Destiny's Willing Student

Destiny's Willing Student

This story is personal but I consider you all friends. A little of the back-story: Early in 2006, my wife, Celeste, was in a terrible car accident that broke her pelvis, a bunch of ribs, and caused several other painful things to happen. Celeste had been already working with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for the last couple years, and this car accident greatly complicated her healing.

The yoga community stepped up to the plate and helped us out enormously—in every way imaginable. My little red truck I run around in is a reminder of how generous people can be. Our only car was demolished in the accident. When asked if there was anything in excess that one could spare to help out Celeste and me, some yoga students whom we had never met readily offered to GIVE us their truck that they felt was in excess. Wow.

Though Celeste spent a lot of time in the hospital and had to learn to walk again after two months of lying in bed, she still found the whole process a beautiful experience. Celeste healed wonderfully from the car accident, to the point that it doesn't come up much in conversation only but to offer gratitude for people like you who helped us out so much. Thanks you.

A couple of years ago, I was scanning through Celeste's teacher training notes to calculate the classes she attended so we could log our hours and get our certificate of completion. Celeste's accident came on the last day of the training. I came across the last page she wrote containing the inspiration she was experiencing literally 5 minutes before her car accident. Traveling in different cars, we were on our way to Missy Barron's funeral, an early death, a car accident. Missy was a fellow yoga teacher. On Celeste's last page of notes, she wrote: "When you prepare to die, or get close to death (perhaps someone you know), you might finally get awake enough to realize and experience the part of yourself that doesn't die. You are free in that moment. I am alive in that moment. I am experiencing everything in that moment. And I am grateful and I weep--thank you, Missy Barron for your presence and the reminder. You pass in to that place of the whole. You remind us to experience ourselves as whole and alive more often."

15 minutes later as emergency workers moved in fast-forward around Celeste's unconscious body, no one noticed the notebook, paused open to this last page and half-covered in shattered glass. The tears Celeste had shed on the page, still wet, melted and became one with the quiet snowflakes that drifted through the shattered window onto her page, merging prophecy with present, blurring the ink, blurring the lines between poetry and life.

And this is how Celeste lives her life: brave enough and present enough to move into the revelation of the present moment. Brave because it was as if by so doing, by realizing the stark truth of this moment, the moment of Missy's death, she quickly learned her lessons. She aligned her active life with the active prophecy found all around her, in the snow, the birds on the wire (see her poem, On a Winter Morning, below), the inspiration of our yoga discussion. By seeing the truth of this poetic world she has no choice but to be hurled along poetry's same swift path, pulling her to the depths and space between life and death, not as punishment but as a physical witness of what her spirit already knew. A chance to practice. This car crash wasn't an accident. Destiny had to teach her prepared student that to truly understand you too must bleed. Celeste rode the line between life and poetry until its end cracked like a whip upon her ready flesh. Bones broken, lessons learned, but as a witness to her life and spirit, her heart continued to beat, her lungs continued to breathe. She lived that day, and the next, and the next, and continues to live richly each new day. Each new dawn brings healing in its wings. Celeste walks this day, steadily, and with knowledge far beyond my own about what it means to freely live.


This poem was written the morning of her car accident:


On a Winter Morning

I turn my head up.
Birds on a line above me as I walk.
On 3 black cords, each cutting the same angle in a white morning sky
pregnant with soft snow.
The birds are not moving,
their heads tucked into plump, feathered bodies.
Giant, dark lumps with wispy tails
settled on 3 thin black lines.

I slow my mechanical walking,
feel the body open itself to the cold canyon air,
watch the steam around my face as I exhale.
My movements seem suddenly unnecessary.
They are breaking the silence,
thinning out the fullness.
There's no reason to keep walking.

It's all here, now

In the birds on a line above me
my eyes find contentment,
and for a moment,
maybe two,
I forget me.
I am resting bird bodies,
quiet,
huddled,
hushed.

The great flakes fall now,
pushed by a gentle sigh in the air.
The dark bird tails too are shifting, swishing side to side.
Like a dance.
In time to itself and the movement of the wind.
In time to the breath lifting my chest as I pause there.
In time to the resting blink of my eyes.

What seemed a solid, painted scene shifts and breathes,
swaying to the deeper hum,
the breath that moves tides.

I have stopped

and come alive

In that moment of bird tails and black lines.
I experience everything in them.
I pass into that place of the WHOLE,

as one dying.

And wake up,

For a pause,
a breath,
I remember her.
A freeway, a truck, a body broken.
A voice gone.

I turn my head down in gratitude,
weeping,
and walk home.

She'll never end. And neither will I.

Winter doesn't surprise them.
Birds never forget.

--ck

Celeste still struggles with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but through this experience she sees how she is being taught by the universe that every day is spectacular.