On one level, the accident wasn't so bad, when I think about it. There's always someone worse off, always someone suffering more, always something more violent, vicious, or horrifying than what's happening to us at any given moment.
 
But that doesn't change what is. What it is was a huge Indian road truck, Tata trucks, they're called, enormous raging behemoths of cargo, barrelling along the highway in the early morning hours as our car quietly, smoothly, and (we thought) safely delivered us to the airport. We were near the end of a 2.5 hour drive from our home in the village of Mayapur; only 15 minutes from the airport as I looked at my cellphone and said to my husband, “Well...we made it. We'll be there in 10, 15 minutes.”

​Well...we didn't make it to the airport. I told the driver he was going to “hit that truck.” And then nothing.

​I regained consciousness once, as they wheeled me from the ambulance into Emergency. I was upset that the nice lady with those huge scissors was cutting off my favourite shirt, and managed to express my chagrin.

It was a top-level hospital in Calcutta, an ambulance sent on request to come and collect us from the outlying small town we'd met our truck in, just out of Calcutta. The hospital enveloped us, first class surgeons trained and specialised and honed in Europe and Britain awaited our arrival: neurosurgeons, plastic surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, eye surgeons, back and neck specialists, general theatre surgeons, you name it.

​The room I finally woke in was beeping, pulsing, hushed but buzzing, stainless steel and white light, fabric-sounding movements, quiet voices, a clipboard hanging from the bed with a list of injuries: a thigh bone savagely wrenched entirely from the hip joint, shredding muscle, tissue, and tendons, pressing its dislodged self against flesh, trying to escape but hanging uselessly; an arm with both bones snapped, ligaments and tendons slashed and torn, glass ripping at nerves, numbing everything; my face, held together with around 100 stitches, a nearly lost eye; my shoulders dislodged; my thoracic spine, “one tiny fraction from breaking,” they said, a lump the size of a soccer ball protruding from between the blades, a mass of damaged muscle and tissue; three bones broken in my back but a whisper away from the spinal chord; a sacrum that couldn't speak, it was beaten too badly; legs that wouldn't walk, they were too bashed and bruised....all beaten, broken, ripped, torn, slashed, and scarred, from the ankles to the tip of the head, which ten years later I still can’t feel; my forehead is still numb, my hips didn’t work for years, I've had multiple surgeries. I could go on...

​I talked a lot but remember nothing; a week in Intensive Care, and only 10 minutes of memories. My husband lay next to me in a coma; then, when he woke, an induced coma so he wouldn't move. The room didn't scare me. Nothing did. But I couldn't stop talking. I remember only talking. And talking. But inside, I was as quiet as a church mouse. Everything in there had moved. I wanted to look at it through a microscope. So I would close my eyes and let it come...

​The orthopedic surgeon lied to me. Later I punched him, but I swear it was only reflex (though it was with my good arm). Not muscular spasm kind of reflex: more “killer instinct” reflex, when he tried to look underneath my injured arm and lifted it, went to twist it to see the underlying side...even when he was the one who had inserted the two titanium rods to hold it together, had stitched the jagged, bone-deep, L-shaped tear in the flesh, had sewn up the torn ligaments and ripped tendons, knew of the numbness in my hand, the frozen thumb and fingers, knew that that arm wouldn't turn, but mindlessly tried anyway. So I punched him. “Sorry,” I said, and left the room. I never went back, but found another instead.

It's too long a tale to tell. I could write a book. Well, I did...but it's not just about the accident. Possibly more about the quiet place, and where it lives every day, even on its days off. And more than that, it's about how I find it in the dark.

Some people don't recognise me. Not because of the facial scars: they're hardly visible. It's the other things that moved and shifted that day which they find hard to recognise; some of those things left, died...some grew out of the rubble, and took root, are growing still. I water them. I try to, anyway. I don't limp and cry and rage like I used to: it was a one-step-forward-two-steps-back routine of healing that my hips and back and shoulders and dammit everything clung to. But while I thank Patanjali and Mr. Iyengar for the yoga, and for the rubber mat makers, the cushion-making man across the river, and for trains so that I never have to get in a car again, still I remember the most painful stages of healing was "other people," that all they'd see were the scars, and as they faded, so too, they thought, my pain did, that my healing had reached its goal, it was all over. “You're all fixed, then?” they would ask. And now, ten years later, they don't even ask anymore. Cos I must be, right?

You see? ♥

My life could be drawn with broad, black & white strokes of an avant-garde brush, tinged with faded colour for effect against a backdrop of jungle tropics. For 20 years, home has been India, 18 of them in a small village on the banks of the river Ganges, 100-and-something kilometres out of Calcutta, chosen for its purpose of existence: spirituality, peacefulness, and simplicity. Every day in such an environment, life is like an exotic novel whose pages unfold like a 1920s silent movie: harmless, artistic, stylised, unorthodox, offbeat, appealing, colourful, fragrant, and never, ever boring.

Life unrolls like a slow, summer storm…it is, for 9 months of the year, warm, damp, and heavy, the fans stirring constantly, cool marble floors under the feet, palm trees rustling against screened balconies like lazy fingers. At the nearby temple, morning worship starts at 4.30 a.m…temple bells resound throughout the village, prayers are sung, mantras chanted.
 
So the days begin, so they go on…

But it is not constant. Life is a series of highs, of lows, and of course those coasting times — the ones where everything is good, when we are enjoying what we have worked for -- are the plateaus. Yet those, too, shall pass; at the end of that plateau is a sharp rise or fall…we are not able to predict. The plateau is the time not only to enjoy, to muse over what has been, but to gather strength for the next stage.

But is that conclusion simply born from a restless spirit? I don’t think so. While I would love to be content with the idyll that is my life, the yearning from deep within to peel back the layers as they rise to the surface is, it seems, preprogrammed into the human condition. Not that we are never content, but that we are always aware that there is still so far to go. There is no resistance to this life I live; in contrast, it is as easy to flow with as the currents in the Ganga at the end of the track outside my house. Life is idyllic, yet not fictional; ideal, yet not escapist. Its simplicity engages the mind and body, while the devotional vibrations and actions throughout the village nurture the soul…my chosen and most sought-after path in life. So no...there is no resistance to what might come. Like Eckhart Tolle wrote, 'to offer no resistance is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.'

​Open, then, to the next thing to come along, always ready…because life is not stagnant. And so in the openness of non-resistance, the next thing beckons, calls us to step up. Because surely there must always be resistance, even to seeming perfection? It is one of the flavours of life. It might seem in my environment that such grace and ease would cocoon one, keeping at bay the desire to change, alter, create resistance. But the human spirit longs for it. The soul cries out for it. Resistance is good. I want to always resist becoming accustomed to ease or to taking such an eccentrically beautiful life for granted. 

Yet what can I write that makes sense to those who don’t know of the spiritual flavour or philosophies my life is centred around? Still, we often want to see inside others, to attempt to detect through their words some flicker of recognition of ourselves in their internal travels, a union of expressed desires to someday, somehow, abandon everything that might be familiar and venture into the journey of our own identity and purpose. Like everyone should…

Everything has a pattern; every belief, desire, spiritual path, meditational retreat…everything. It is always tailor-made, individual, each person finding or needing their own unique flavour and style. That is natural. Yet the common ground such choices share is their constancy: they do not stop testing us. And that is the beauty of them. Perhaps, then, 'seeking' is the wrong word. Rumi wrote, 'I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my soul.' At some point, yes, we do stop seeking, when we find the path it is we want to tread upon for this lifetime.

Yet the journey itself never ends, the path forever strewn with obstacles, challenges, personal upheaval, let-downs, crushing blows, overwhelming success, unfathomable love and devastating hate, tottering health, plummeting youth, blossoming wisdom, and on and on. It is full and beautiful and it is ours, all ours. There is an art to scaling those obstacles, moving around them…even sometimes planting a few sticks of well-placed dynamite at their source and blowing the absolute f*ck out of them. But they are all part of the scenery on whatever path we take. Part of the territory, the package. No refunds. No way out. I have seen people stop at those obstacles and build their lives at the base, rather than moving around it, or scramble over it to the other side. They cover it with all manner of pretty things to disguise it, but it is still just an obstacle. Even the softest of lives has obstacles and challenges. How we face them speaks volumes. I cannot truly say that I have ever defeated one, won the challenge one presents, or removed any. I only know that they have to be faced. And I have faced my share...

Every life has them, even a seemingly idyllic and peaceful life on the banks of a river in an Indian village. Not that we have to go seeking them out in order to fulfill some wanderlust or satisfy our need to feel that we are 'doing something meaningful,' but because the nature of the soul is to rise to the surface and leave behind the limited confines of our human conditioning.

And so we take those rises and turns, those bumps and obstacles that scatter our own designer-made paths. We are not seeking; we know what we want, need, live for. 

May your own path rise to meet you, and the wind be always at your back…