Energy Rising

In many ways this has been the most challenging week yet. My conception that healing should progress in a linear order dips once again into a feverish state.

The belief that I can participate in this healing by the moderate embrace of the things I love--thinking by doing a little, I gain a lot—I focus on a little work with my Skatter Monkeys and making music. My doctor gives me full clearance to push the energy levels towards normalcy. No matter the activity and the tube in my belly, further damage to the urethra is unlikely.

Music seems a no-brainer. It requires a burst of energy and the band mates are magnificent about taking up my share of moving the equipment. They recognize when my eyes glaze over and I am no longer contributing effectively to the rehearsal. In the moment of practice or playing a show, all of the problems and sorely physical sensations slip away and I feel light in its purist form.

If I am quickly tired on a short walk or trip to the grocery store, considering my skis seems absurdly foolhardy. I rationalize the physical effort by staying on the easiest slopes, avoiding all bumps and trusting gravity to allow my skis to simply glide effortlessly. In fact, it turns out the real effort is securing the hot chocolate and fairly dividing up the French fries. When the morning is over, avoiding the route I used to ski, it is a long hike of two hundred yards uphill with boots on to our lockers where I wait for my son to return from romping by himself on our favorite runs.

To make this effort twice on the weekend, Monday has become a major day of rest on the couch. By Tuesday, I have felt invigorated and ready to write, visit friends, look for work, and otherwise move myself forward.

This weekend, however, combined the two activities, setting up the band Friday and playing twice in the afternoon with just a little rest between skiing and music. Tuesday I was still on the couch and slept nearly all of Wednesday with a high fever and a mystified doctor’s office considering I might have to make a trip to the hospital.

Easy to blame this episode on over-doing the weekend, my heart wants to find another cause. In my second year with these sweet kids, I have come to cherish their little monkey hugs. Having gone a long time without playing music, I am not in the mood to put it aside now.

My big sister Lane and I have shared so many intimacies, starting with sending her poems I had written but could not share with junior high school love interests. I came to Oregon to build her house and married the woman next door. We assisted at each other’s home births and she gave me shelter during my first divorce.

Suffering weekly, sometimes daily phone calls from Vermont to Oregon, she faithfully calmed me down in crisis after crisis through the long years of my second marriage, listening and supporting after most others had given up on our ability to manage any healthy changes. When I finally found the courage to separate, she has celebrated the return to my self and my creative excitement.

Within days of my accident, Lane sent me a piece about Chiron, the Wounded Healer of Greek mythology, a concept she had been telling me about for years. Chiron represents the transformative power that lies within us to accept the gift of the wound—the reality of our human condition—as an opportunity to grow more divine. By acceptance of what IS and forgiveness of ourselves and others as to the cause, we can emotionally detach from our story, and no longer defined by it, can become a medicine, teaching, assisting and inspiring others on a similar journey.

Hearing of this latest fever, Lane immediately called upon a network of like-minded friends, healers, who held me in their thoughts at a certain hour, envisioning a healing light that might embrace me. For hours afterward, my temperature was nearly normal.


This wound is to my groin, the root Chakra, the base for all else. The core representing family, security, one’s confidence in the world has been deeply ruptured. The consensus of my sister’s friends is that my Kundalini energy, the spirit of the divine, is awakening, rising from this wounded core, ready to sweep through my body and soul. This fever may, in fact, be my fear to heal, my fear to accept the wound as a pathway to wholeness, a complete renovation of old attitudes that no longer, if ever, worked for me.

Kipnco played rockin’ sets on both afternoons into darkness, Sunday especially, our eyes alight with mutual appreciation and self-satisfaction. As a combination of four, we were so much more powerful than individuals, contributing energy that could help people dance and laugh, just as these women 3000 miles away could keep me company through my fever. My little Skatter Monkeys are not yet making the connection that picking up their own skis helps me to help them, but they do accept that I am unable to bend over so easily this year, and hot chocolate comes faster if they are not all grabbing at once.

Wisdom is passed on--and learned intuitively--through the ages.

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