Raptor’s-eye view.

If my writing, of late, was like hurtling at great speed down a slope, on skis made of the thinnest glass and wax, then the past week has been about lying very still in the snow, dazed and with fractured bones after a massive wipe-out.  It was about time that events conspired to break the momentum and prevent even more grievous injuries.

I’ve had a chance to contemplate.  I’ve concluded that it won’t do me much good to lie in the snow for too long.  For one thing, there’s looming hypothermia, not to mention the necessity of stabilizing the broken bits and mobilizing some people to help carry me out of the woods.  I’m a wilderness first responder, after all.  Check for scene safety, insure body substance isolation.  Airway, check.  Breathing, check.  Circulation, check.  All the way through to evacuation and writing up a SOAP note.

There is much for me to attend to.  One might forgive any extended silence on my end, no doubt.  And my child is sick with a cold, to boot.

Nevertheless, there is an insistent call within myself, and this is what it says.

Get up.  Stand up.  You are here to learn.  It will take time and discernment to even come close to understanding the intricacies of this lived experience.  Every wipe-out is a map, pointing out your especially weak places and those of others.  Read the map in front of you.  Identify the topography, the cliffs, the bodies of water.  Recall that the map is not the territory, unpredictable and wild, and that you will need to accept that no map will ever be complete.  Time for a raptor’s-eye view of this undomesticated landscape.  Time to orient, to read the sun, the wheeling stars.  The spiraling flight path forward is waiting.

credit: Luc Viatour / http://www.Lucnix.be