motto was always ‘refuse to lose’. A year after the attack he adopted a variant of that and had it tattooed on his arm ‘Possum ergo facit’, I can, therefore I do.
It has not been an easy journey, nor is it over. There is a very long way to go before Nick could be said to be recovered. His sight, clarity of speech and coordination, balance and…well, I can no longer say inability to walk… We have employed everything from common sense to parcel tape and every shade of ingenuity and unorthodox approach that we can and he had worked relentlessly for his recovery.
His mind and his intellect are clear as a bell, though there are a few invisible issues, he handles them extraordinarily well. He has developed a wisdom far beyond his years in many things. He realised some time ago that he would not now change a thing as he has gone from a successful and ambitious young man to being a happy one who appreciates living.
After he had hugged me while I wept all over him, we stood in his garden talking today. He said that after all the biological and mathematical odds against any one of us being born, it was simply a matter of respect for life to do our best with it. He has a point. We spoke of the power of the imagination and how we create a reality in our minds that is mirrored in the world if we allow it to be and work for it. We spoke of the will and the determination to succeed, to hope and to believe in the impossible and to achieve it with all we are, against all odds and predictions. Against all logic. We spoke of having faith in the impossible being possible. His face lit with passion as he spoke of these things with great eloquence and I wished I could record it for you to hear, for it came from the heart.
Then my son spoke of his dreams, if he can now learn to walk. The places he wants to see and the things he wants to do. All the things he never thought he would be able to do since the attack. The things he could have done, perhaps, before but did not think to spare the time or the joy to do.
“You’ll get postcards from everywhere,” he said, “telling you about all the things I’ve done… not all of them sane.” The lunacy must be genetic, as my only response to that, through the mist of tears, was, “Good!”
He has refused to lose… and today I saw the most beautiful thing I have seen since the day I watched him take his first breath for the second time in his life. I saw my son walk.
Be glad with me.
A golden dawn
I couldn’t sleep. I’d gone to bed early and spent most of the night in that liminal state between dream and waking when the mind treads strange pathways, watching itself, while the body rests as if in slumber.
It is a strange state where the levels of consciousness seem to separate out and you see each of them clearly. Like liquid in a centrifuge, your immobility in the spinning of the world teases out the dense from the subtle, showing the clear definition between the layers of being, where in the agitated movement of everyday life we are accustomed to see them mingled, as if shaken together and cannot see what they truly are.
As you lie there you are aware of the components of who you are… the body… heavy, dense, the stuff of earth… the emotions and the mind… other layers less observable as a rule… and you see how they mingle, inter-dependant, the ingredients of the being you call you.
For that brief time it is a bit like the wonder of watching a rainbow as a child. Seeing all the colours of light refracted and separated in the unreal prism. Light is all around us, always, yet though it illuminates the world we do not see light itself until it interacts and plays upon the physical world, as in a rainbow, captured in water droplets, refracting and reflecting the sun.
When you see a rainbow, it isn’t really there… it is not an object, cannot be touched or approached.. which is why that pot of gold is so elusive. We see them only when the sun is behind us and conditions are precisely right. Sometimes the light reflects twice within the moisture and there is a double arc, the colours reversed in the inner and outer bows. To a child… or a dreamer… there is magic here.
Although the rainbow allows us to see sunlight manifest in beauty, have you ever thought that you cannot look at both the rainbow and the sun at the same time? You may see prisms in the clouds or camera lens… tiny glimpses of colour… yet to see the full beauty of a rainbow the sun must be behind you, and if you look towards the sun, the rainbow is no longer in your line of sight… it is no longer perceivable. To see the rainbow you turn your back towards the sun, to see the source you turn your gaze from the rainbow.
Yet if you stand between them and close your eyes, you know that both are there, even if unseen.
As I observed the separating layers of self in the night I thought about that… and realised that there was, in the spectrum of being I was observing, a rainbow of self, ranging from the density of matter to the most ethereal levels of mind. They too are reflecting and refracting a Source unseen, that stands behind our life, out of our line of sight.
Call it what you will, in the still, small hours it was clear. And something else too. The observer was none of the parts of me that I think of as ‘me’ in daily life… it was other than that… poised between the Source and the rainbow, knowing both and partaking of the nature of each, poised at the mid-point of creation.
As dawn rose on a frosty autumn morning I was out with Ani and saw the sky on fire, pondering the night. In that flare of golden glory I saw the source of light reflected in the windows and rooftops of the sleeping village, gilding the clouds and setting the skeletal trees ablaze. I could not see the sun itself, obscured by the structures in which we live our lives, but its colours changed the world into a magical place as I watched.
For those moments I was aware that the world was held in the reflected light of the sun, a sun still in the heavens even for the dark side of the planet, simply obscured by our own shadow as we the earth turns its back in sleep.
And there are no words for the feeling that followed, knowing that we too are rainbows of being, gilded refractions of the One, and though we may not see both Source and manifestation in the same glance, though It may be obscured by the busyness of our lives, we sometimes catch a glimpse, a prism in the clouds, and we can close our eyes and know that both are there.
It is a strange state where the levels of consciousness seem to separate out and you see each of them clearly. Like liquid in a centrifuge, your immobility in the spinning of the world teases out the dense from the subtle, showing the clear definition between the layers of being, where in the agitated movement of everyday life we are accustomed to see them mingled, as if shaken together and cannot see what they truly are.
As you lie there you are aware of the components of who you are… the body… heavy, dense, the stuff of earth… the emotions and the mind… other layers less observable as a rule… and you see how they mingle, inter-dependant, the ingredients of the being you call you.
For that brief time it is a bit like the wonder of watching a rainbow as a child. Seeing all the colours of light refracted and separated in the unreal prism. Light is all around us, always, yet though it illuminates the world we do not see light itself until it interacts and plays upon the physical world, as in a rainbow, captured in water droplets, refracting and reflecting the sun.
When you see a rainbow, it isn’t really there… it is not an object, cannot be touched or approached.. which is why that pot of gold is so elusive. We see them only when the sun is behind us and conditions are precisely right. Sometimes the light reflects twice within the moisture and there is a double arc, the colours reversed in the inner and outer bows. To a child… or a dreamer… there is magic here.
Although the rainbow allows us to see sunlight manifest in beauty, have you ever thought that you cannot look at both the rainbow and the sun at the same time? You may see prisms in the clouds or camera lens… tiny glimpses of colour… yet to see the full beauty of a rainbow the sun must be behind you, and if you look towards the sun, the rainbow is no longer in your line of sight… it is no longer perceivable. To see the rainbow you turn your back towards the sun, to see the source you turn your gaze from the rainbow.
Yet if you stand between them and close your eyes, you know that both are there, even if unseen.
As I observed the separating layers of self in the night I thought about that… and realised that there was, in the spectrum of being I was observing, a rainbow of self, ranging from the density of matter to the most ethereal levels of mind. They too are reflecting and refracting a Source unseen, that stands behind our life, out of our line of sight.
Call it what you will, in the still, small hours it was clear. And something else too. The observer was none of the parts of me that I think of as ‘me’ in daily life… it was other than that… poised between the Source and the rainbow, knowing both and partaking of the nature of each, poised at the mid-point of creation.
As dawn rose on a frosty autumn morning I was out with Ani and saw the sky on fire, pondering the night. In that flare of golden glory I saw the source of light reflected in the windows and rooftops of the sleeping village, gilding the clouds and setting the skeletal trees ablaze. I could not see the sun itself, obscured by the structures in which we live our lives, but its colours changed the world into a magical place as I watched.
For those moments I was aware that the world was held in the reflected light of the sun, a sun still in the heavens even for the dark side of the planet, simply obscured by our own shadow as we the earth turns its back in sleep.
And there are no words for the feeling that followed, knowing that we too are rainbows of being, gilded refractions of the One, and though we may not see both Source and manifestation in the same glance, though It may be obscured by the busyness of our lives, we sometimes catch a glimpse, a prism in the clouds, and we can close our eyes and know that both are there.
