This is a story- one that will be ongoing- about losing control, about getting lost, about getting really hurt, and ultimately, about somehow finding enough determination to overcome all that. It's about finding hope (and sometimes just creating it) even (especially?) while being terrified; it's about a kind of fear matched with stubbornness that makes a person look an "expert" in the eye and tell them they are wrong, wrong, wrong about what a human being can and can't do.
And it's about the rare but powerful experience of being moved by something inside that takes over in a crisis, never knowing that such strength could exist in such a damaged person. It is that part which drove me to write this story down.
There are so many metaphors and layers to this story, so many things that happened on so many levels, penetrating other levels, creating metaphors upon metaphors- but it will take some time to get there. It's hard to know where this story really begins, so let me start here:
I think of it as a wing because I was trying to fly.
Well, not literally. But close.
One might say I was trying to fly because I was in one of the lowest places of my life and had just been freed from part of the anguish of that place, at least somewhat.
I don't think I was necessarily thinking of flying, however, at the moment I fell, although someone once asked me,"What were you trying to do, fly off that cliff? Is that why you climbed up there, T?" From that "cliff", I took a 30-foot fall, head first, and stopped about half way up the pitch when the rope finally caught.
On the way down, something caught my left elbow and smashed it up nice and good, from radius to ulna to olecranon, creating quite a nice little puzzle for surgeons to come.
Breaking this arm has become very metaphorical to me. I hadn't thought much about my arms until I only had one that worked. But after my fall, aside from the new, shocking realization of how truly useful they are for every day living, I realized what they meant on so many other levels.
They were my ability to reach out and create or take what I wanted and needed in life, especially from the sorry place I was in. They were my ability to wrap my arms around the world, my friends, my family. They were tied in with my ability to love, to bring things I loved to me, to hold on to just about anything, literally or figuratively. But most of all, they had come to represent wings. I had just begun to think about the metaphor of flying out of that bad situation, something like a baby bird out of the nest, when I broke that wing.
And while what technically happened to my elbow and how it was that I fell, and why I was up on those rocks climbing to begin with is a part of this story (and will eventually, be revealed), this story is really about what happened to my spirit, my heart... and the wings that grew there instead.
So... here we go...
