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Into The Woods (Part 31) . . . The Final Chapter

Vincent Van Gogh

A Wind-Beaten Tree 1883

 

 

 

 

Bulky stars pierce the blackened sky

like beacons from a distant land.

My soul: swollen, bruised and aching.

Nothing goes as planned.

 

Before the night settled in,

Before the fog fell heavy here,

I felt the woods around me

Coated with familiar fear.

 

Lost

Impoverished

 

Trailing through night by night

How could I fail to recognize?

The stiff woods outside of me . . .

All smothered with soupy lies.

 

All the trees, the dark, the paths,

The mystery, the monsters three,

My twisted limbs, my broken bits

Are really the woods inside me.

 

Wayward

Consumed

 

The nearness of this knowledge

Bears stubby thorns of escape . . .

The outside woods inside me!

Tangible truth is a stabbing drape.

 

I slanted inside, slipping into the woods,

But God pursued each step and tumble.

His presence graced my wooded self,

Waving me toward the door marked humble.

 

Escape

Merge

 

This concludes the "Into The Woods" series. If you missed the beginning of this series, click on "Into The Woods" to catch up.

If you've enjoyed the "Into The Woods" series, be sure to check out "In The Room" and "Trudging Through the Tunnel".

Into The Woods (Part 30)

w i s h                      under-----stand                                                                                                       you could

 recognize    ---yllaer wonk<>really know-- -

               ,,,,,eisla,eislb,ci'#5Q2mm.....   

            truly   

               ........discern******ll;/,mnnbvcxr09.++++

                                     how             4$#cf-ThE                  bro--ken //-//---//bits...............               

    of/what/is/left

                         a      r      e
M
  I
    X        99ijn37,,,,,and how the M-//ASSI[VE cnofusion persistspersistspersists....kbgfdrj,90(((
      /e
        D   down and up                                   (never okay)
and          how                                                                 the HUGE   tURbUlEnCe    side/in/in/side

= fear/never okay/borken
           OOVVEERRWWHHEELLMMSS         and is Diffi---c--u--l---t     2     ttoolleerraattee..............
       
c   u    h     d                   ............        f           a        g                        n              e  D
   r   s     e 
                                                              r                            m   e               t      
wish               underst----and               you could         
how smothereddefeated it is to be.........,,,,,,LOSt in the woods..................

just like a page of text with messed-up, backwards sentences, misspelled words, and jibberish.......

Into The Woods (Part 29)

Sitting in the dirt, leaning against the massive tree limb that just ambushed today’s journey, I read the slip of paper once more  -- for I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ -- then let it drop from my hand. I stare at it on the ground and remember when he gave it to me; I hadn’t believed him that it would help. I wonder if he believed in me when he gave it to me or if he was simply doing what he was supposed to do.

I mumble into the distance, “God, if you’re there . . . I need a way to believe.”

Pushing myself to my feet, I brush the woods from my scrapped elbows and knees then retie my tennis shoes. My backpack in place and my gaze set ahead, I begin . . . again. After several steps, I go back to the tree limb, pick up the paper and shove it in my pocket.

The woods are puffy and tawny with daylight, the kind that’s too bright to see well in the dark areas and too dim to do much good anywhere else. It seems I’ve been lost such a long, long time but that I’ve been here such a short time. This portion of the woods is stiff and constraining, each step a grinding shade of gray shooting up my legs. I can’t do this. I take another step and my foot twists deep into the sodden decomposition of the forest. This is what I can’t do. I pull myself forward, past a throne bush, ducking under low hanging branches. I can’t do this anymore.

This. Everyone has their own this. That grisly thing that’s turning them, twisting and ringing them toward an escape. Paul’s this was a prison term; someone else’s this might be a wandering through the woods. But I wonder, if this is this hard now, what will I feel like at fifty years old? Or twenty pounds overweight? Or facing a terminal illness? All while waiting for this to turn on its heel and . . . what does that paper say again?

 I reach in my pocket and pull out the slip of paper, reading it again – I appreciate your willingness to continue the journey despite the struggle, to me this is a good indicator that you can continue to make progress -- I shove my hand back into my pocket. There’s nothing else there. His handwriting is the same but the message is different. I look behind. He isn’t there. I look above and around. He’s nowhere. I read it again . . . he believes I can do this.

Into The Woods (Part 28)

This morning the moon sits right outside the morning, watching everything, reluctant to move on, to give up the day to the sun. Those first, tender moments of dawn are so telling. When the celestial crescent retreats, bowing to the blaze of a fresh day, I know the moments ahead will hold feeble, halting steps for me. But, when that beautiful orb fills the morning with itself, refusing to turn away from the splendor of the day, I know I have an equal chance of facing a day filled with calloused courage.

And this morning the moon was being more than stubborn. As the sun rose, pushing it aside, it was hanging on by a thread.

“What’s the thread?” I had asked him many, many months ago.

He looked at me with a quizzical eye.

“The thread in my dream.” I explained. “I was dangling by a thin thread over a deep, black abyss. What’s the thread?”

“The thread is a thread of hope.”

He answered as if he hadn’t had to think about it at all.

Of course he would say that. Had I really expected him to say anything different?

I stand, throwing my backpack on my shoulder and join hands with the fading moon, deciding I will follow in his defiant steps this day.

Within hours my gutsy, heavenly inspiration is gone and the burning of the day mires my steps and my will. The woods are itchy and swollen with one hindrance after another.

Once again I feel discouragement settle inside of me like cement.

I see a small hedge of trees in the distance, some shade, a place to rest. As I step over a fallen tree limb, my shoe lace catches and I dive toward the ground, face first. My shoelace is tangled on the limb; both legs are sliced and bloody.

Hot, angry tears move through my body and out my eyes.

“I hate these stupid woods.”

I untangle my shoelace and kick at the fallen tree limb until my energy is spent, then reach in my pocket for a tissue. My fingers find a piece of paper instead. The paper he gave me over a year ago.

"For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ."

“My this.” I whisper. I had forgotten . . . forgotten why I had come into the woods in the first place – to find my 'this.'

Maybe it isn’t too late.

Into The Woods (Part 27)

I used to stand in doorways and wonder where I was going. There are no doorways here.

These woods have lumber, wilds, and the middle of nowhere. But no doorways.

At first he is very still, immobile, looking past me. Seeing repudiation on his florid, placid face, watching him turn away, listening to his silence, leaves me alone, without a doorway. My soul unoccupied, left cold, me in the woods.

I remember living in a place as a kid with thin and worn carpet. It was a vacant, brown house incapable of feeling like a home because there were creatures – in the basement, in my bedroom, everywhere. Varmint that I couldn’t see. Deep inside the walls. I could hear them scratching. Behind doors the gnawing echoed. Inside cabinets the scurrying screeched, turning me to stone more than once.

I walked on top of the furniture, jumping from chair to couch. In the kitchen, I remained frozen at the breakfast table. The rowdy critters crowded my senses with the need to run through doorways, darting from room to room, ensuring that I end up on top of a bed, a chair, a table, as if the floor were on fire.

The noise of these things left me with the feeling that worse things were coming. Something worse than the sound they could make.

 As running through doorways turned to lingering, fear began to stir and stagnate.

I stop in the cancer doorway, waiting for the word remission. Whatever that means. It doesn’t mean gone.

Impaled with dread, I hesitate in the misery doorway, waiting for respite. That could mean a place where my real laugh is different from this one.

I tarry in the faith doorway, waiting for mercy. If that means help and care, I’m not sure where it will come from.

The angle of the sun makes the woods look shallower this morning.

I push my moleskin into my backpack. It’s time to go.

My steps drag through the woods; the onward motion leaving me fixed in doorways.

Into The Woods (Part 26)

And, the story goes . . . I awake before the dawn, waiting for the creases of sun to fold up the blackness. I feel the crawling of my skin and the squirming of my heart. Another day in the woods. Life here is like a permanent state of repairing, like a nail being driven or like me being nailed.

Roaming these last few days until the sky overlaps my path with dark, I am left with my legs cut, my arms itchy and my ears buzzing with the noise of the woods. The land around me is chipper with life. As the wind tosses around bird trills and swells with activity, it whips a deep reminder toward me that I am here.

How can a place full of life be so empty? Where does emptiness come from? I suppose God spoke it into existence when He was throwing out words to create the heavens and the earth. Did He know that people would use emptiness to ride the ebb and flow of loneliness or to grasp the true meaning of devastation?

My stomach is empty. My heart is empty. My soul is empty.

These are the ideas I’ve had to get used to.

As I linger in the furrows of early morn, I wonder if I will venture forth today as I have been doing, day after day, into the vacant woods. No matter, for a moment, I am happy to be drifting in and out of this place.

“What would it take for you to believe?”

My moment is cut off by his voice. I sit up, only able to make out a shadow in the murky, early, woodsy morning.

“You know, I wonder sometimes what it would take for you to believe me.” He says again.

I watch the figure, and of course I know that something happened between us after I gave him my story. The story didn’t depress him and in life there are few stories where something happens that doesn’t depress the reader. And it was as if his reading my story proved that I am real, that I exist, just as much as emptiness exists and is real.

So I watch him, but remain unsure.

He walks toward me to where I sit on the ground. The sun is beginning to empty its smocked rays onto his face.

“Maybe . . .” I begin and my words halt his steps while he is still a way off. “If you could help me get out of these woods.”

He says nothing. I’ve asked too much.

“Or maybe if you could just give me a hug once in a while and tell me I’m going to be okay.”

“You think that would change things?”

I hang my head, unable to answer because I know the answer . . . of course, for a while, never . . . because that’s how the story goes.

Into The Woods (Part 25)

The distinctive smashing of his steps coming to a halt behind me gives an unexpected jump to my pencil. He shuffles a few more steps through the soppy mud—then a pause. It’s a hefty moment, the kind of silence that settles in your joints and freezes them solid. His voice is gravely this time. “It’s all about imagination, skill and passion.”

I don’t move.

“I read your story.” He says.

Now I know why he’s back. I place the pencil into the crease of my black moleskin, leaving my legs crossed under me but tossing my gaze far into the woods.

“It’s not meant to be literal.” I say.

“No need for apologizes.”

“I wasn’t apologizing.” I turn to see him interested in my response, listening, almost waiting. His hands hold my story as if the pages were aged and frail. I wish he wasn’t here but cannot deny that I am equally overwhelmed with relief. The story was written to subvert the loneliness, to quell the sadness of being in the woods. I didn’t realize until this moment that it hadn’t worked. Regardless, I couldn’t have not written that story and I feel he’s looking at me now as if he had known this all along.

He stares at my story, still in his hands. He looks up and I imagine I see a flint of happiness cross his face.

“You unfold, as a writer, that which has not yet been said, translating into the absolute terms of story—something other than reality.”

He leans forward, stretching the story toward me.

I shake my head. “Keep it.”

“Are you going to write another?” He smiles the question at me.

I’ve never seen him smile and am stunned at the timing, the moment we’re in.

I nod. “It’s safer to write. Remember?”

He lifts his chin up then down, tucking my story into his jacket pocket.

“I’ll look forward to it.”

There is a sincerity filling the spaces between his words that I am quite sure was never there before.

“You don’t think it would be a waste?”

“From my perspective, nothing is wasted. It’s all about imagination, skill and passion. Remember?”

Although I’m sure my face remained firm, I could feel my own smile building inside.

 

 

Into The Woods (Part 24)

These are the first words I’ve written since I’ve been out of the pit, unless you count signatures on checks or aimless blog posts or doodled grocery lists. But those words are nothing like these words. These words are real. They mean something.

When gravity turned on me, bits of my soul were shaken out, sprinkled onto a clump of moist woodsy soil like pepper spilling out of grinder. I lay still, my head hanging over the edge of the pit, my eyes studying the patches of greater and lighter dark swinging around in the bottom of the pit. The swirling blackness left me nauseated, wishing I hadn’t opened my eyes. I stayed there for days and days and nights and nights. Not caring that I was out of the pit. Not caring that I was still lost in the woods. Not caring what would happen now. Not caring what had just happened.

Last night it occurred to me that perhaps the pit was a dream. But I knew better.  Had I been dreaming, I would have dreamt I were someone else . . . I was somewhere else. I would have dreamt myself out of these woods, not into a pit. That’s how I knew it was real. That’s how I know these woods are still huge and undeniable and thriving around me. That’s how I can muster the strength not to care what may happen next.

“Get up.” He says.

“I don’t want to talk to you. I want to be left alone.”

I can’t see him. I didn’t even hear him walk up. And I hate that he’s always coming and going.

“I think it’s usually harder for you to talk to me after I’ve been away.”

I turn over like I’m in bed, but there’s no cover to readjust or pull over my head. I hang my other arm over the side of the pit, hoping he'll go away.

“I don’t think it will be any easier if you wait.” He says.

I close my eyes, letting the aroma of wet earth pull my head deeper into the tuft of ground cushioning my body. Why are the areas surrounding a pit always soft and slippery and smooth?

“It’s okay to get up and we can talk about the pit.”

“Thank you for your generous offer, but – if I did feel like talking to you – the pit is the last thing I would want to talk about. I don't want to talk.”

I hear silence. I open my eyes and turn to look. His voice is gone.

I'll write. It's safer than talking.

Into The Woods (Part 23)

Abraham Pais, Einstein’s colleague and scientific biographer quotes Einstein: “I was sitting in a chair in the patent office in Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: ‘If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight.’ I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.”

Einstein called this “the happiest thought of my life.”

A theory of gravitation? Didn’t Einstein know that Newton had already been there? Done that? Two centuries ago? Makes you wonder whose grandma was baking brownies for the Nobel Prize board in 1921when Einstein won that big cheese prize in Physics.

As I finish the last page of the Idiot’s Guide to Pit Dwelling, I can’t help but feeling that I am finally on solid idiot-grounding as far as my understanding of pit dwelling goes. My recent swallowing of idiot information makes me wonder if maybe I am now capable of thinking like Einstein, able to create my own “happy thought.” It’s worth a try.

First attempt: If a person sits in a pit long enough she will not feel her own legs or butt or weight.

Not so good. I try again.

Second attempt: If a person trips in a pit enough times she will not experience the feeling of falling because she is already so low.

Not bad. But it doesn’t do anything for the “happy” part.

Then it hit me. Maybe Einstein meant something altogether different with his theory of gravitation. Perhaps he meant . . . if even a single moment can exist in which gravity can be transformed away, as if to disappear, then that means that gravity as a force doesn’t really exist. That’s it! Gravity doesn’t exist. I wonder what grandma put in those brownies.

Oddly enough, that’s exactly what he meant: gravity as Newton explained it (a force that is pulling toward the center of the earth) doesn’t exist. It took a few more years, but Einstein took this theory of gravitation and evolved it into the principle of equivalency which in turn forms the basis for Einstein’s general theory of relativity. All of which shows, mathematically, that gravity is not a force. In order to keep things straight, Einstein renamed the force that we feel pulling us down when we fall: old name=gravity, new name=tidal forces.

Phew . . . what a happy thought!

Third attempt: If gravity, as Newton saw it, doesn’t exist then a person can fall freely out of a pit and onto solid ground, regardless of her weight.

Much better. Does anyone have Einstein’s grandma’s brownie recipe?

Into The Woods (Part 22)

Another night covers the woods, descending like tentacles into the pit. I’m tired. This pit seems an okay place to be when you’re tired, when the treatments of life are breaking through your skin, when the cares of life are closing down your mind. There is something about the night, something, anyway, in having gotten through another day.

I look at the lovely wall paper of hopelessness draped across the pit, so familiar like it’s been on the walls for the past 100 years, it’s corners curling, it’s brightness yellowed. I settle deep into the recliner and open my book Idiot’s Guide to Pit Dwelling, Second Edition.

 

Contents

Part 1: The Roots of Pit Dwelling

1.      What is a Pit Anyway?

                Early Ideas About Pit Dwelling

                Defining the Slopes of the Pit Walls

                Calculating the Area of a Pit

                Finding the Average Value of a Pit

                Visualizing and Graphing Your Pit

                A Few Pit Rules to Keep in Mind

                Problems for the Budding Pit Dweller

2.      Polish Up Your Pit Skills

                Common Forms of Pit Dwelling

                Position and Displacement

                Understanding Deceleration in Small Areas

                The Three Laws of Pit Dwelling

                Problems for the Budding Pit Dweller

Part 2: Sequences and Series that Affect the Pit

3.      Monsters, Nightmares, and Fear, Oh My!

                What Makes a Monster Tick?

                Rating Your Nightmares

                The Symmetry of Fear

                Discontinuity: Holding it Together in the Pit

                Problems for the Budding Pit Dweller

4.      Reflection and Refraction in a Dark Pit

                Is a Pit a Particle or a Figment?

                The Inverse Square Law of Reflection

                The Critical Angle of Reflection

                The Refraction Spectrum Extreme

                Calculating the Frequency of Refraction

                Problems for the Budding Pit Dweller

Part 3: Pit Dwelling – An Introverts Dream Come True

5.      Common Pit Tasks

                Classifying Extremes

                The Hopeless Value Theorem

                Differentiating an Inverse Pit Feeling

                Applying the Pit Difference Theorem

                What if Nothing Works?

                Problems for the Budding Pit Dweller

6.      Pit Dwelling in Motion

                 Limits of the Pit

                Vertical Pits

                 Horizontal Pits

                 The Special Confines of a Pit

                 Honey, I Shrunk the Pit

                Problems for the Budding Pit Dweller

 

Introduction

Let’s be honest. Most people would like to learn about pit dwelling as much as they’d like to be left alone in a room with a therapist or get kicked in the head by a mule. Usually, people learn about pit dwelling because they suddenly find themselves in a pit. Maybe they got a little too close to the mule.

 

It’s not that you wanted to end up in a pit, but here you are. And now you wish someone would explain things to you in a language that you understand, but in the back of your mind, you know that pit lingo is going to come up and you don’t think you’ve got what it takes. You don’t think you can do it. Guess what? You can.

 

This book is about pits. But what about pits? Isn’t it terribly hard and lonely to learn about pits? Don’t you have to be an Einstein to understand pits?

 

Our understanding of pits derives from the sciences and humanities equally. Pit dwelling isn’t a perfect science. Yet it carries with it some basic research that has produced elegant solutions for avoidance, amazing equations for plunging head first into trenches of despair, and specific calculations regarding the patterns of pit living.

 

We’re going on this journey together into the wilderness of the pit. Trust me, I know my way around. I’ve walked too close to a few mules in my day. My goal is to teach you all you’ll need to know to survive in your pit. I’ll explain everything in plain English, step by step. I’ve even provided Problems for the Budding Pit Dweller at the end of each chapter for you to hone your pit dwelling skills.

 

I’m not going to lie to you. You won’t find every truth comfortable or every problem easy. But you will get through this. I’m here to give you a push in the right direction. I’m someone who knows how you feel. The mule didn’t mean it and besides, now I know this great plastic surgeon. (See Appendix A).

 

With this guide in hand, you’ll have no trouble becoming a strange pit-dwelling character with arcane and baffling pit dwelling knowledge. Hey, reading this book is better than being alone with a therapist . . . or a mule.

Into The Woods (Part 21)

Life in the woods is like a permanent state of repairing. Somehow, I wasn’t expecting another fall – straight down into a pit. Here in the dark, in this muddy cavern I can’t see the wounds but I feel their shape, their moistness, their ache. The shift from having myself to missing myself has left me vacant, more alone than ever.

Observing an entire life – from birth to death – within your own lifetime can be remarkable in terms of sorrow, studded with a raw recognition of the limitations of time. It is the instability of impermanence. It is a concrete world cloaked tightly in an abstract concept. It is the absolute certainty that time is not an absolute quantity. Einstein didn’t have much use for time. He said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”

Perhaps it’s more than time that is transient and uncertain. Perhaps life is about more than tolerating the ambiguity of days and more about accepting the impermanence of moments. It is there within everything—this impermanence. I knew when I held Lauren in my arms for the very first time that it wouldn’t last. I knew when Megan refused to sleep for more than six hours at a time on any given night for the first 2 ½ years of her life, that I was worn out but that it wouldn’t last. And when my grandfather died, I realized that even time grows old and stops.

If impermanence is of any value in life, it is the reality that no matter how wrong something seems, how deep or insufferable the pit may be – there is an end. Most of us tend to think of endings as happy or sad: being rescued from the pit or dying in the pit. But what if there’s another option, a different kind of ending that speaks to allowing impermanence to fold itself into the mix of things? What if putting up wall paper along the slippery pit walls and draping a few throw rugs across the black, sticky mud floor were an option?

I know what you’re thinking: Wait! Getting comfortable in the pit, hanging up curtains and setting out pictures of your kids? That’s the worst thing you could do – it’s acceptance, it’s . . . permanent.

Really, it only appears permanent. The beauty of impermanence is that it is no respecter of persons or circumstances. What if there was nothing wrong with accepting where we find ourselves at any given moment in life? Not so that we can stay there forever, because nothing is forever, but so that we can see it and understand it better? And maybe in the process of understanding where we are, we will be able to see ourselves with more clarity, even our hollow, empty selves.

If there’s nothing permanent about impermanence, then what difference does it make that I’m sloshing around in a pit in the middle of the woods right now? I look at it this way, even the cancer cells that unite to overtake and destroy a human body have to stop when the person dies. It’s like when you’re leaning into a long stretch, holding the muscle taunt, feeling the pain of it, breathing through the discomfort . . . it makes me curious about how things will turn out.

So how about a party? Join me in accepting your current pit-status or nonpit-status and celebrating the impermanence of life, the cycle of days. Be sure to RSVP, the invitation won’t be around long.

Into The Woods (Part 20)

If there can be a best part, the best part about being lost is the loneliness. Perhaps it’s the overwhelming noise of the important things or the drowning silences of the necessary things that make isolation preferable to dodging despair and traveling with terror. I consider this as the huge, complicated beast slips into the shadows, as his lax and threatening steps shake the trees and the woods. The rain, that had previously been insane and harsh, performs its final dance with the earth, bowing to the applause of the forest sweeping every last drop into a final rinse toward the waiting grave.

There on the edge of the grave she waits.

Detached and dying, this now shivering, skeletal figure of myself would shock anyone who had known me years ago. It’s me but even I recognize no part, inward or outward, of this being. For a moment I feel like I’m balancing at the peak of infinity, looking up and down an endless number line of life. Confusion gurgles over in my soul.

She looks at me, her expression fading, her frame failing. I almost miss the slight shake of her head that stabs like a pin onto the corkboard of this present moment revealing that I’m late, too late.

“Don’t be discouraged,” she says.

Now hearing her voice take that settled or fearful drop as she looks toward the grave, now smelling the familiar and reassuring, but tonight faintly intimidating, odor of the woods, I feel that running and hiding is not perhaps so much in order as it used to be, that I myself have brought not only the bitter rain, but some staggering sense of helplessness, an edge of alarm, of which she had been quite unaware but which now seems daunting and disturbing to us both.

“It’s too late.” I say.

“But you can’t be discouraged.”

She falters, closer to the black, wet hole that has been sipping her strength, her confidence for months. She who used to be welcomed by me with affection and robust delight, is still welcomed but can’t stay, won’t last. I see tears sitting in colorless eyes, tremors trickling along weak arms.

 “Why not?” I ask. “Discouragement isn’t bad. It’s uncomfortable and miserable, like being lost in the woods or shivering in the cold, but it’s not wrong.”

Defending myself instead of helping, reaching back instead of moving toward her. It sickens my gut. With this sad witnessing of my former self comes a uselessness to recover the loss. Of course I’m discouraged.

After hours, or perhaps only minutes, of watching, the grave becomes full of her, of what used to be, especially of what should have been. Without her, I am truly alone. It is not necessary to stay here, it’s over. She is dead, gone. I take this vacant part of me, the portion that wanders in woods and, not at all happy with what is left, head into the thickest part of the woods.

I cough. I try to cough something out of my throat. The pain, from my throat. The pain and emptiness out of my chest. Between spells of coughing, there is something other than the driving pain pounding in my ears. A distinct, baleful sound. Before I can see what is there, before my feet can find a place to stop, another cough tightens my throat. One more cough, a halted step, a grating fall into the blackness . . .

Goodnight, woods.

Goodnight, blackness all around.

 

Into The Woods (Part 19)

Remembrances of Jake touch my heart as I let my arms fall from the neck of the huge, complicated beast. I hadn’t thought of Jake in years. I was his primary nurse in the Peds ICU for five months, for his entire life. Although he weighed only 2.4 kilograms, Jake had a heart defect that was as huge and complicated as the beast – leaving him virtually untouchable. There are times when a baby is so severely ill that any additional movement -- like holding or stroking -- will force the child to expend energy that cannot afford to be wasted.

By the time I met Jake, he was less than 24 hours old, had already spent the majority of his life in open heart surgery, and, although she longed to,  had never been touched or held by his mother.

As a pediatric nurse I was accustomed to touching, hugging and holding sick children and their families. The tight-squeeze hug for mothers, the reassuring back pat for fathers, the balancing on the lap closeness for siblings; it was a benefit of my occupation.

For Jake, however, touch was a blessing he would have to forgo. His mother and father, both of them barely past their teen years, were an unfinished portrait of the perfect parents. With no extended family to assist them, they were often overwhelmed and weary throughout the five months of Jake’s life, yet never abandoned hope for their son or purpose for his difficult days.

They would often come to the hospital later in the day and stay throughout shift change, well into the darkest parts of evening. Since I worked nights, it was typical that one or both of them would be ‘hanging out’ with me during the first hours of my shift. It was not unusual either to have Jake’s tender, rather serious mother in a chair pulled right up to the warmer bed, as close to Jake as she could get without being in the way of his ventilator, IV pumps, wires, and tubing. It was as if her nearness could make up for the lack of physical contact.

As his nurse, I had to complete a physical assessment on Jake every hour of my shift – this involved touching him. His mother would look on, asking yet again if there was anything she could do to help me.

The first time Jake was held by his mother, it required the surgeon’s permission and was accompanied by weeks of preparation and anticipation -- vital signs within certain limits, ventilator settings weaned to specific parameters, physicians and nurses notified and within ear shot at a specific time of day in which the surgeon was in house. As one day would undertow the next, weeks turned in upon themselves as well as we all waited for the perfect hand to be dealt to Jake. He was two and half months old before discovering his mother’s touch.

I lowered Jake into his mother’s arms, arranging the tubings and the wires, watching the monitor and the baby.

“I’m scared to hold him,” she confessed.

 As I placed a pillow under her arms for support, she sat up straighter in the plump, burgundy chair and drank up the sight of him from this new perspective – in her arms, near her heart.

“He feels right here,” she said.

She couldn’t stop the tears that had been sitting in her eyes for weeks from splashing onto his blanket. She apologized and seemed worried that it might shorten the amount of time she would get to have him this close to her.

“I think the sides of my heart are melting,” she smiled. “He’s so fragile, it makes me feel defenseless.”

“Every child is fragile.” I told her, then I hoped the transparency that overwhelms us all when touching something so dependent and slight would never escape her. I knelt onto the floor in front of her, patting her knees, observing Jake’s response, his color, his breathing. Jake was able to tolerate being held for five minutes before he had to return to his warmer bed. And although we didn’t know at the time that his mother would hold him now and only once more in his life – while he took his final breaths – it was no less soothing for their souls.

And what no one would ever find out is that from that delicate moment onward after visiting hours ended, after doctors made their final rounds, after the hallway lights were dimmed, I would pull up a chair close to Jake’s warmer bed and let his tiny hand wrap itself around my finger, letting his huge and complicated health problems melt away.

Perhaps, even though touch can be unnerving, producing a letting go somewhere inside, and a discovering of yourself as undefended and overexposed, maybe it is what ultimately heals us, attaches us, and secures us. Since the first time we feel safe in the world is in someone’s arms, doesn’t it reason that the safest place to feel frail is the same place?

Into The Woods (Part 18)

I fall into a sort of daze, as if his words – “forgive yourself” -- have run a knife through my brain causing acute damage of the diencephalon. Located in the forebrain, the diencephalon is the regulator of basic functions like sleep and appetite. Without its input, without its drive there is a blankness resounding from within that resembles nothing of me, of who I ever was, of the person I hope to recover. My inert state is mistaken as brooding by him; I experience it as a profound pathological mental idling. I don’t know what to do, how to change, when to start, where to go, or why I should care.

A freezing rain begins, assaulting the opening of the cave, awakening my cortex. Although the rain is cutting my skin and soaking me through, although the crisp bite of the cave is strangling an unidentifiable place within me, although it makes the loneliness deepen, draping my heart with alarm, he turns to leave. Tremors loop around my head, jumping toward my limbs one by one.

 “Where are you going?”

“I can’t stay. You’ll be okay.” His words, like congealed gravy, flop onto the floor of the cave, melting into the collecting rain puddles, disappearing before I can grasp them, before I can believe them.

Fragile, I watch his black shoes fuse into the soggy woods.

“Why are you leaving me here?” Desperation reaches out, finding nothing and no one. I don’t understand. Blanketing myself with my arms, I sink against the wall, the stabbing and throbbing in my chest scorches my eyes with tears.

A crawling quiet seeps into the air. I tilt my head to listen and realize it’s the power of the driving rain that has muted the rest of the woods, that has heightened the sound of isolation beside me, above me -- it’s surrounding me. Abandonment appears out of nowhere, yanking me deeper into the cave, jumbling my insides, scattering me like ashes into the sheltering darkness. I feel crowded by loneliness.

The strain of the cave has been severe and exhausting. Many see this place as weakness or deficiency, but it comes from someplace much deeper down in the nervous system, the unconscious. It taps into the oldest, most insecure feelings one has. It’s like epilepsy of the frontal lobe when it takes over -- there’s a thin line of control between you and the cave, between you and the raging storm outside. It reduces you so that you no longer feel fully yourself.

If I don’t know who I am, how can I forgive myself? How can I get through these woods? How can I help her? There’s an incompleteness to these thoughts that I can’t identify, I can’t finish and dispose of it, I can’t let it go or allow it to pass like other thoughts.

Sobbing. It begins low then widens, becoming extreme and hostile. It’s her. She’s out there, with the beasts, the grave, the downpour. If I don’t do something . . . if I don’t let her know . . . if I don’t go now . . .

I rush out of the cave, slipping through the mud, falling in the gloomy night, tearing my legs and bruising tree trunks. The pelting rain mingling with the overcast sky distorts my view, plaguing my awareness, so I follow the sound of the moaning, unable to stop the flavor of the soppy woods from ambushing my sense of smell. There she is, confined by the storm and toiled by sorrow. I stumble toward her. As I reach, as I call to her to take my hand, the monsters – one, two, three – line up between us, their sudden presence assaulting my intention.

They are hovering and lurking. They form a rim around this moment, hedging me in. I have run out of options. Captured.

As the huge, complicated beast moves toward me, the other two wail, lifting their fists, arresting my spirit and I realize that these are not beings I can know with my mind. There are not words enough to fit them into my understanding, to make them change, or to force them to leave me alone. As this thought pounds me into the present moment, I am unable to run so I open my arms, embracing the huge, complicated beast.

 

Into The Woods (Part 17)

As the huge, complicated beast slinks back toward the prisoner and the grave and the monsters, I retreat a few steps into the hallow blackness of the cave, leaning against the wall before dropping to my knees. I curl into a ball and wait. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help her.

My mind wanders off to the image of Sarah Kay, a beautiful 7-month-old baby I admitted to the Peds ICU at 1 o’clock in the morning. As Dr. Merino recited orders, I looked at Sarah Kay lying motionless under the bed warmer. I noticed that her thick blond hair road across her head like a wave and ran my fingers through it; she smelled of cigarettes. In the creases of her slender fingers and toes was dirt. I studied the grime tucked under her fingernails and toenails.

“Once you get the IV in, start her on LR.” Dr. Merino said.

I let myself go through the motions of gathering the IV supplies, returning reluctantly to Sarah Kay. I pushed my hands into the rubber gloves, pulled the tourniquet around her bony arm, found a vein in her right hand, rubbed the area with an alcohol swab, and, holding her arm in a vice grip, pushed the needled through her thin, dry skin. She didn’t move; my stomach turned as an eerie quiet suddenly filled the room. Crazy as it sounds, I silently wished she were pulling away from me, fighting me, crying, and screaming. Any normal reaction would have made my night.

“Ever seen a retinal hemorrhage? It’s easily seen in shaken babies.” Dr. Merino said.

I shook my head, thinking I could go my whole life without seeing a retinal hemorrhage if I had to and I’d be okay with that.

“Take a look.” He offered me the ophthalmoscope.

I lifted Sarah Kay’s still left eye lid, leaned in close to her sweet face, and peered into her vacant eye. The odor of smoke and uncleanness that surrounded her seemed larger than her tiny body.

As soon as I visualized the retinal hemorrhage, tears stunned my vision.

There was a tap on the door.

“Her mom wants to know when she can come back,” Deb whispered toward me.

“Give me about ten minutes more,” I answered.

“You need to stay in the room with her during her visit. The mom’s boyfriend has been arrested, but she’s under investigation too. DCFS should be up here any time to talk with me and interview her.” Dr. Merino said.

I nodded. Dr. Merino left the room, leaving the orders behind on my desk.

She needs a bath. I need to clean her up. I looked at the clock and decided it would have to wait until mom’s visit was over. Mom – she didn’t deserve the title. How could she have let this happen? Why didn’t she protect her baby? Why didn’t she feed her and bathe her?

Another tap on the door and Deb said, “Julie, this is Sarah Kay’s mom.”

A slender woman with wavy blond hair came into the room, crushing tissues in her fists. Her face was red; her eyes swollen. She didn’t seem to see me. She went right to Sarah Kay -- murmuring over her, rubbing her arms and legs with short strokes. Soundless tears spilled down her face.

I stepped up to the other side of the bed, watching . . . listening.

“Mommy’s sorry, baby girl. I’m so sorry. You’ve got to wake up, Sarah Kay. Okay? You’re going to be alright. Please wake up, baby.”

Whatever had happened to Sarah Kay and whatever role this mother played in what happened, I would never fully know. But in that moment, I could see this mother’s heart in her eyes and I could hear the desperation in her voice.

“Can I hold her?” Sarah Kay’s mom noticed me for the first time.

“Not right now. No.”

I watched as her gaze wrapped her baby in warmth. I suppose no matter what kinds of mistakes we make as mothers, whether big or small, our hearts break for our children in the same places.

Just like Sarah Kay’s mom, I wished Sarah Kay would wake up. I hoped she would move. I prayed she would open her eyes. But she never did. Not that night, nor any other night.

Sometimes the damage we do to our children is so severe there is no turning it around. Sometimes the harm we do is only something God can mend. Sometimes the pain we cause them becomes a vital part of who they become. Regardless, children are amazingly resilient and forgiving. Their characters can tolerate the ineptitudes of adults much more than their fragile bodies can.

As I remember Sarah Kay, my own heart breaks for her and for my own children. I am sorry for the pain I’ve caused them, for my own desperate lacking on their behalf. My face is awash with tears that burn and stab my skin.

 “This is the part where I offer you a Kleenex,” he says.

I startle out of my fetal position, wondering where he came from, readily taking the offered tissue.

“I don’t want to be here,” I tell him, looking up at the slimy walls of the cave.

“I know.” He nods with understanding. I can almost detect a single drop of empathy. That warms my heart.

All of a sudden the sounds of shovels scrapping the dirt and sobs slicing the blackness pierce my awareness. I remember the prisoner standing in the bitter night, watching the monsters dig her grave, wondering with each breath if it would be her final one.

“Are you going to help her?” He asks.

I stare at him, regarding him as some type of clairvoyant but quickly dismiss the theory as I observe a sympathetic smile infiltrate his countenance.

“I saw her too,” He explains.

“I don’t know how to help her.” I say.

“Would you like a suggestion?”

I assume it’s a rhetorical question and wait for the answer, while using the tissue to sop up the wetness on my face.

“Forgive.” He offers.

“Forgive . . . her?” The suggestion puzzles me.

He shakes his head kindly. “Forgive yourself.”

Into The Woods (Part 16)

I wake in the middle of the night. My torch has kindled itself into nothingness and the solid blackness it leaves behind reminds me: I’m in a cave. I’m alone. As a heavy and painful sense of self settles around me, I cannot help but believe that this is all there is. This cave. These woods. This pain. This darkness. As I sit up, I can feel chills draped over my body, shaking my limbs, wetting my brow, sickening my stomach. I run my hand across my face. My lips are seared; my mouth scorched.

Instantly I wonder what will become of me. But the thought is broken in two and dispelled as my ears fill with the familiar sound of blazing terror and slashing fear. It’s coming from outside the cave. My body feels like a tomb, yet I pull myself to my feet and feel my way through the darkness toward the noise. The clashing of their grunts and the slamming of their groans pierce my mind like the injury of pure silence. I can feel my legs weakening and my head pounding. At the opening of the cave, I sink to the ground as my gaze searches the bland background of the woods for the huge, complicated beast and his cohorts. I am surprised to find them hard at work within several feet of the opening. Glad to be tucked within the shadows of the cave opening, I sigh as a tear of relief slides down my face. Yet in the same moment, I realize what they’re doing.

It’s a grave. One of them is inside the hole throwing dirt out, one of them is lurking along the edges of the cavity, and the huge, complicated beast is guarding the barest psycho-skeletal outline of someone . . . I can’t quite make out who it is. With trembling limbs, I crawl toward them across the opening of the cave, closer, straining to see who they are holding captive. But the huge, complicated beast raises his nose toward the night of the woods and sniffs . . . left then right then toward the cave. I freeze as a massive roar follows his snorting and he takes one step toward the cave, moving his snout around, gulping in the air. As he moves aside, the prisoner he is holding shifts in the moonlight and I see . . . it is me.

I am confused and filled with horror. Realizing that I have become a witness to my own end, fever rushes anew through my body, zapping my strength and will. The huge, complicated beast rushes toward the protection of my cave. I use the slick walls beside me to pull myself up, to face him, to look him in the eye. My sudden presence brings him to a halt, as if he weren’t expecting me to be so near the entrance. Now he is confused as I take a stoic stance, bracing myself along the wall of the cave and starring into his evil, gray eyes. He releases a low growl and inches closer to me. Everything inside of me wants to turn and run; I can feel my body giving out drip by drip.

I feel distraught and disturbed as I stand there before him, his glare embracing me and his coral, inflamed stench moving in and out of my head. The huge, complicated beast swings his paws across the ground between us releasing a bellowing of dust and dirt toward me. Yet I stand firm, letting an instant realization overcome me . . . courage isn’t the result of facing my monsters and my fate. I don’t feel brave or daring or bold as I thought I would. Instead I feel strangely vulnerable and exposed, suddenly aware of the fear pulsing through my veins, ringing in my head and I realize that this is courage . . . the facing of it all, not the feeling of it all.

The huge, complicated beast presses his nose toward me, stopping just inches from my face and sucks in the feverish scent of every fear I’ve ever known. But then, stepping backwards, he begins moaning and licking his teeth. It is then that I know, beyond a doubt, that he smells, not my fear, but my fortitude. And although my determination is wrapped tightly in susceptibility and risk, it does not go unnoticed by him. He lurks back to the hole. I know then that I must help the prisoner. Somehow, I need to help her.

 

Into The Woods (Part 15)

On this night, while the black sky grows deeper and the moon sprinkles light on the treetops, and the noise of the monsters lilt in and out of leaves and twigs, and the pain is the worst it has ever been, I found the cave. I felt this dark entry into the earth could directly sustain my life; I made a torch out of hickory bark and grape vines and lite it with one of my last three matches.

The dim flames of torchlight bouncing across the cave walls are a comfort. The deeper I go into the cave, the less I can hear the groaning of the monsters, the wind pushing through the trees, or the whirlpool swishing in circles in the sinkhole. The further I go into the blackness, the more my eyes adjust to the details of the dusty ground below my feet. I soak in the quiet of this place and let the chill envelope me as I plunge forward. I run my fingers across a smooth stretch of cave wall, it welcomes me. It’s as if I have never known any other place. I decide to stay here.

The markings on the walls entrance me. I touch each one, tracing the lines and studying the pictures until I can’t keep my eyes open. I find a dusty spot and lie down, letting my eyes pull my head into a heavy sleep as the forms and motifs emerge, ghost-like from the walls. It’s as if the walls are merely membranes between all that I fear and all that is to come.

As if an altered state of consciousness seizes me, I stand outside myself. In the gentle torchlight, I see the lethargy of distant dreams overtake my body. I watch as easy breathes move through her. I can see that she has no strength left. I see that her world has changed. There’s a second darkness, like an evil that will not sleep, screaming at her in a whisper, disturbing her. Like riders in black, distressing her. Her mind fills with nightmares of people with round cheeks and droopy eyelids who can’t see her and won’t help her no matter how much she begs them. She twists and turns, awakening from her sleep too soon. As she settles into another corner of the cave, I wonder what she will do now.

I don’t want to take my eyes off of her for fear that she may fade away completely. Not sure what to do for her, I pray . . . that she finds the heart to fight, that her spirit will not lose any more potency. And that she will realize soon that she was made for so much more than all of this.

“You are treasured.” I whisper in her ear.

She puts her backpack under her head and curls up tight, covering her head with her arms, shutting out the dancing, misty figures from the cave walls that are threatening to destroy her for good. I can see the pain of their presence on her face.

“You are more than what is hurting you. You are His.” I say.

Her closed eyes relax a bit as a single tear falls to the cave floor.

 

Into The Woods (Part 14)

            Another bad dream wakes me; it’s still night. The chill of the moonless sky has crawled under my skin. I sit in the woods alone, wondering what to do next, wondering when the sun will find me, wondering once again if I’ll be okay. I shudder and shiver, shaking the foggy remains of the dream from my head. But it’s obstinate, coming alive before my eyes.

            I can see the operating room; it’s wide with carts and cabinets lining the perimeter. I let my gaze begin at the left, letting it drift across the room. A cart full of sutures, a cabinet bursting with drains and sponges and gauze and suction tubes. I can see the size 18 needles for the IVs, the JP drains, the IV pumps and the anesthesia machine. To the right I see the heart monitor, IV pumps, and a ventilator. Attached to the wall is oxygen tubing and two suction canisters with catheters. And above it all, the obnoxious, metal lights are dripping from the center of the ceiling, glaring down on a freezing stainless steel stretcher. And there on the stainless steel is my body –unmoving.

            I hear the gowns being slipped on and tied. I hear the latex gloves snapping into place. I see the doctors and the nurses surround me like vultures. I see the betadine hit my skin, discoloring my body. I see the endotracheal tube down my throat and the tape over my eyes. I see the glint of the scalpel and . . . enough!

            I’ve been told that I know too much and that that’s part of my problem –  you’re too smart and you think too much.

            “So, don’t think about things?” I ask.

            “Maybe just not so much.”

            The truth is I didn’t sit around and think up this scene on my own. My brain manufactured it from the facts that I’ve acquired over the years of being a nurse, being in operating rooms, and being a part of surgery. My own mind has pasted it on the subconscious walls of my brain so that it would surface in my weakest moments of unconsciousness. It’s not my fault that I have a clear picture of the inside of a human body or that I can see the tumors being cut from the tissue, or that I can trace the incision lines that haven't been made yet. I don’t do it on purpose, but when the dream comes, it hits hard. And when it comes in the dead of night when my back's up against a tree, it’s even harder to bear.

            I’ve also been told that just because the dream comes alive inside of me when I’m awake, doesn’t mean I have to view it all over again. It’s just a dream – even if it’s a very realistic one. It’s just a dream – even though it’s actually going to happen. It’s just a dream.

            I take a few deep breaths, I notice that I feel fearful – I release a long-held flush of air and find a rhythm in and out, in and out. I force my mind to retreat but to where? Where? Another easy breath allows the cool night air to tickle my throat as my mind flips through my mental index of memorized scripture . . . Psalm 97, Deuteronomy 33:27, Proverbs 3:4-5, Isaiah 43:1-2 . . . ahh, that one . . . Isaiah 43, that’s what I need right now. I run the words through my head not once, not twice, but for as long as it takes.

“But, now, thus saith the Lord who created thee O Jacob, he who formed thee, O Israel, Fear not; for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. When thou passest through the water, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire, ye shall not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.”

Breathe in. Breathe out. “Thou are mine.” Breathe in. “I will be with thee.” Breathe out. "It’s just a dream." Breathe in. “Thou are mine.” Breathe out. “God, get me out of these woods.” Breathe in. “All you have to do right now is know that you are Mine.” Breathe out.

Into The Woods (Part 13)

“I’m tired.” I tell him. “Where are we going? Do you even know?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He never does. My mind wanders.

I picture Chris, a one-day old baby in the Pediatric Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit. Chris was born with a heart defect that required him to be on life support the moment he was born. He was too weak to undergo open heart surgery. The third baby out of quadruplets, he weighed in at a mere 2.1 kilograms – he was fragile and beautiful and tiny. The life support he required was ECMO, Extra-Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation. This type of life support allows blood to bypass the lungs and the heart, allowing both to rest completely. A baby on ECMO requires two nurses, a primary nurse and an ECMO nurse. I was his primary nurse.

Chris was an extremely sick baby boy and I think his mother knew it, somewhere deep inside. Having just given birth to quadruplets, the other three were pint-sized themselves but alive in the NICU, Karen spent every waking moment at Chris’s side. She sat on a high stool next to his bed, stroking his head and playing with his teeny fingers. We urged her to eat, brought her food to his bedside, imploring her to keep up her strength for her babies. But she was tired, drained, we could feel her despair. Not knowing if he would live or die, Dr. Geiss said all we could do was give him time. For days, the ECMO machine re-oxygenated his blood and pumped it through his body for him. Finally, on the fifth day the ECMO nurse and I had had enough. We cornered Dr. Geiss and asked to speak with him privately.

“This baby is suffering. You’re letting this go on too long. He’s showing no signs of improvement, Dr. Geiss. You need to stop this. Please.” It was as if Eva and I spoke in unison.

I’ll never forget Dr. Geiss’ reply. “Some day that mother will have to know that we did all we could to save her baby. That she did all could to save her baby. And right now, the only thing we have to save Chris is ECMO and time.”

Feeling horse-whipped with truth, Eva and I slunk back to Chris’s room, making sure that Karen knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Children’s Hospital of Illinois was doing everything they could to help her son and letting her know that being here with him was the best thing she could do.

“Ow!” I trip over a tree stump and fall to the ground. I can’t see where he’s stepping anymore. I can’t see him at all; he’s so far ahead. The shadows of the darkness, the gloom of the woods, the sounds of obscurity overwhelm me, frighten me. I can hear the monsters, they’re close, I know it. I’ve got to get away from here, but my ankle hurts and my hands and elbows are bruised. I rub my ankle briefly, willing it to stabilize me, and dart from this terrible spot. I run for what feels like hours, but know it’s only minutes.

I stop, placing my hand on a tree trunk and sucking in the smoky-colored air around me. They’ve found me, I know it. Just like Karen knew that her son was going to die. She knew it and yet she came to his bedside everyday anyway. She knew we were doing everything we could to give him a chance at life. I wonder -- has God given me every chance at life? Do I know that He’s done all He can to help me, to save me, to heal me? To get me out of these woods? Do I know?

I sink to the ground, fear paralyzing my mind. Their smell inflates the air and sits around me. I can hear them stepping through the thickness. I’m sure the end is near. Sure there’s nothing more I can do. Sure that God has done all He can do. I wait, thinking of Chris’s last day on earth. The day the ECMO machine was weaned off, how his heart rate drifted to nothing, how his chest meandered toward a grim stillness. His mother holding his hand, knowing that everything possible was done to save him, acceptance streaming down her face, surrendering to a fate bigger than her, a destiny no mother should have to face. She’s depleted, yet split in two – embedded with grief and respite all at the same time.

A resounding roar shakes me, embracing me, undoing me; I cower beside the tree, letting the blackness win. My ankle throbs and I can feel my insides quivering. They’re close. I cover my nose and mouth with my hand, as the essence of their enflamed bloodshot flesh fills the air. I look around, there’s no place to hide. My ankle won’t let me run anymore.  I wait. Wait for them to find me. Like Chris, waiting to live or die because ECMO is the best that doctors could do.

“God,” I pray, “I’m lost again. He was going too fast and I couldn’t keep up. I’m sorry. I’m so scared. Scared to stay here and scared to move on. Scared to sleep and scared to stay awake. I don’t know what to do. I’m tired and frightened. I’m alone.”

I stay for hours, lying at the base of the tree, crying, sputtering, waiting. Letting this long period of pain and uncertainty connect us, until I finally hear a still small voice like the steady churning of the ECMO machine, “You are far away right now, but you’ll be back. I am here with you. Just let yourself rest. It will be alright.”

Finally able to close my eyes, I let sleep descend. His nearness allows the fears to bypass my heart and lungs; His comfort aerates my being. Maybe God hasn’t done all He’s capable of doing.

Into The Woods (Part 12)

Lately nights in the woods seem to go on and on and waiting for dawn is like waiting for the promise of eternal life – you know it’s a tangible reality and yet it’s so far out of reach your mind tells you over and over that it’s utterly implausible. And as the woods bear down around me, the implausibility becomes a solid part of me and I begin to believe that the chances of getting out of the woods alive are faulty, slim, unlikely . . .

It’s starting again; do you hear that? That gruesome sound is the reason I’ve been sitting here under this Maplewood for the last several weeks, instead of moving forward. It keeps coming and going, ebbing and flowing through my days, gaining in pitch then diving toward the dirt leaving a rich silence behind that overflows with toil and groans with worthlessness – and all without a single word. I can’t see where it comes from, but there are times it’s so close I think I can feel the feverish struggle, and then it is distant, prowling through the woods like it’s in the middle of a war.

As I sit here, too terrified to venture from this spot, I tell God again how the misery of the sound makes me want to do nothing more than lean against this tree and cry. I tell God that it’s time to get me out of these woods. I tell God how and when He should go about it. I tell God how He will benefit when He gets me out of the woods.  But as the sound engulfs me again, I realize that I am mortal, I have a limited number of heartbeats and I’m using them up day after night trying to be okay . . . trying to convince a Sovereign God of my tiny, human ideas and all I feel is a heavy and painful sense of self.

“There you are.” He says, plopping down in the dirt next to me.

I look over, not the least bit surprised to see him.

“I didn’t think you’d come back.” I say.

“Why not?”

I shrug, not sure how to explain that I know I’m not myself right now and I don’t deserve his company or anyone else’s. But I am sure it’s not worth explaining.

“What’s that noise?” I ask.

“It’s coming from over there now,” he points through the forest past a fluffy batch of red and white pines that have been growing together for probably more than 200 years.

“Is it the monsters? It’s such an awkward noise – scary and paralyzing.” My gaze follows his pointing finger, but I can’t see a thing through the dim cover of night.

He shakes his head, “No, I know this noise. It’s the sound of truth being restored.”

“Can’t be . . . it sounds like a battle, like the hostilities of hell are beating down the woods . . . truth can’t sound like that.”

“I’m quite sure,” he nods. “I’ve heard it before . . . the Spirit of Truth triumphing over deception. And you’re right, it sounds awful. It’s been difficult for you these last few weeks, hasn’t it? Hearing this? Feeling stuck here?”

I don’t answer, but instead hang my head. I know I should have been moving forward these last few weeks, but the sound has kept me immobilized. How can he understand? He can’t. Once again I decide it’s not worth trying to explain it to someone who’s never been lost in the woods, never been submerged in an undercurrent, or bewildered by their own churning, vortexing behavior.

“Triumphing over what deception?” I ask, not wanting to look at him.

Suddenly there’s a roar that explodes my ears and penetrates my head. A current of deafening   turbulence twists me into the Maplewood, the bark cuts into my back. I slap my palms over my ears. It has never been this close. Then, like a giant gust of sewage stench sweeping silently through the streets, the end of this sound sits beside me, spreading itself between us, antagonizing my heart and clotting my will. Finally, I look at him -- he’s unmoved by the assault.

“What is going on?” I demand. “Truth? Deception? What are you talking about?”

“Truth over deception . . . an answer to prayer maybe? What have you been praying for?”

“To get out of the woods, what else?”

“Ahhh,” he nods. “That’s it . . . the deception.”

I try to understand, but feel like he has just said many things at the same time. My head begins to swim and tilt.

“Getting out of the woods is a deception?” I ask.

“The deception is that you’re asking God to get you out of these woods but you refuse to leave this place. To get out you have to go through. You have a part to play in getting your prayers answered.”

I let him look at me for a long time, observing me like frog guts under a microscope.

“Do you always sit for days at the base of a tree and cry?” He asks.

I can feel fresh tears pinching my nose and eyes, but hold them back with anger.

“I saw you face the monsters. You can handle this noise.” His eyes seem warm and protective, but I scoot away from him, it could be a trick. Trust is always tricky with him.

“But the monsters are still out there and the nightmares haven’t stopped.” I argue.

He stands up. “Come on. This behavior isn’t you.” He reaches toward me, “Time to step out in faith.”

His words hold a smear of hope, something I haven’t experienced in a long time. I take the help that is offered and stand on my own two feet for the first time in weeks.

“Where are we going? Out of the woods?” I ask.

“Larger victories are won by small victories that come by just taking the next step in faith.”

The noise shrinks to a trickling of clattering echoes. He takes a few steps away from the tree then stops and turns. “You coming?”

I’m not sure what to do. Why does faith have to feel like a leap from nothing into a seemingly larger nothing? Like I’m stuck in a whirlpool that’s pulling me under?

“It’s okay to trust.” He says.

“But I’m not convinced that I will someday escape all of this -- these woods, the monsters, that awful noise. Maybe it’s safer to stay right here. How do I know I can even trust you?” I can feel my insides unraveling as the sound crescendos again.

“You stood up, that was a courageous choice. I’m proud of you.”

The words fall out of his mouth almost as if he knows something that I don’t know-- an idea of what’s next that I don’t have.

“Just step where I step.” He says, then turns toward the darkness of the woods and continues without stopping this time.

 

Into The Woods (Part 11)

Allison was 15-years-old when she died. It was three months after her second heart transplant and she had been admitted into 4112 – the reverse-isolation room in the Cardiovascular Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. For me it was the first of two 12 hour night shifts that would eventually blur together, leaving my insides groping for understanding.

As I stood in the anti-room of 4112 listening to report, it was all I could do not to stare through the glass doors at the electrical bed that cradled her -- she is someone’s daughter . . . that could be my child in that bed -- my thoughts briefly abandoned my colleague.

Report staggered on and on, the amount of detail in caring for a patient whose body is rejecting an organ is astounding. I wondered how I had come to be here in this room at this moment with this assignment . . . taking care of this child.

When I entered the room, I must have looked like an alien to Allison – with the yellow paper gown, shoe covers and face mask, the baby-blue head covering into which I had shoved all my hair, and the plastic gloves that made my hands appear pearly white.

“Hi, Allison. I’m Julie and I’m going to be your nurse tonight.”

She was sitting up in the bed, the television was on and she was playing with the Band-Aid-looking light wrapped around her index finger.

“I like this red light.” She said, holding up her finger, playing with the white chord attached to it. She looked weary and small in the oversized bed.

I picked up the television remote and muted it. “Pretty cool, isn’t it? Do you know why it’s there?”

“No.”

“It’s measuring the amount of oxygen in your blood.”

“This little light can do that?”

“Allison, do you know why you’re in the hospital?”

“Because I didn’t take my medicine.”

I had been inspecting the IV pumps, drainage tubes and all other equipment attached her.

“It’s a little more complicated than that. Your body is rejecting your new heart.” I explained.

“Because I didn’t take my medicine.” She laughed. “I hate taking medicine.”

I laid down the chart I had been writing on, pulled my stethoscope off my neck, and began taking a closer look at my patient.

“You want to tell me about it?”

“I just didn’t want to do it.” She twisted around in the bed. I asked her to take some deep breaths while I listened to the fluid build-up in her lungs, then to breathe normally so I could listen to her  banging heart . . . the third heart this body had housed in 15 years.

“Why not?” I began checking her pulses and capillary refill, all the way down to her feet.

“I want to be like other kids, that’s all. None of my friends have to take that crap. None of my friends have to be in bed at 10 o’clock every night. None of my friends have to pass on trips to the mall so they don’t catch a cold or get the flu. I hate it, that’s all. I hate it.”

Right now in the middle of these woods, I know exactly how Allison felt --- I hate being here. I hate doing this. That’s all. I just hate it. At the other end of the woods, somewhere I can’t see right now, the sun is setting. I know because I can feel the forest chill settling in around me as the tops of the trees bend near. Sitting here with my back against the bark of a Maplewood, my mind is thinking about Allison. I can’t get her precious face out of my head today – the live, animated face or the dead, fixed face.

Allison smiled a short laugh toward me while I checked her dressings. “Last week my friend Star helped me sneak out of my room. We walked all over the neighborhood at midnight.” Her head shook from side to side with sparkle, then she dissolved into a coughing fit.

“It’s okay,” I assured her. She brushed it off.

“When my mom gave me medication that night, I hid it under my tongue then went to the bathroom and flushed it.”

“How many times did you do that?”

“All the time.”

“You know you need medicine to stay alive right now. You know that, right?”

Her onyx eyes already round and wide found mine. “But I felt fine. And taking those crap pills made me feel bad, sick to my stomach. Anyways, I couldn’t stand my friends always looking at me like I was gonna break or something. I hate it, that’s all.”

The next night, as I reported for my second 12-hour shift, room 4112 was quiet. Allison lie in the monster-sized bed and most of the supplies had already been put away. It was the first and only time I had ever received report on a person who was deceased.

“She went into cardiac arrest about an hour ago,” a fellow nurse explained. “You’re going to have finish up here.”

As soon as report was over, without a yellow alien outfit on, I headed in to see Allison. I closed the doors to the anti-room and pulled the curtain across the glass doors and windows, in case her mother should come by. As I lifted the sheet back to look at her one more time, I could feel my insides fill with a cold and lethal pain.

“Why didn’t you just take the stupid pills?” I whispered at her. But my question didn’t get an answer.

I removed her body from the bed onto a gurney and gathered the final paperwork and her chart. As I wheeled her to the morgue, there was only one thought rolling over and over in my mind, I hate this. That’s all, I just hate this.

The forest is almost black now. I haven’t moved from this spot all day, but I don’t care. All I can think about is how something as insignificant as a tiny pill can mean the difference between life and death sometimes. I’m sure her mother screamed at her, pleaded with her to take her medication. Inside my head I can hear the fight, “Get over it, Allison, you’re not like other kids. Don’t you realize that? This is your second heart transplant, don’t blow it this time. You will never be like your friends, just give up that idea right now. Don’t you want to live, baby? Don’t you?”

Now I know why she didn’t take the stupid pills. It is overwhelming how illness and medication, surgery and disease can demote human beings. How they work in unison to turn people into frightened morsels of helplessness. How they back you into corners where your only choices are the blue pill or the red pill? This disease or that one? The long scalpel or the short one?

Allison’s choice for normalcy, while it lasted, doesn’t seem to be a choice at all for most people. It appears to be an obvious choice for death. “You do what you have to do to live!” So many people have spoken or shouted that one at me recently. I’m sure Allison heard it a time or two as well. As I step inside Allison’s world and look outside her eyes, I can see the corner she was trapped in and the anguish to be anywhere but where she was.

There are so few clear moments in the woods. And all I can think is I hate this. That’s all, I just really hate all this . . . pass the red pill, please.

Into The Woods (Part 10)

                Although the morning sun is finally breaking through the dense trees of the woods, my stride is slacking and my mind is mired. With drooping eyelids I spot a place beneath the weighty brush. I wilt to the ground, a mountain of decaying sod welcoming my head.

 My thoughts move toward the last few weeks – they have stretched on endlessly, wearing at me, tainted with doom and design, monsters and allies, weakness and courage. I wish deep inside that  journeys  through rooms and tunnels and woods would unfold like bloated fields -- open and unbroken. Day has finally crashed over the woods, leaving me the opportunity to idle my being. I crawl deeper into the darkness of the underbrush, the daylight my blanket – in its security I let sleep rush over me in waves.

I know I’m still in the woods. I know it’s a dream and that I’m really okay, I’m safe. But I can’t wake myself, I can’t pull free of the drug of slumber . . .

The narrow places of distress press on my insides. I dream of blackness, I smell dampness, I feel torment. I don’t want to be here, but I am and I hate it. My heart negotiates with my eyes – release the tears or soothe the grinding discontent? I know I am alone again, but he is here nonetheless; I can sense him through my emotional erratum.

“It’s okay to cry.” He says.

I use the tissues he gave me last night in the woods to pull the rest of the emotion from my tear ducts.

“Why are we back in the tunnel?” He asks.

I inhale a lungful of clammy air and become lost in the power of its memories. Private tremors rumble through my body.

“I don’t know.” My anguish reduces to sputtering sobs. “It’s a dream, that’s all. A dream.”

“It hasn’t been easy searching for your ‘this’ in the woods, has it? Do you think you prefer the tunnel to the woods? Is that why we’re here?”

I am troubled that I can’t see him clearly in this tunnel. When I can’t see his face, I’m never sure what he’s saying or what he means when he says it.

“No! Of course not.” I growl.

“How is it that we’re in two places at once then?”

“Why are you asking so many questions?” I growl.

“I’m not the one who brought us here today.”

I turn my back on him and throw my hands over my ears, wishing I could wake up and go back to the woods.

I feel tapping on my shoulder.

“This is for you,” he says.

A sudden flash of light assaults the tunnel’s dimness. I cover my eyes as he swings the flashlight to the left. I let myself take the paper he is handing me.  I hold it toward the light and try to focus on the words but a string of tears surface.

“Want me to read it to you?” His eyes look through me instead of at me.

I give the paper back. He reads:

“But now, this is what the Lord says – he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel; Fear not, for I have redeemed you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.”

He stops. He waits.

The words sound huge in his mouth, bringing my mind to an abrupt halt. And although they feel incomplete and awkward as they settle inside, they ignite a concrete truth that refuses mindful understanding because it's too busy dropping snugly into my spirit – a perfect fit.

I reach for the paper and read it again to myself. My heart, my soul, my spirit all huddling together sifting through the words for comfort.

“What do you see in those words?” He asks.

“God’s history with Israel was one of creating, redeeming and caring for them. He had a history with these people, a personal history in which he knew their name, he called them by name. And . . .”

I stop, reading the words again.

“Israel’s future could be determined by God’s present history with them -- because God had invested so richly in them, he would continue to do so, they could count on it, they needn’t be fearful. It was a personal type of care that God wasn’t only willing to provide but always made assessable in every condition – through flood or fire.”

He is quiet.

“Israel could be sure of this type of care, comforted by her history with God . . .”

I notice the glare of the flashlight swivel a bit. His presence is the truest it has ever felt. It is safe to continue.

“God’s history with me is one of creating, redeeming and caring. He knows my name. He has invested richly in me. Just like Israel, I can look over my past with God and be comforted because . . .”

I pause, staring at the paper in my hand, letting the truth of the words become a permanent fixture within me.

“Because it is a history that foreshadows a profound future regardless of the rooms I get locked in, the tunnels I trudge through, or the woods I get lost in.”

Like a clot forming along the top of a wound, I can feel the words healing parts of the inner gloom that still has the power to plunge me toward tunnel nightmares and baffling behaviors. Then, as if a second understanding emerges from the darkness around me, I sense the God with whom I share a history hovering in the grisly details of the tunnel and the murky swirling of the woods. I want to wake up, but my mind lingers here in the tunnel, wondering if this erratic mix of wind and longing is the breath of the Almighty or the porthole where humans step in and out of dreams.

I close my eyes, squeezing out fresh tears, considering this idea but instead am distracted by a slow swelling of certainty. In a moment, my heart stands spellbound at the tenderness of God reigning over the intense misery of my soul. I am undone.

“Do you have another tissue?” I ask him, turning to find the flashlight on the ground and myself alone in this dream, in the tunnel, in the woods . . .

Into The Woods (Part 9)

As the monsters blast me with another growling breath, my regressive steps smash into something pliable. My mind goes wild with doubt and fear. Although the woods remain shadowy and grim in these moments before dawn, I can still make out the shady figures of the three creatures in front of me. I can hear their bodies shuffling and I can smell their reek permeating the last bits of night. As fear completes the circle of my thoughts, I realize that I have played into their plan, stepping into the arms of a fourth enemy.

Immediately, an oceanic flood swells within me surging toward my eyes, clouding what little vision I have.  I throw my hands over my face, a groan of defeat releases itself from my throat, knocking the next breath from me.

“It’s okay to cry here.” He says behind me.

I spiral around and recognize his outline against the faint contours of the trees.

I stare at the figure of him in the darkness. “I thought you were dead.” The words barely make it out.

He hands me a tissue. We both turn as the sound of a low, vermilion howl from one of the monsters coils through the night toward us. Inside of me there is a deep trembling competing with the assurance of having him back. Moments like these are not easily boiled down into a clear syrup of understanding. The sudden appearance of him and the ominous presence of the three beasts looming in the overcast woods leave me bewildered.

“I don’t know what to do.” I say to him, knowing the monstrosities are waiting for me, sensing their eagerness to attack.

“What is your worst fear?”

“That they’ll attack me.”

“What would happen if they attack you?”

“They will kill me; I’m sure of it.”

“Then what?”

“What?”

“If they kill you, what would happen after that?”

I thought for a moment before quoting Paul from the book of Philippians, “For me to live is Christ, but to die is gain.”

The beasts begin scratching at the ground; I can hear the clawing again. They release a dragnet of terrorizing smells and inflamed grunts. I shudder somewhere deep inside.

“Is there another fear? Greater even than death?” He steps up beside me, both of us facing the monsters now.

“That they will attack again, I told you.”

“Okay, so they attack again and you live through it, then what?”

“Then what?” I am startled at his insensitivity.

Around us, the scratching gets louder, the smell grows stronger.

“Then it would be awful -- to live through, I mean. If all three of them attack me I would probably be left mutilated and disfigured.”

Trepidation detonates inside my stomach as he says it again. “Then what?”

“What do you mean? Then what? Isn’t that bad enough? Scars? Mutilation? Disfigurement?”

“After that. After you’re left mutilated and disfigured. Then what?”

“Well, then I would be devastated. I’d cry and maybe scream and . . . I don’t know. I wouldn’t be happy, I’ll tell you that. I’d throw a fit for a long while I guess. I might be so angry that I’ll say things or do all sorts of things that I might regret.”

“Okay,” he goes on. “Then what?”

I am quiet for a moment, letting each ‘then what’ clear a fresh path in my mind and start new tears down my face.

“Then I would be sad. Incredibly sad. For a while I’d grieve. I’d probably feel pretty sorry for myself. I’d wallow in self-pity and loneliness, feeling rejected and miserable.” The words bring me face to face with the pain of those cowardly feelings, it’s as if I were already damaged and tossed aside.

He waits within the bubble of a swelling moment before letting his next ‘then what’ ring through the woods.

"Then what?"

“Then . . .” I start, but a sinking relief suddenly takes up space somewhere inside of me. I notice the groans and scratching of the beasts start to fall away.

“After the rejection, the misery, and the self-pity . . . then what?” He urges me.

“Then . . .” The apprehension within shuts down my throat. I take a deep breath and force the words. “Then . . . I’d do what I always end up doing eventually . . . I’d go facedown before God, just like I’ve done a thousand times. I’d accept His grace and mercy and believe Him to work it all together for good.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’d get up.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’d choose to live.”

“Then what?”

“Then I will have trusted God.”

We stood silent as the first moments of dawn struck the woods with brilliance. He pointed at the beasts now soundless and limp, their churning and sputtering quieted.

“You have disarmed them.” He explained.

I looked on in amazement, blinded by an explosion of calm, internal faith. As the outburst clears my mind I ask, “How?”

“In the presence of courage, they have no strength.”

“Courage? These last few nights have been terrorizing. Your questions were horrible. It didn’t feel like courage at all.” I admit.

“Courage is often not the absence of fear, but moving forward in the face of it while holding Christ's hand.”

Exhausted, I collapse to the ground, tears rippling down my cheeks. I lift my face to the dawn, trying to believe him, trying to take in the course of courage I’ve just experienced. “I’ve barely made it through the last few nights out here. I'm not sure I’ll make it through another day. If this is courage . . . I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

As I take another tissue from him, my ears are primed, ready to drink in his usual assurance: it’s okay to cry here. But instead he nods my direction, “I believe you have taken positive steps forward tonight. I believe you’ll be okay.”

Something inside me believes him; comfort fills my spirit. But then I am suddenly confused remembering that I had witnessed him being attacked; I saw his wounds and the spot where his blood remained behind. I turn toward to him, my quandaries on the edges of my tongue . . . but he's gone. Did I imagine his presence? I look around . . . fingering the tissues in my hands.

Into The Woods (Part 8)

The night remains limp with darkness. I’m wide awake, as I’ve been trudging for nights and nights through these woods. At least I’m finally dry from being in the sinkhole. I can’t sleep, so I decide to make some headway through the blackened woods. The dawn must be getting close; the sounds of the woods are swelling. The shouts of the animals, the calls of the birds, the swinging of tree branches. But the half moon has tucked itself behind a battering of clouds, leaving me with scarce light to make my way.

As I trip over downed branches and topple through thickets, each bitter stick and ragged rock poking my legs and cutting my skin differentiates the line between isolation and seclusion. I haven’t talked to anyone for weeks, not since he has disappeared. And I’m not sure what to do now except work harder at getting out of these woods. The sinkhole had slowed me down, but now I feel ready to plunge ahead . . . with little sleep or food, with my insides untouched by the fact that I have survived the sinkhole. My head cracks into a low hanging branch that had merged with the darkness. The faintest flicker of self-pity stings my eyes as wetness trails down my face. I sit on the ground and scream at myself.

“No!”

When I touch my head and feel the blood there, I decide to go easy on myself. I take off my backpack, pull out a napkin and press it onto my head.

“You will not do this.” I tell myself as gently as I can muster. “You will get through these woods. You will be okay.”

Before rushing on, I close my eyes and imagine the end of this journey. I remember the words he shared with me, "For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ." I imagine myself finally finding my ‘this’.  Then I wonder about Paul, the man who wrote those words. I see him in prison; I hear the scuffling of the chains around his wrists and ankles. I think of his message to the Philippians, how he had found his ‘this’ when he wrote, “Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel . . . Because of my chains, most of the brothers in the Lord have been encouraged to speak the word of God more courageously and fearlessly.”

Because of my chains . . . I sat with the words for a time, feeling the weight, experiencing the load, being anchored to the moment. Because of my chains. Is it possible that confinement can produce results that abandonment cannot manage alone? It is possible that imprisonment can move issues of the heart further than freedom could? Is there more to be gained in captivity than in roaming? Is it possible that encouragement, courage and fearlessness can spring from my chains as well as from Paul’s?

Carefully, I step aside and observe myself chained to the sadness of these woods, burdened by the discouragement of the foggy nights, fettered to the insecurities of myself. There I sit against a concrete prison wall, the shackles cold, the darkness spewing out distractions.  

As I become a witness to myself in this place, I try to imagine the possibilities . . . the potential to learn something here, the way Paul did, within the chains . . . because of the chains.

A scraping nearby halts my thoughts and my eyes fly open to the gloom of the night. It sounds like claws digging into the wooden night. I think in quick succession: him? Then, the huge, complicated beast? Then, the faceless monster? Then, the one-eyed fiend.  But he’s dead, isn’t he? I left his ripped body in the middle of the woods? But how had the monsters devoured it so quickly? Where had they taken him? Where was he? I am suddenly sorry for wishing him to be gone, then I hate myself for wishing he were here to help me. I can do this, I tell myself.

The sound stops, as if whatever it is is forced to take a break. Then it starts again, the scraping, the rubbing, covering the woods with echoes of the troublesome scouring. It continues in interrupted moments, stopping and starting.

Then the distant stench of foul red fills my nose, soiling my stomach. I recognize the smell, as ripples of their presence float around my head. But I must be at the opposite end of the forest, how have the monsters found me? A spiral of spinning panic sweeps around me. I’m not sure what to do. Run. I need to get away from this. My wrists still feel heavy. I touch them to be sure the chains were only my imagination . . . then I gather my backpack ready to disappear into the night again when a thought opens my mind like a vast hole in the middle of the ground.

“What would a courageous person do?”

The question wrenched power from my being; I felt as if I had been caught in a net . . . I could see through it but I couldn’t move.

What would a courageous person do? The words roll through my mind again as the disgusting odor swells into a moldy mist around me. What does courage look like in this moment? Although everything in my being is telling me to run, I look out as far into the woods as I can. I reach out in front of me feeling for false shadows, trying to avoid any more knocks on the head, then take a step toward the sound.

“For I know that this will turn to my salvation . . .” I whisper, taking another step forward. The scraping stops.

“I know this will turn to my salvation!” I yell toward the dripping, crimson smell.

Out of the vastness of the night a silent deluge of horror ignites the air followed by a roar so hideous, I can feel the blast hit my body. But I see nothing. I stand firm, splattering my last hope against the will to be courageous.

“This will turn . . .” I begin, but another invisible roaring explosion blows me back, steeling the steps forward I had taken. I stumble to remain upright. Taking one more backward footfall, my body bumps into something quiet, something alive.

 

Into The Woods (Part 7)

There are sinkholes in woods . . . I know, I’ve been in one all week. Sinkholes can be powerful places of destruction or assistance, depending on whether you have lungs or gills. Their ambiguity takes you to places you don’t want to go, teaching you lessons you never knew you had to learn.

Out of nowhere, I feel in. This watery sinkhole bombarded my head, weighing on my body and pulling me under . . . I’ve been clutching at the edges of life for days. Inside the wet hole, in the middle of the woods, my body has been smashed, poked, and bruised. It has been yelled at by machines, forced into cramped holes, and left alone in waiting rooms.  For days the sinkhole has been my only friend . . . a solitary source of answers, a single explanation offering sincere smiles and pleasant assistance. Sometimes the help was a hand shoving me further down into the water; sometimes it was a lift toward the surface to catch a breath of air.

Either way, sinkholes cannot be fully trusted. They are not for enjoyment. They are not pleasant swimming holes; they do not possess the gentle blues of the seaside or the anxious waves of the ocean. Sinkholes, although they can be manmade, are often a result of the naturally occurring process of erosion. Erosion . . . now there’s a concept one can never get worn out playing around with.

One of the questions I’ve been pondering this week in the sinkhole is: What are the factors that trigger the change from cellular order to cellular chaos? Or, let me rephrase the question for my readers who appreciate a more direct approach: What is life asking of me? I found the answer in a most unusual place – deep within the blackest part of the waters.

My research led me to the work and words of Charles Sims, a pathologist, who studies biopsied tissue samples to determine if they are malignant. He points out that when looking through a microscope at cancer cells, they are only slightly larger than regular cells with larger nucleii and hard edges. He suggests that, although this is one way to identify cancer cells, that there is a more accurate way --‘relationship’. He says that cancer cells do not relate well with other cells. By their very nature they are renegades and outlaws who won’t follow the format, who refuse to conform to the rules of cell division. They trample over other cells, travel anywhere in the body they want and even erode and devour other cellular tissue – eventually destroying the body, one sinkhole at a time. Okay, so Sims didn’t say anything about cancer cells creating sinkholes in the body, I made that connection all by myself just to show you how bright I am!!

Today, as part of ‘experiencing’ the Cancer Treatment Center of America, part of my schedule included an “Introduction to Meditation” class. Thirty minutes of deep breathing sounded relaxing and refreshing, I can do this! Well, that’s what I thought. It’s hard to breathe deeply when your head’s under water.

In a group of about 15 people, I was sure it would be a breeze. Sit in a relaxing position, spine straight, legs uncrossed, hands in your lap. Close your eyes. Breathe in.  Hold briefly. Breathe out. Check. Check. Check. And check. I was right! Nothing to it. For the next 17 minutes I was lost in the ins and outs of my breath . . . when the session was complete, as I opened my eyes I was shocked to have my being flooded with sadness.

It shoved me into the blackest depths of the sinkhole forcing me toward an interior journey to face the ultimate conflict -- the wish to live and the wish to die. My deepest fears pushed my upward. I struggled to reach the surface, then yanked my body out of the sinkhole. I sat for two hours at this fork in the road, just me and my question: What is this situation asking of me?

With my hair dripping wet and my hands shivering from the approaching cold night, I sat on the soppy-wet forest ground and realized that the erosion inside my body had begun years and years ago. One of the triggers that moved these cells from conformity to chaos had been pulled by the steady process of internalizing one emotion after another, turning things inward, pressuring my body with feelings that it was never meant to bear for long periods of time. Perhaps, just as cancer cells are self-destructive and self-centered, so an isolated and withdrawn self can trigger internal erosion producing sinkholes. How can any of us expect our cells to live in peace with each other if we are continually at war with ourselves or others?

It’s been a long week in the sinkhole. I’m glad to have finally drug myself out, even if I’m wet, cold, hungry and still in the middle of these woods. But none of that matters much because what I’ve discovered this week is that when health fails, if we invite God into the process, it is highly possible that we will derive profound spiritual benefits from the struggle to regain it.

The sky is darkening again. The nights always seem very long in the woods. Before I bed down for the night, I’ll probably need to walk for a bit until I dry. I don’t like walking through the woods at night . . . the creatures are loud, the monsters stalk me, the darkness presses on me – I am charged with danger every moment. Regardless, I step out in faith. And with each stride I see that maybe these woods aren’t just one huge, irritating experience. Maybe the woods are this: an opportunity to see sinkholes as a creative challenge and to find courage in the face of chronic illness.

Into The Woods (Part 6)

I awake with a start, midnight feels somber and vague. My hungry pupils search for some recognition of where I am. Then I remember. I’m in the woods. And he’s dead. I walked all day yesterday until I fell in a heap, sleeping fitfully with visions of his hands around my throat. I feel empty, like my spirit has vanished. The half moon moves a slight, subtle light through the trees toward me as the chill from a windless breeze hits me on the face. I shudder, closing my eyes to the darkness here then realize that the visions inside are worse.

Without warning, my mind goes back to a midnight more than a decade ago. In the middle of the night, under the harsh lights of the Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit, elbow to elbow with Dr. Geiss. I see both of us hovering over Clarence’s open chest – the spreader pressing his ribs wide open, his pale brown heart a stoic lump inside in his chest. I see Dr. Geiss threading an electrical wire into the distal section of the SA node on Clarence’s heart. After the insertion, Dr. Geiss connects the wire to a hand-held defibrillator box, providing a small electrical jolt to the area, hoping to initiate a cardiac response – a heartbeat. I watch -- the cardiac emergency instruments spread throughout the room and a suction catheter in hand --  as he moves with precision down the SA node of Clarence’s heart. When one area does not respond to the electrical stimulation, he gets another wire and threads it distally through the heart’s flesh, less than a millimeter from the last one, repeating the jolt and getting no response. I hand him another wire, he threads it into the brown heart, connects it to the box, turns the knob . . . the process continues for over an hour until the entire length of the SA node of Clarence’s heart is rich with wires.

Eventually, he announces the time of death and steps off the stool, away from the bed. Ripping his mask from his face, he turns on me, “What did you do?”

Dr. Geiss, one of the best cardiovascular surgeons in the entire continental Midwest, has a reputation for yelling – not at his patients, only the nurses. I had been in the Cardiovascular ICU for almost a year now and knew it was about time to yell back.

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” My voice echoed off the walls of the room and bellowed down the hallway.

He took a deep breath and leaned back against the wall, 78-year-old Clarence still in the bed between us, his chest wide open, his heart still. Dr. Geiss motioned for me to come over to where he was. He looked worn and tired. I leaned against the wall beside him. We stood elbow to elbow again.

“Julie, what happened here tonight?”

I knew what he meant. He meant what happened in the hours between when Clarence left surgery to recover in this CVICU room to the time when I called him in a panic to come back to the hospital. Without a single hesitation, I ran through the details, the numbers, the labs, and the settings on the vent, the balloon pump and the defibrillator box that Clarence had come back with from surgery.

Dr. Geiss listened without saying a word. Then he wiped his brow with the back of his hand and said, “This is the sickest heart I’ve worked on in a long time.”

“Now you tell me.” I said.

He smiled and left the room. He never yelled at me again.

I open my eyes, dispelling my CVICU days from my mind. I know what I have to do. My only hope now is to engage my will. But how? I look down; my journal has fallen onto the ground. I pick it up, ready to do battle. With pen in hand, I work out the details of my survival . . .

July 2010 I must surrender my will to Jesus absolutely and irrevocably. This is a crossroads, I can never go back – whether it means life or death, nothing need stop me from doing exactly what God wants  --------- what He wants. It is a matter of the will. There is no debate to pursue, no reasoning with God for alternate options. With no further thought or consideration for myself, I forsake the pretense of considering what it will cost me to follow God, to surrender to His will. It is not as if God does not know, does not realize in full empathy and compassion what my obedience will mean, because He does know, more than I know ----- I must keep  myself before God at all times, determined to be utterly His, absolutely  and entirely for Him, focused on my determined purpose to yield my will, my illness, my life, unashamed to Him ---- my all for His glory and honor --- it’s my will I lay down because I know that this will turn to my salvation. The debate ceases now.

I drop my pen, the journal slips from my lap. My stomach doubles over with pain as I spill to my knees, burying my face in my hands among the crusty leaves and dirt of the ground. In this moment, I feel God moving in close, His breath on my neck, His hands on mine. With Him looking on, I reexamine my reasons for wanting to live, for wanting to fight this, for wanting to engage my will. His presence hard-wires my nerves as emotions of powerlessness and blind hope transform into rich prayers of expectant faith in His perfect will. As hope fills my being, I feel renewed life ignite within. I see now that the loss of hope I had experienced equaled the loss of life. Life – I feel Him place it once again in my hands, a gift, this day, this moment, this disease, this life.

I lift my swollen face toward the sky, a final surrender of my will. As my mind clears, a calm, vivid voice breaks through, “Yours is one of the sickest hearts I’ve worked on in a long time.”

I lift both corners of my mouth, “Now you tell me.”

Into The Woods (Part 5)

At first he looks at me as if he hadn’t heard the question, then lifts his head . . . studying the canopies above, deep in thought. Is he ignoring me? That makes me mad. My body is still sore, my head is pounding, and my lesions are tender and weepy.

“Here.” In his hand is my journal. “I fixed it. I couldn’t replace all the words you lost, but I put the pages back and straightened and cleared the damaged words.”

As I grabbed my journal out of his hand, I looked at him, feeling orphaned and betrayed.

“Who are you?” I yell but the words get lost in the underbrush between us. I am anxious to know . . . the answer will assure my heart of his trustworthiness. I wait, secretly wishing he was gone for good. Eventually my patience corrodes in the face of his silence.

“You know what . . . I can take it from here. I don’t need your help. I never did.” Slowly, I get up, brushing dried mud from my clothes, picking the decomposition of the woods from my face, hair, and arms.

“I have a lot of concerns about you being on your own until you’ve had a few more weeks of feeling better.” He offers, peering at me intently as if I am merely a code to be broken.

I look at him, hearing a far-off voice in my head warning me with grisly alerts of impending harm and malady. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t want you out of the woods. He turns to his left, listening, looking at the woods.

I open my mouth to ask ‘who are you’ again, but instead am struck by the outline of him, easy and still, framed by a mosaic of deciduous forest: butternut, birch, aspen, oak, hickory, elm, ironwood – all fat and elaborate, side by side, having overcome the stress of the wood’s deep shade by emerging and flowering together. 

Finally he begins his answer, “I am . . .”

Then a distant rustling behind the trees causes him to turn toward a yellow birch.

“What is it?” A lush smear of fear is spread across my soul. I listen for him to say something soothing like he used to, for something that will clear the terror of the moment. As he takes a few steps toward the birch, I can hear the grinding of dead twigs and decaying leaves as they release the smell of fresh, aged forest.

Bursting from the center of the mosaic woodland, a rusty behemoth dives into him releasing a coppery yell. I cover my ears as the thing uses its massive clutches to squeeze the air from his lungs.

He emits a blurry breath of warning toward me. “Run!”

In a single move, it splinters his head and ruptures his heart. Less than a moment and it is finished; he is lifeless on the forest floor. I am petrified, unable to run. The creature steps away from him and stretches its neck toward me offering an impaired cackle. I can feel myself trembling but can’t see my hands or limbs moving. Without touching me, its eyes reach out in deep disrepair, plastering my insides with quiet dread. Then it is gone.

Standing over him with huddled concern, all I can do is watch the blood puddle beneath him. He is unmoving; his permanent wounds seem larger than his body.

“I’m sorry,” I mutter. In absorbed confusion, with competing voices running through my head -- “Help him.” “I don’t know what to do.” “Do something!” “Get out of here.” -- the brittle air forces me to turn and run as fast as I can into the woods . . . away from the monsters, away from him, away from the trees, the decay, the death of this place.

My mind is teeming with nightmarish activity as I move forward on my own, vanishing in and out of shadows, tripping over slopping, fallen trees, dissolving beneath the weight of my pounding heart. Out of breath, I begin to slow, baffled by my selfish sprint. Crouching on a dead tree, I wait and listen, unsure what to do. I need to get out of these woods. I need to go back.

Unsure of how far I’ve gone, I head back toward the spot where I left him, pushing myself to run, pressed by the urgency of his impending death. When I arrive at the clearing, he’s gone. I stand over the area where he had been, looking at the ovals of clotted blood now forever mixed with the black dirt of the forest.  

I look around at the nothingness, the bleakness. He couldn’t be trusted anyway, I assure myself. He was never really on my side. I stand alone, my journal still clutched in my hand, realizing this is what I wanted, isn’t it? I wanted him gone.

I fall to my knees, my body designing a fresh batch of tears for the moment. No, it’s not what I wanted. Not like this, I thought. I didn’t want him dead, eaten by the beasts. As my tears soak into the blood-stained dirt, I imagine I hear his voice erasing my imperfections and bolstering my insecurities, telling me ‘It’s okay to cry here’.  The words are so close, so present, I look up expecting to see him right beside me, but I’m alone.

Into The Woods (Part 4)

When I open my eyes, I'm no longer in the woods. The accelerated beating of my heart resounds in my ears as I take in the splendor. This place stretches before me slender and solid, soaring above me. As my pupils adjust to the brightness, I catch the faintest sound of chimes in the distance, accompanied by chants. I rub the palm of my hand across the smooth marble floor that is just the right delicate shade of pearl. I sit up.

My gaze goes from the floor to my hand . . . it's clean! The bruises, the mud, the wounds are all gone . . . I rub my hands over my sides, my limbs, my face . . . all restored, renewed. My clothes are fresh. My body is whole. My mind is charged. Where am I?

As a serene freedom floats to the top of my heart, I stand on steady feet, ready to move, ready to shift.

I am drawn to a table by the wall and see an earthen vase with a delicate blush-colored orchid set off by two brown twisting sticks. Simple. Perfect. Beside it is a book, every page is blank except for one. I read . . .

"Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."

I take in the words, then look down the long room, wondering what it means. What is this place? The end is far, but I can make it out. I think I can reach it.

After only a few steps, I can see the outline of a throne and am blinded by the brilliance centered there . . . the power, the dignity shortens my breath and squints my eyes. The white light illuminates the objects around it, but makes it impossible to visualize the sovereignty seated there. But I don't have to see, I know inside because emerging from the burning glow is the tip of an outstretched scepter . . . welcoming me, pardoning me, accepting me. I am pulled to my knees, my heart bursts with adoration and humility.

The created beings drift in and out of time, transporting and sorting His majesty . . . surrounding Him with it, transposing it from sound to sight, then from touch to smell . . . the illustriousness of His majesty in every form pouring from the seat of royalty, spreading across the floor, migrating up the walls. I cannot hold my head up another moment, my face bends to the marble floor in awe as every prayer and request within me presents itself before God with thanksgiving that is impossible for me to hold back. 

"My God. I ask to be healed." I speak boldly. When my petitions are exhausted and my praise finds its end, I lift my head. Just as promised, peace surrounds me.  There strong and steady around my heart and mind, peace stands guard, like soldiers assigned to watch over a certain area in battle. I am stunned by the infantry of peace reaching beyond my discernment.

I am overwhelmed with gratitude for my Lord; my tears are an unceasing tide across my face. Again I bow in worship, closing my eyes to rest them from the polished intensity of this God. Once again my heart pounds in my ears . . . I hear the murmur of a voice and the moving of wind through leaves. My eyes burst open to discover that this is the woods. My clothes are muddy, my wounds glazed over with dried blood, my mouth sticky with black charcoal. I see him, standing there, his hands on his head, his mouth moving, his words blurring toward me.

"What happened?" I ask.

"The poison from the fangs of the huge, complicated beast . . . some of it must have absorbed into your system. Good thing you drank as much of this as you did." He is closer now, dangling the cup in front of me.

"How do I know it wasn't that drink that almost killed me?"

He considered me with a kind gaze. "I've been praying for you."

"What did you pray?"

"That you would receive a fresh vision of God's love for you."

As my soul begins to shatter and rejuvenate every bit of assurance within me, I finally ask what I've wanted to know for months, "Who are you?"

Into The Woods (Part 3)

Despair, in its purest form, often feels as if it has no before or after. Now, face to face with the huge, complicated beast, his fangs deep inside my flesh, it seems that he has always been a part of me. From the corner of my eye I can see the other monsters. Still coated in black, the faceless monster hovers over me, calling my name. Something in his contaminated call attracts me. Somehow he seems preferable to the huge, complicated beast tearing at me. The one-eyed thrashing fiend is scribbling in my journal, ripping at the pages.

The fangs of the huge, complicated beast bite down again; I can feel the sting of his venom and the malignancies within me multiplying. The swirling culmination of unnamed turbulence that is my life fuels the fury of all three of them . . . I wonder what is taking death so long to arrive.

"Enough!"

The command ricochets from the trees around me, hitting the huge, complicated beast in the chest, breaking his restraint on my airway and sending him reeling backward. Choking in too much air at once, my stomach turns on me, emptying itself without my consent. As I suffocate on my vomit, I can hear the monsters groaning, shuffling quickly back to their pits of doom. Rolling onto my side, I spit on the ground, unsure where I am. Sputtering for air, I let my lids drift closed, breathing in the dampness of the woods, remembering. I push myself upright, realizing the rain has stopped. Opening my eyes, I look for the voice.

"Where are you?" I call into the obscurity of the woods.

It is then that I become aware of the oozing lacerations on my arms and legs, the lethal piercings on my sides and the festering hole in my chest. My head feels heavy and thick. My body is throbbing. I try to stand.

"Don't get up. Drink this."

He hands me a cup with thick charcoal syrup unmoving inside.

"What is it?"

"It'll soak up the toxins his venom left behind in your system. Drink it."

"It smells awful."

"Drink it."

I attempt a slow swig. My stomach slants, halting the entrance of the sappy mixture. I take a deep breath and try again. The taste coerces tears to surface and spill down my face.

"It's okay to cry." His voice is wrapped in comfort. I soak it in.

With the back of my hand I wipe the tears from my cheeks and the black syrup from my lips all at once, noticing my shredded journal in a muddy heap.

"What will you do now?"

"What do you mean?" I reach for the journal.

"You can't stay in that cave and out here in the woods you have those beasts after you. What next?"

I take a thick drink, forcing it down my throat, then another long swallow, setting the cup down, flipping through the journal, assessing the damage of my ideas, my thoughts, my life. A deep sadness wells inside as I realize that without these pages I'm not sure who I am anymore. I need words to survive but there are very few left here. How will I go on?

"You need to drink all of this." He kneels beside me, picking up the cup and handing it to me again. I take another drink. As if seeing and studying every circuit and coil of my brain, he asks, "What's wrong?"

"I'll never find my 'this' without my journal. I need these words . . ."

"Can I see?"

I am suddenly aware of how close he is and my heart secretes insecurity like sweat glands pour perspiration onto the body. Unsure if he can be fully trusted, I pull the journal toward me. I look inside the cup and realize that I've already drank more than half. What is it really? I wonder. What have I done? I silently beg my eyes to hold back the alarm swelling inside. He's still beside me, his knees in the mud, his hand reaching for the journal. I look at his face; his eyes are open and searching. I feel empty and transparent.

"What is it?" He withdraws his hand. The tilt of his head is so slight, I almost miss it.

"Nothing." I hand him the journal. He takes it and stands up. Stepping back, he flips from one page to another, inspecting what’s left, scrutinizing my final words. My brain is screaming at me: it’s too late, it’s too late.

My eyes droop and blur. This is my fate . . . to die in these woods. I thought he could be trusted, but my head is staggering. He helped me in the tunnel didn't he? But now the black syrup is making my tongue heavy. He was there in the room too. Wasn't that him? I can’t remember now, my ears are whirling. It's this drink.

I drop the cup on the ground, the muddy contents mixing with the mire of the woods. Maybe he's wanted my journal the whole time . . . maybe he has always intended to destroy everything that makes me me. He gave me the journal in the tunnel; he knew I would fill it with myself. But why? Why would he want it? I thought he was on my side . . . the dread deep within is faint now, trust is slipping away. My eyelids are weighty. I drop onto the soggy ground, closing my eyes, letting my head fall backward into the mud.

"I’m so tired. But I need to get moving. I need to get out of here." I can feel my lips move, but the rest of my body is limp, refusing to cooperate.

"Be patient with yourself and rest." He says in the same voice that has filled me with care and understanding.

"Why are you doing this?" I ask just before the faith in my soul darkens and the light in my mind dims to nothingness.

 

Into The Woods (Part 2)

It's horrible in here. This black hole of doubt is leaving blisters on my soul. The downpour hasn't stopped but phrases like "there's no hope", "there's no way out", and "give up now" are leaking from the stone walls around me, their fumes are strangling me. The words dart around my head then drift toward the opening of the hole, making it smaller. Each utterance is like another piece of tape over the opening, closing it up. I've got to get out of here. But outside of this hole are the monsters . . . and air . . . my lungs feel padlocked, the intense sorrow of this place is sucking my strength . . . I need to make a decision.

When I worked nights at the hospital, although it may not be true, it seemed that most people died at night -- especially children. I recall one night when I stood at the bedside of a baby who, after having open heart surgery, was dying. His mother was on her way. I didn't want him to die alone, so I stroked Jake's head and his arms for hours, finally scooping my hand under his head in his final moments, speaking to him, singing to him, praying with  him. If I could have held him, I would have, but he was connected to too many machines and it's not protocol to take a patient out of their bed in this condition -- not until after death anyway. I talked him through his final breaths, wiping my tears from the tufts of baby hair on his head.

His mother arrived after he died, so the next hour was spent preparing his body for her to hold. In a private room with the curtain pulled, she grieved the loss of her son, then laid him back in his bed, leaving him behind in the PICU room that had been the only home he had ever known. I watched her walk, alone, down the hall -- not knowing where she was going, who she was going to call, or what she would do now.

I went back into Jake's room, wrapped his body in a warm baby blanket and lifted him into my arms. I tucked his chart under my arm and began our journey to the morgue. This wasn't my first trip to the 8th floor, but each step seemed as if it were. My feet drug, my heart pounded, my head dodged phrases like "life is fragile" and "death is certain".

On the deserted 8th floor in the small hours of the morning, I pulled open the heavy, metal door with one hand, balancing Jake and his chart in the other. A frosty blast of somber and crushing cold slapped at my face and body. I went numb inside and out. A light should have automatically come on, but didn't. I looked for a switch, but couldn't find one. I pushed the door wider to let in the light from the hall, then searched for a spot to leave Jake.

As I stood in the middle of the dim morgue, with Jake in my arms and the freezing wind of this room blowing down at us both, I realized this would be the last decision I would make for Jake. I studied the rows of metal shelves -- some occupied, some hollow, some large, some small, some to the left, some to the right. I knew that one of the smaller shelves to the right was the appropriate place to leave Jake, but it looked too barren, it seemed wrong. I stepped toward the other bodies on the left of the room, but I wasn't sure who they were, it didn't seem right to leave him with strangers. I had to make a decision.

"You'll never make it out of these woods alive" --- another whoosh of crippling doubt peels off the wall, landing on my head, disrupting my memories of Jake. I look over at the opening and see it's almost closed up. A few more phrases like this and I'll be trapped in here forever, with no air, no hope, no escape.

My lungs are burning and longing for relief. I gather up my things, throw my backpack over my shoulder and try to remember how I decided where to leave Jake that night. Think . . . which side of the morgue? The right or the left? Alone or with others? He's dead, why does it matter? 

"It's hopeless" hits me in the side of the head then drifts off to take its place as part of the obstacle blocking the opening. "You're dead either way . . . inside the hole with no air or outside with the monsters . .  why does it matter?" I felt the weight of that one strike me in the middle of the back, knocking me to my knees. I have to get to the opening before it closes. I feel dizzy, like the hole is getting darker or maybe my gray matter is turning black. Somewhere inside my head I step to the left side of the morgue and lay Jake next to a another dead body -- not for warmth, not for comfort or convenience. But because it's the right place to leave him. I push myself to my feet, trying to see the exit of the hole. I can't make out the exact spot of the opening anymore but I can hear the rain and wet just beyond it . . . I turn toward the sound and begin running, better to take my chances against the monsters . . . but why does it matter?

As all 130 pounds of me detonates the opening, it erupts, discharging the layers of doubt in all directions. As I break through the negative words, a squall of fresh air first tempts then excites my lungs as they maul at each oxygen molecule. I land with a thud on the ground, feeling the sharp bite of the soaking woods and the murky doubts digging and ripping at my skin. The rain is drowning me, I try to stand but slip in the mud. In the last rays of the day, I see something out of the corning of my eye -- something red and eerie. As I stand and pick up my backpack, I hear a slippery hustling behind me.

As I turn, the stench of acrid venom fills my nose and covers my face, burning my eyes . . . the clasp of fear encircles and smashes my throat . . . the last thing I see are the fangs of the huge, complicated beast . . . 

Into The Woods (Part 1)

Let me catch my breath . . . I've been running for days in these woods . . . I think I have a side-stitch or a carbuncle or maybe something more serious and life-threatening . . . I'm not sure. But all this running isn't helping. The deeper I go into these woods, the deeper I go into myself . . . searching for 'after' . . . running away from 'this' . . . I know, I know . . . another allegory . . . more metaphors . . . let's hear a collective groan all the way around the room . . . ahhhhhh . . . now don't you feel better?

When Lauren (my eldest daughter who is now 21-years-old) went to a preschool screening at the age of four, I was too young and stupid to realize there were right and wrong answers in life. She was too. She impressed the educational gurus with her knowledge of colors, numbers and letters. Pleased with my bright child, one of the teachers leaned in close to Lauren and asked what her favorite television program was. Without hesitation, Lauren answered, "Into the Woods."  The teacher stepped back, observing us both with a tented brow.

"You know, the Stephen Sondheim Musical . . . Into the Woods . . . ." I was hoping to jar her memory. No such luck. She simply directed us to the pre-registration table. At the time, I was too young and ignorant to realize that my four-year-old was probably more musically well-rounded than this teacher who had never heard of Sondheim.

Into the Woods is a Broadway musical from the late 80's that deals with the concept of 'after' happily ever after. Weaving together many different fairy tales along with an original story of a childless baker and his wife, Sondheim explores the ideas of consequences for actions and the necessity of interdependence in community. I'm quite sure this is why little Lauren loved to watch the video over and over and over again. Even then she was charmingly intuitive.

Running around in these woods this last week has made me think about Sondheim's play and the way the fairytale characters scurried in and out of moments searching for meaning after they thought they had their lives all figured out. In the play Jack, from Jack and the Beanstalk, asked himself what do I do with a dead, thousand-pound giant decomposing in the backyard?

Here in these woods, stewing in the middle of my own personal 'after', I've had to ask myself the same question, "What do I do with this decomposing carcass?" 

Let me tell you, it's easier to keep running through the woods than to face that question. It's easier to curl up in a ball and let the huge, complicated beast catch up to me and eat me. Sounds like a good 'after' to my happily ever after, don't you think? Shhhh . . . listen . . . what was that? Did you hear something behind that tree . . . hold on, I'm going to check it out.

It was a skunk . . . she was NOT happy to see me . . . ran off, I think I scared her. . . . shhhh, there it is again. Did you hear that? It sounds like the echoing footsteps that tingle and crunch in your nightmares leaving you feeling less than-a-coward when you wake up . . . there it is again . . . what is that?

"Yes, it's okay to cry here too." The words entered my atmosphere like a slow knife being thrown from across the room. I felt my body lurch.

"What do you do that for . . . sneaking up on people like that? I asked you that question a week ago and you're just now answering me?"

"It took me a while to catch up to you. I brought you this."

He handed me a slip of paper, my cowardly eyes read, "For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ."

"What is this?"

"It's Philippians 1:19. Paul was in prison when he wrote that about his 'this' turning toward . . ."

"I know what it is. What I mean is . . . this . . . why did you come all this way in your black dress shoes to give me this?"

He looked down at his shoes, the new shine was obliterated with mud and scruffy scrapes. A loud prattle sprang from a nearby tree, making me jump and throw my hand over my heart.

"I thought it would help you find your 'this'. That's why you're in the woods, right?"

I crumpled the paper and threw it toward his damaged shoes. "Thanks but I really don't want to find my 'this'. I just want to get through these woods and out the other side before the huge, complicated beast catches up to me and . . ."

"I think it's too late." He pointed through the trees. My gaze followed his finger as a mist of terror coated my soul. A few trees away from me the huge, complicated beast was crouched, gnawing on his own arm for lunch. My stomach bolted into my throat as he looked up at me, a stringy red clot dripping from his mouth. Just beyond him were two more monsters . . . one coated in black from head to toe, standing faceless and silent, coiling his tail through his fingers. The other a one-eyed fiend thrashing around on the bronzed forest floor moaning lightly and pulling at his ears.

"Who are . . . ?"

"You may have hurt fear's feelings back in the tunnel . . . looks like he brought his friends with him. Yup, you're going to need this." He picked up the crumpled paper, smoothing the wrinkles and handing it to me again.

"Why? What did I do? Why is he after me?" I took the paper, smoothing out the last of the wrinkles myself.

"It's starting to rain. You may want to get  your computer out of the wet." He said.

I glanced back at the miserable devils fogging the corners of my woods. Their posture seemed poisonous and they smelled of a deep, filthy redness, the kind that refuses to wash off the skin. It seemed as if their presence was soothing me and pulling me apart all at the same time. I pulled my eyes away tucking the paper in my pocket and gathering my things.

"You're going after your 'this', then?" He asked.

"I have to find a safe place to spend the night." I announced.

"But if you find your 'this' first, it'll . . ."

"How can I worry about my 'this' when I'm in the middle of the woods with creatures like that stalking me?" I pointed toward the freaks, hoping my raised voice hadn't startled them.

As usual, he didn't respond when I insisted on doing things my way. I think I detected a faint nodding of his head, then again maybe he was just bending to polish his shoes.

"You don't understand. I'm sorry for snapping, but . . ."

He straightened; he hadn't gotten far cleaning his shoes. "But what?"

"Do you think the complex will ever be removed from my life?"

The rain was rushing past us in earnest now. I wondered if it had drowned out my question.

"Over there," I yelled through the downpour, pointing toward a ridge.

The pelting rain had forced a portion of rich, dark dirt to dissolve into the headland nearby, leaving an entrance. I ran toward it, stumbling inside. The walls were thick with rock, muck and grime. Wisps of smoke blew in circuits around my head and out the opening. It felt familiar, like I had been here before. But that was impossible. I saw the opening materialize only moments ago. Didn't matter if it was the black hole of doubt itself, I was out of the rain and away from the demons. That's all that mattered.

"You coming?" I called after him, straining my neck to see out the hole and through the wet backwoods. But there was no answer.

Julie