The Convalescence Notebook, Part I, March 22, 2005

Published in the Uncategorized

The Importance of Wishing for the Right Thing

On my first morning at the hospital, word began to spread that I’d been admitted and something was wrong with my neck. And the phone calls and e-mails and best wishes from friends began to arrive. People were praying for me, saying mantras for me, sending me good thoughts. I remember thinking that was nice, but I didn’t see how it could possibly help. I mean, what had happened had already happened and I’d be having surgery in a couple of hours. What possible difference could it make? Well, it might make my convalescence a little easier, my recuperation a little faster and more complete. And it was something  people could do.

Now that I’ve been out of the hospital for five days, I know that something—and I’m not willing to rule out the effects of distant healing—was responsible for the miraculous chain of events that led to a cancellation of my surgery. What this means to me is that not only am I not in the middle of a difficult and painful recovery and rehabilitation from major spinal surgery, but that within three days I was home and sleeping next to my cat, eating a friend’s lasagna, running errands, and writing again.

And so this is for everyone who helped—or tried to help—in practical and invisible ways. What this hospitalization has taught me—in many ways—is that I have the greatest friends in the world.

I was meditating when the three bottom cervical vertebrae in my neck collapsed. I had been put on steroids and Tylenol for pain two days before, and I could sleep again and at least wasn’t in a constant state of worsening pain, less mobility, and more fatigue. So I sat up in bed on a Sunday morning, feeling refreshed after a peaceful sleep for the first time in recent memory, and began meditating.

I usually meditate for about an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. Some days it’s good, or at least parts of it are okay, and sometimes it’s nothing special, and sometimes it’s annoying or I’m in a hurry and I just stop. But it’s something like brushing my teeth—I only feel clean if I do it twice a day.

But this time I instantly entered a state of complete bliss (I can’t even remember a transitional period) and it didn’t go away. When I’ve heard stories of experiences like this in the past, I’ve only half-believed them, and I’m not really sure of what really happened because it was an experience given to me and then taken away. But I would sort of drift this way and that, but always within this brilliant white light. I could see “lightshadows” composed of an even brighter light circling around me and I could hear voices talking, or it was more like singing. I’d never had this experience before and I was kind of observing it, enjoying it, not thinking about what it meant. At one point I even had to force my eyes open to see how long I’d been meditating and it was something like an hour and forty or an hour and fifty minutes, but I just smiled and went back to meditating. It was Sunday morning.

In addition to that daily meditation practice for over 30 years, I’ve recently begun reciting the Gayatri mantra whenever I think of it during the day. The biggest difference I notice is that my daily highway commute is a lot more fun and I feel energized when I get to work instead of drained, and that I don’t get as irritated standing in long lines at the post office. And when I’m not thinking but just repeating a mantra, I can see a lot more of what’s happening around me—and some of it is pretty interesting.

The reason I’d added the Gayatri mantra was that I was recording a mantra program with the Vedic priest Thomas Ashley-Farrand, and Beverly asked him for a personal mantra and he sat down and gave her one. And as we were walking to my car after our final recording I said, in a commanding tone, “I want a personal mantra too!” “Oh, well, I’ve been waiting for you to ask for something. What do you want?” “Hmmm. Can I think this over for a minute? The reason I ask is that I’ve noticed that whenever something bad happens to me—or something that I’m afraid of—it always turns out to be in my best interests in the long run. When something bad happens to me, I learn beyond any doubt that I can survive even that—even what I fear most—and that makes me stronger. If you’re pulled across a river, you’ll have to learn how to cross it on your own before you’re through, right, so you’ll be stuck somewhere probably much worse still thinking you need help because you think you can only got across it with divine help—well, that’s how helping someone doesn’t help them in the long run, you know? But to honestly succeed against adversity is a real accomplishment. And even if it crushes you, in a couple of months, you often find it’s a positive change right–like the “thank God for cancer” people. People say that when things go badly, you find out who your real friends are–that sort of thing. And sometimes you have to be forced into making a change that’s going to save your life, or at least give you another life, a chance at a different life. And the more times you go around the wheel–the more times you hit bottom and pick yourself up and keep going–you begin to anticipate and see the shadows of the future in the present. You’re not feeling it, but you trust spring will come. Struggling is difficult, but it’s also rewarding. Your body knows it when you’ve done a good day’s work. Blake knew this! That not having to struggle makes you soft and over-confident and clingy. A real friend tells you the hard truth—you hear it, you face it, you change. But compliments and adoration make you weak, you get confused and a little delusional—and that’s what we really want when we want something and are willing to ask for it rather than earn it, right? It’s like seeing someone’s car and saying, hey, give me that, instead of, gee, that’s cool, I wonder what I’ll have to do to get one of those? It’s like my friends whose parents bought them everything—they never really amounted to anything because they were always looking for a way to manipulate the system for their own benefit. They always had their hands out. They were always searching everyone’s pockets. That never ends well. You have to earn the only things you can take to the bank, like honor and valor and loyalty and will and strength and courage. Because you’re going to be tested every minute of the day. When you wish for something you haven’t earned, you step off the natural order of things and any gift you get in that way can’t be the real thing, right? I mean, it’s like stealing. Part of deserving respect, I imagine, would have to include the willingness and desire to earn it, to sacrifice for it, and then to find it in the only place where you can actually own something like compassion or strength—the only place that no one can take them away from you—yourself. If it’s been given, it doesn’t belong to you–it isn’t yours–and can always be taken away, and so you’re ultimately weakened even by the gift of it. Because to bargain for qualities that you desire is like cheating–the heart knows the difference between someone who’s earned trust, and someone who hasn’t. Plus just in general you’re still looking for something outside of yourself that will save you, and you’re becoming dependent on something or someone outside of yourself for what you really need. And if you could possibly eliminate every one of those desires—which are almost always a desire inspired by fear or a sense of impoverishment it seems to me—then you’d finally be free and without fear. No one has anything I want! No one can convince me to exchange my precious time for something I don’t need. And I refuse to be oppressed by the lack of it! It’s a win-win situation. So even if chanting a mantra for divine favor may or may not work for some people, I think you’d get there a lot faster if you spend your time trying to earn the things you desire. If you want more love in your life, for God’s sake, love more. You wanna feel abundance, give someone a significant amount of money. Plus, I distrust myself. If I don’t earn it, how will I know if I’m accepting the genuine article or something that only has the outward appearance of it and I’m actually further away from what I wanted than ever before? And when you haven’t earned it you’ll always come back to that painful point where the thing you can’t live without becomes the one thing you have to give up. Clutching the symbol instead of the reality is the source of all tragedy! And it’s the source of most of what we call evil. But in this sense the demons are really gods, and the gods giving out all the gifts are actually the demons. You’ve got to learn to accept the demon to understand how it’s just another kind of angel, a better kind of angel, right? I think indigenous cultures are more hip to this than we are—they’ve got all their demons raised to the level of gods; we’re the only ones who insult all the demons in favor of a single god, or the “good” gods and goddesses. And then we create ideas like sin and grace to explain God’s smiting the innocent and damning his creations to an eternity of torment. As if the disappointments of just being alive weren’t difficult enough. Plus, all things have many faces—that’s where their power comes from—if you give penicillin to every one of your patients, some will get better, some won’t be affected at all, and some of them will die. If you ask it in, you should have to sign a waiver or something that says that you realize that to bring in one of its faces is to bring in all of its other faces. Even something as ephemeral as weather has at least four seasons, and you can count on them to appear in a specific order. And that’s the other half of all tragedy! Anyway, the question is, when you ask for something, how do you know you’re asking for the right thing? If you really wanted to help yourself out, wouldn’t you wish for something bad to happen to you? But who’s going to do that? That’s crazy! So I’ve got to be very careful here.”

“Oh,” he said, “Good. First, I had to be sure. You see, when you asked for a mantra I immediately heard the Gayatri mantra in my head. That was my teacher’s mantra and when I asked him for a mantra he asked me the same question I asked you—“What do you want?”—and my answer was the same as yours. So this is your mantra too. It is the foundation of everything I do.” He recited it to me. It was too long to remember, so I asked him to write it in my pocket notebook. We were on the highway at this point, and when he handed it back to me I looked at it quickly. The mantra took up an entire page. “Holy shit! You mean I’ve got to repeat this 108 times twice a day? That’ll take all day!” “Well, you can do whatever you want, but this is your mantra.”

So it’s Sunday morning, and I’m meditating and I’m in a state of bliss. And then a tremble of joy travels up my spine from my tailbone and when it reaches my neck it just moves it a little to the left—half an inch—just a tiny pleasant restrained extension. And suddenly I’m in immediate and total pain. Flames from the bottom of my skull are shooting down my neck and into my arm and wrist, and my back is in spasm as well. This lasts for at least 20-30 seconds. Then some quality of mind returned, but I wasn’t conscious. I was only conscious of the heat and the pain. And then in a few minutes the paralyzing pain subsided enough that I could think of something else, like getting out of bed so I could get my pain medications, which were downstairs.

I should back up a bit to the very beginning of this story.

I live alone, but I’ve lived with women before and the “how sick do you have to be to call the doctor” thing comes up. What solved it for me was one day I looked at her and said, “Well, if this was happening to me, what would you want me to do?” But when you’re alone, that person you’re having the argument with is yourself, and when you remove the primary motivation of seeking official medical treatment for the sake of easing your partner’s suffering, the argument loses a lot of its juice and direction. I thought about calling the ambulance to get me out of bed and into the hospital but my next thoughts were that Max had been throwing up all night, I was a day overdue for a shower, and that I had to get the catfood and large water jug out for Max because I might get admitted.

I’d actually “won” the call-for-help argument on my own about a week before. I had been having persistent and worsening left shoulder and neck pain for several days that had also begun waking me up at night, and I was also experiencing numbness and tingling in my left hand and fingers. I’ve worked over 20 years in emergency rooms and I know what pain radiating down your left shoulder and tingling in your fingers can mean. So I called my doctor and made an appointment.

The first thing I told the nurse was that I was certain it wasn’t cardiac-related. I don’t know why I felt the need to reassure her that I wasn’t really dying, but part of it was all those years in the emergency room where I’d been at the other end of one of those conversations—by making this phone call I made her responsible for giving me the right advice. What if I croaked on the way over—she’d always wonder if she did the right thing. There would be an investigation. Her decisions would be questioned. But none of this was mentioned in our conversation. Instead she told me to get to the office as fast as possible.

I casually took the second open appointment and ambled out to my car. At least I’d called and made an appointment! But then I began to worry. What if I was having a heart attack? What would that mean? What state were my affairs in, what would happen to all my stuff? What about the house? My unpublished manuscripts? Was I wise to drive myself? Should I have taken the symptoms more seriously? All those years in the emergency room—hadn’t I learned anything? Maybe not today, but someday it’s going to be a real heart attack. What will I do then? Wait a couple of days, call the doctor for an appointment, take a later appointment, drive myself to the office? Who would take care of Max?

But I wasn’t having a heart attack. My primary care physician (a generalist) asked a few questions, determined I was experiencing “thoracic outlet syndrome,” a form of repetitive motion disease—a carpal tunnel syndrome of the neck—instigated by all of the time I spent working at a computer. He found my strength and reflexes bilaterally equal, and he left the room to print some exercises off the computer that would be good for my condition. When he got back, he added a few general comments about improving my workspace, that I should work less, take longer breaks.

I walked out with a handful of paper. I noticed that the exercises were listed as being for “Bicycle-induced Auricular Radiculopathy,” but didn’t think too much about it.

I went home and did one series of the exercises. Some of them seemed to help, others not, but when I got to number six, where you arched backwards by dropping your shoulders and pulling your scapulas together, I could only do 5 of the 10 repetitions before I suddenly felt myself become very weak. It was as if all of my energy was pouring out of me. I waited fifteen minutes and tried again. This time I felt even weaker, almost empty. I finished the 10 repetitions gradually and then I turned to the next page, which explained what “Bicycle-induced Auricular Radiculopathy” was. BAR is named after an ailment common to people doing a lot of riding on European-style bicycles, where your neck is unnaturally curved backwards for extensive periods of time, putting stress on the rear portion of your cervical spine. Thoracic Outlet Syndrome is caused by the reverse process of putting unnatural stress on the front portion of your cervical spine, such as when a computer operator or a writer continually leans forward.

That night the pain in my shoulder and the numbness in my hands were so bad that I couldn’t sleep. Up until then I had two positions I could lie in without pain—one was with my left fist curled up under my chin and my left arm and shoulder pressed under the weight of my body. The other was on my other side, with my left arm draped over the curve of my hip.

But neither of these worked that night and it took over four hours for me to finally fall asleep, restlessly, for a few hours. The pain worsened the next day and by night-time it was constant and unrelieved by movement or position. I literally spun from 11 p.m. until 5 in the morning—I would settle into one position and then almost immediately have to move to avoid the pain. So I’d do another quarter-body turn, end up on my belly, my shoulder would hurt, I’d turn on my left side, impossible—immediate pain—back on my back, uncomfortable, and then start the whole process all over again.

Max couldn’t figure out what was going on. He sat at the bottom of the bed and stared at me and listened to me groan as I spun in the comforter until it was gathered around me like a corkscrew. Then he began throwing up.

When I got up in the morning, I realized it was Friday and if it my pain continued to get worse or if I couldn’t get to sleep tonight it was going to make for a long weekend. So I called the doctor and made another appointment. I took the later one.

When he examined me this time, I had noticeably less strength in my left arm and fingers, and my reflexes were diminished as well. He ordered x-rays of my cervical spine.

The woman in his office who took my x-rays took eight of them. When they came out on the developing tray, we immediately realized that I was wearing a silver necklace, which partially obscured the area of my cervical spine that they were intended to reveal. She left the room to consult with the doctor and I used the time to stare at the bones of my face, my head, and my neck, trying to see something significant, but I couldn’t. They didn’t even really seem to be my bones, particularly. But the silver necklace x-rayed beautifully—like a Rayograph.

But even from these the doctor was able to show me what was going wrong in my neck. My bottom three cervical vertebrae (C5, C6, and C7) had “collapsed” down onto the spaces between them like a Hollywood overpass in an earthquake, and the pressure had caused the expulsion of half of the cushioning fluid into places where it didn’t belong—in my case into a nerve bundle radiating above my scapula into my upper arm. (A later MRI revealed that I also have congenital spinal stenosis—which is a diminishment of space separating my spinal cord from my spinal column—which would explain the later pain down my back, but we didn’t notice that then.)

At this point it was 5 p.m. on a Friday. Everything was closing down, including the doctor’s office. (This time I’d definitely made the wrong choice.) While I stood in the hallway, everyone was getting dressed and going home, except for two nurses who were calling the eight closest imaging facilities to schedule an MRI for the next day, without luck. The earliest appointment they could get was on Monday evening, in Lakewood, about 60 miles away. But I was scheduled to fly out for a recording in Ojai on Tuesday morning, returning late Thursday, and we decided since I wasn’t in a lot of pain that it could wait until I got back the following Friday. The doctor gave me a prescription for steroids (dexomethosone, one every four hours) and Tylenol extra strength, two tablets every four hours.

Once I began taking the steroids and Tylenol, I immediately felt better, almost as good as new. No pain, little discomfort, and my good spirits returned. That brings us back to Sunday morning.

Once I was able to stand up, bracing myself against the wall, I decided my first destination should be to get downstairs and take a steroid and some Tylenol and see if they helped. It took me over 75 minutes to make it downstairs, but standing up and moving around actually felt a little better at first. The problem was that within a few steps I’d become completely fatigued and have to drop to the floor as gracefully as possible. When I got there I bent over and hung my head toward the floor, and that seemed to make me feel better. In those moments I wasn’t in any obvious pain, but I didn’t feel like getting up either. But eventually—sometimes fifteen minutes later, sometimes twenty minutes later, it’s hard to tell—I’d “wake up,” feel a sudden swell of energy, stand up slowly, and totter a few steps, or make it to the top of the stairs, or sometimes just down a couple of stairs before having to sit down again, having to rest for longer and longer periods of time. Near the end I had the sensation that I was actually falling asleep or losing consciousness—I would sort of drift off and it was very pleasant, actually. It was hard not to give into it. It was certainly less of a struggle. But I also didn’t have any choice about the struggle. It would just sort of happen—I wasn’t really thinking about getting up. But I’d heave a sigh, steady myself, stand up slowly, and totter a few steps and sit down again.

When I got downstairs, I took the pills and waited to see if they’d have any effect. They did, a little. About 45 minutes later I began to feel somewhat lighter. I got up and got Max’s food dish out and filled it, got the water jug out and filled it, and even took a shower (kind of), and cleaned up all the cat vomit, in case someone came over to feed Max while I was away. But all of that expended energy was a mistake, and long before I’d finished cleaning up I realized I was on a downward spiral, and still over two hours away from when I could take another steroid or Tylenol.

That’s when I decided to drive myself to the hospital. Part of the reason is that I only live a mile away and I can get there driving mostly on one sidestreet—Balsam—which begins a block from my house. And if I got tired I could pull over.

I soon realized I had more problems than being too exhausted to drive–bending down to get into the car, for one thing, and then adjusting the seat backwards. I ended up leaning forward, with both arms bent over the steering wheel, peering over my fingers. Within a block I had to pull over and rest. Then I crossed Folsom without trouble, and when I got to Balsam I was in luck and the light was green and there was no traffic. At this point I needed to pull over but suddenly realized that there’s no parking or even a pull-over lane on Balsam, other than the bike path. What if something happened—what if I became unable to drive for some reason? Or even if I pulled over, how could I catch anyone’s attention? I didn’t even own a cell phone. But I soldiered on somehow and nothing terrible happened and I made it all the way to the hospital in one final assault. Walking into the hospital wasn’t so difficult, and the nurse on duty knew me and took good care of me and got me right back into a room.

I had to climb onto a stretcher, undress, and put on a robe while the ER tech took my medical history. A lab tech came in to set up an IV and I closed my eyes because I’m not fond of needles and IVs. Then I felt a cool hand on my shoulder and I opened my eyes. It was Dr. Jones, perhaps my best friend on staff in the Emergency Room. I’ve known him and his wife for over 25 years. He looked like the kindest man I’d ever seen. “Randy, what happened?” “I fucked up my back, David.” “You sure did.”

David did the neurological exam and told me he was calling in a neurosurgeon immediately because my deficits weren’t good. While he made the call, the ER tech took over putting the IV in my right arm. He criticized the lab tech for leaving the room before she’d finished—didn’t she know that they need that in before they can start giving me medication for pain? I kept my eyes closed. He was jabbing. “Holy shit!” He shot away from the side of the bed. “I’m sorry! I’ll clean that up. Woah!” When he finished he had to wipe down the wall, the floor, the railings on the stretcher, and in between my fingers. When the lab tech came back she said, “Why did you put it in sideways?” “I didn’t.” “Yeah, you did.” “Well, it’s working.”

They wheeled me down for an MRI and in the hallway the nurse asked me, “Do you think you can go through with this?” “I don’t know.” “Do you think you need more sedation?” “I don’t know.” “Do you want to have a nurse from the ER come down and check you out?” “I don’t know.” We stared at each other for a long time, her arms crossed over her chest, peering down at me, waiting for something to happen. “Hey, let’s just go ahead and do it, okay? If it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.”

It didn’t work the first time. I wasn’t aware of moving around or anything, but I was on a lot of dilaudid and valium at the time. Anyway, they pulled me out, pumped me full of more drugs, and I went back into the tube. Then they took me up to my room.

The MRI revealed the spinal stenosis as the reason for my back pain, and it also revealed what had caused my “accident.” The exercises I had been given by my primary care physician had put a great deal of pressure on the rear portion of my cervical column, where over the years a great deal of cushioning material from the disk (think of a balloon filled with goo) had collected. To deal with gradual or continuous pressure, a back bone compensates nicely, forming additional bone calcifications and muscular-skeletal adhesions, reinforcing the danger spots. But the exercises I was given had cracked those calcifications and the adhesions. In effect, I had reduced the only struts and supports strong enough to hold up the lower portion of my cervical spine into rubble. In addition, the backbone doesn’t react as well to sudden pressure, such as that caused when I used my entire back, shoulder, and chest muscles to do a reverse crack on my three lower cervical vertebrae. In those cases, pressure goes wherever it finds the least resistance. In my case, when sudden pressure was exerted on the distal portion of my cervical spine, the compressed cushioning material had to flow somewhere, and the weakest areas of my cervical column were on the left side and down along the front of my cervical spine. That meant that a lot of this material traveled down my spinal column and into my left arm nerve bundle.

When we got to the room, the mattress was at least six feet off the floor—it looked like something out of “The Princess and the Pea.” “Oh, dear,” the nurse said, “We’ll have to fix that. Can you get off the stretcher and walk, or do you want me to wheel you over?” “I don’t know. Let’s see.” I swung my legs off the stretcher and stood up slowly. Everything seemed to be working. “Yeah, I guess I’m okay.” “Well, let’s fix that bed.” A quick check of the three most likely places to find a light switch in the room came up emptyhanded and she eventually gave up and went to get a floor nurse. “Hey, while you’re doing that, I’ll be in here, going to the bathroom, okay?”

When I got out, the bed and the lights were both operational—sort of. “So you’re our new surgery patient?” asked a floor nurse, cheerfully. Then there were a lot of instructions given in a very short amount of time about what worked and what didn’t in the room, especially for someone taking a lot of valium and dilaudid at the time. They would point to something and by the time I could turn to see it, they’d moved on to something else.

Unfortunately, the pain medication orders hadn’t made it to the floor yet, so before anything could be set-up several phone calls had to be made. Finally David just wrote a continuation of the dilaudid order from the ER, and the nurse began hooking up a PCA pump—one of those machines where you can get medication on demand within certain time constraints—mine was 2 mgs. of dilaudid every fifteen minutes.

After it was all hooked up, she explained how to use it. Since she’d set it up on the left side of my bed, I had to crane my neck to see what she was describing and I still couldn’t even see the button I was supposed to push, which she had placed on the mattress beside my useless (and to me invisible as well) left hand. “Um, you see, I’m injured on my left side, and if I have to turn over on my left side every fifteen minutes, craning my neck to find the button, I don’t think it’s going to be a very good night.” She reacted as if I’d made a temperamental or childish request, or that I was criticizing her nursing skills. “Of course, I can set it up on the right if that’s where you want it.”

I didn’t like the dilaudid. It kept me awake, for one thing. It just made me agitated and hyper. I kept my eyes closed but I kept seeing these fractured fractal movies playing over and over again, interspersed with disturbing images and fragments of remembered conversations, like three films projected onto three levels all at once.

I had arrived on the floor a little after 6 p.m., and there were no surgery orders, although I was admitted as a surgical patient. This meant, the nurses told me, that the doctor would be in shortly to examine me and it was probable that I would be going into surgery before the night was over. But we would have to wait until he arrived before they could answer any of my questions about my condition, my treatment, my prognosis, any change in drugs (I was already trying to get off dilaudid and onto valium, which was the only thing that seemed to genuinely help), or my daily dose of Lipitor or the steroids (which I had the presence of mind to bring with me, but now couldn’t take).

The sole real conversation I had with anyone on staff during my stay took place during my intake evaluation. A young nurse actually picked up a chair and approached my bed. She questioned me softly and looked at me when she asked a question and listened patiently for my reply. The interesting thing was that she whispered the entire time, even though there was no need to—we were the only two people in the room. Then she would very slowly and carefully write down my answer on her log. When she was finished she’d stare down at the piece of paper for a long time—too long, really—before looking up again and asking me the next question. Sometimes she would either flatten the page or sweep some imaginary dust off of it before she continued. I felt that we had all the time in the world. Several times after I finished my answer, she would continue to stare at me with large eyes of kindness, waiting to see if I had anything more to say. I felt the whole evening slowing down, becoming quiet. She was leaning over the side of my bed, looking down at me with lovingkindness and genuine concern.

Her questionnaire had three sections. The first was my medical history. The second was to record my baseline functioning—what condition I was in when I arrived on the floor. The third section was a social assessment. This was the most interesting part of the interview.

“Mr. Roark, what is your acceptable level of pain?” I stared at her. “Zero.” “On a numerical scale of 1-10, please.” “Zero.” She wrote down my answer and stared at it for a long time. Then she leaned over the side of the bed and whispered into my ear, close enough that I could smell the sweetness of her skin, that she wasn’t wearing perfume. “Mr. Roark, we’re very seriously into pain control on this floor. There’s absolutely no reason for anyone to suffer. But if I put down ‘zero’ on your chart, every time a nurse comes in the room and takes your pain scale, if it’s not zero we’re going to do everything we can to get you there. Is that what you really want?” “Good Lord, no! Put down 1.5 to 2. No, put down three. I can put up with three as long as it’s not constant.” She turned her pencil over and patiently erased the “zero” and wrote 1-2 instead.

“Do you feel safe at home?” “Well, considering this happened at home, no, home is not feeling particularly safe to me right now, no.” This was the only time that she actually seemed genuinely flustered by anything I’d said. “Well, actually, this question is more for people who don’t feel safe with the people they live with at home.” “Oh, like abusive spouses or something?” “Or kids.” “Well, I live with my cat. He’s pretty mellow.”

Her final question was “Is this hospitalization causing you any stress?” I stared at her in disbelief. “Well, yeah! There’s so much to do and this is a bad time because I’m supposed to fly out for a difficult recording on Tuesday and instead I’m in the hospital getting prepped for back surgery and I can’t move my left arm. Yeah, I think this hospitalization is causing me stress, sure.” “You know,” she was whispering again, leaning close to my ear, “I’ve always felt that was a ridiculous question, too. I mean, I’m always more worried about the ones who say no.”

Then she left and someone got me a sandwich plate and a banana from the kitchen (I hadn’t eaten all day) and by 11:30 I convinced the nurses that the doctor wasn’t coming in and we decided to turn out the lights and let me get some sleep.

It was about this time that the alarms in my room started going off. I’ve worked in hospitals nearly half my life and I know that hospital alarms going off is a bad thing. But these days when you’re in a hospital, an alarm means that you have to find the call button, which in my case often became trapped under the immobile half of my body since she’d hooked it up on my left side, or more often discovering that it had fallen completely off the bed. Then, once you find the right button and push it to get someone’s attention, an orderly will appear and ask, “What’s wrong?” “The alarm is going off.” “Oh, okay, I’ll have to get a nurse. I’ll be right back.” Then a nurse will eventually appear, turn off the alarm, and scowl at the machine as if it had done something wrong in order to annoy her.

The first alarm went off when my IV bag ran dry—which is not something that’s supposed to happen. Even so it emptied out again later that night. And once an alarm woke me up to tell me that my dilaudid had run out, which I thought somewhat ironic. Finally, at about 4 in the morning, a fourth alarm went off—this time it turned out that my dilaudid IV had become blocked and had to evacuated. That took a long time, long enough that I just stopped taking the dilaudid.

With breakfast came the news that the doctor would be in “between eight and ten” to go through the pre-op procedure. Then a nurse came in to check my IV at shift change. First she found a punctured bag on the counter. I’d forgotten all about that. During the night a nurse had come in, jabbed the bag while she was inserting a needle, and had dumped the punctured bag on the counter before going out for another one. She picked up the leaking bag and waved it in my face. “Who left this here?” “I don’t know. It wasn’t me!” “Well, who was it then!” “I don’t know! It was dark. I’m on dilaudid! Alarms were going off!” Then she looked closer at the hook-up: “My God! He’s got this running at 125. You’ll blow up like a balloon at that rate. Well, if that’s what your doctor wants, that’s what he’ll get!”

At that point I began calling people, and I quickly realized that I was no longer sure of anyone’s phone number. Except Susan Edwards, whose number starts with three 4’s, and then includes a sequence of the numbers 4-8-6-2, which makes an inverted square around the number pad on a telephone. I actually needed Sue Rhynhart’s phone number so she could take care of Max, but I knew Susan would have it. And as it was Monday morning and I was expected at a meeting in twenty minutes and was also supposed to turn in a final manuscript as well, I also called work to explain what was going on and what we could do. I had to dial the number three times before I got it right. My boss called back—she would take care of the final changes to the book that was due to proofing that day, but the only copy of the final text was on my home computer. I thought for a moment and realized that the only person I knew who might be able to help was Joe Richey—but what was his phone number? The more I thought about it, the foggier it got, so I just grabbed the phone and punched in the first numbers that came to mind without thinking at all. Luckily Joe answered the phone. I explained the situation and he assured me he would take care of it immediately.

Then Susan Edwards dropped by and handed me a cup of tea, and waved her hands in the air to dissipate the suffering that had gathered over my head, and then sat in a chair and stayed a lot longer than she intended because instead of talking about my illness we had one of our usual conversations about art and poetry, filled with jokes and wisecracks and laughter.

As she was leaving, Sue Rhynhart showed up with a handful of gladioli and turned a water jar and a bow into a decorative vase for my windowsill. By this time, I was barely able to keep my eyes open, but I told her several times how beautiful she looked. I was seeing her through a gauzelike curtain of myopia and she was radiating light and softness.

My mouth and mind weren’t tired or unable to follow the conversation, but when I tried to visually focus on anything in, it would randomly advance or recede into and out of focus. Sometimes Sue seemed right beside my bed, almost in my face, and at other times she seemed to retire into the outer reaches of the room. I was the only immobile object in the room.

I think Sue said goodbye before she left, but I don’t really remember. I remember a nurse waking me up to check my vital signs on her noon rounds. She no longer knew what to tell me about the surgery. It was certainly too late for the doctor to schedule a surgery for today unless he was willing to call in the second crew on a Sunday.

Then Joe Richey showed up and instantly noticed that my hands were swollen—probably secondary to the high flow-rate of the IV—something that either the nurses themselves hadn’t noticed or had done nothing about. Joe brought a radio so that I could hear Sam Kashner speak on public radio that day about his book on Allen and Naropa. That didn’t seem like something that would make me feel better, so I thanked him but we both knew I probably wouldn’t be listening to Sam Kashner tonight.

At 1 o’clock my surgeon arrived at the hospital and discovered that the orders he’d phoned in the night before for a 1:30 surgery hadn’t made it to the floor or into the surgery book (probably since I was delivered directly from MRI to the floor, but, still, that’s preposterous—someone would have found them and delivered them to the floor at some point, and certainly at shift change, or they would have been found when the nursing staff called down for medication the night before). Exasperated, he sent his assistant into my room to handle the pre-op duties while he tried to call in another crew. At this point I had still never met my surgeon.

The first thing his assistant said to me was, “Well, it’s not the best MRI I’ve ever seen.” “Why? What do you mean?” “Well, it’s just not.” Then he took my medical history and read me the healthcare bill of rights and the pre-surgical agreement. I signed something. Then he had some time to kill so he thought he’d give me a quick physical examination. “What’s your level of pain now?” “Oh, one, one and a half, sometimes two. Mostly one or one and a half. It spikes to three if I move around too much.” “And you’re on … what?” “Dilaudid. 2 mgs. every fifteen minutes. But I’m not taking it any more.” He looked up. “You’re not taking any pain medications?” “Not since 4 this morning.” “And you’re doing okay?” “Yeah, I’m doing alright. I can get up and go to the bathroom—after I unplug all of this equipment of course, which is by far the hardest part of that procedure. I can bend over and pick something off the floor if I want to.” He was silent a long time. Then he stood up and said, “Well, let’s see how your strength and reflexes are doing.” He tested both sides together, then stopped and tested them again. Then he tested the two sides individually. Then he stood behind me and tested them again. “Well, that’s interesting. It must have been the pain. Let me get your doctor.”

He returned with a young Nordic god dressed in a white lab coat who towered over the end of the bed. He introduced himself, we shook hands, and then he and his assistant leaned back against the wall, as far away from me as possible, and crossed their arms, looking down at me quizzically. “Well, you’re not in pain, you’re up and moving around, your strength and reflexes are bilaterally equal. You’re no longer a candidate for surgery. I pronounce you healed!” Everyone laughed except me. “Come in the office on Wednesday and Thursday and we’ll give you a couple of injections in your neck and you’ll be as good as new.” At that point Joe spoke up—I had forgotten he was still in the room. “And lots of full body massages!” The doctor paused and looked at Joe, and then turned back to me and said, “Of course, if you’re not better by Friday, that could still mean surgery, but I’ll discharge you tomorrow with a bottle of percoset. Call me if there are any problems.” After first shaking my hand, he never touched me at all. He didn’t repeat the physical exam.

The next morning after breakfast I took a shower and felt worse, and the nurse decided I needed some percocet before she could discharge me home. I was feeling grey and exhausted and didn’t feel very excited about going home. But I wasn’t about to stay in the hospital either. I had realized that one doesn’t necessarily improve under medical care, one more or less survives in spite of it. It became clear to me that my body was a wondrous thing—it could withstand all sorts of treatments and mistreatments and still get well.

When the discharge nurse came back to give me final instructions, she told me to lie down instead. It was the second time during my stay that a nurse had actually looked at me and shown genuine concern. “I’m not discharging you until you’re ready. There’s no hurry. We’ve got plenty of rooms and our census is low. You can stay here all day if you want to.” I immediately fell over sideways and went into a dreary kind of sleep. When I woke up an hour later, I felt much better, better enough to pack up my stuff and carry it into the hallway.

I must have looked a little unsteady. The nurse at the desk questioned me about my orders, my discharge instructions, if I felt okay to walk or if I wanted a wheelchair, is someone going to meet me in the lobby? I lied about everything while continuously staggering forward, toward what I imagined was the exit. She turned me around and pointed me toward the elevators. I stumbled on, taking rather wide turns, unable to stop my forward motion except to ask everyone I passed which direction I should be going—I felt like I was caught in some illogical maze. Every time I opened a door, I seemed to be in the wrong place or headed in the wrong direction.

They were supposed to call a cab for me because I shouldn’t have been driving with percoset “on board,” but by the time I got downstairs my head had cleared and I could walk a straight line and it seemed easier just to get into my car, back up, and drive off. I had to stop at Safeway to get my percoset anyway. Then I stopped at the Kentucky Fried Chicken next door (I’d only had two meals in the last three days) but couldn’t eat any of it when I got home.

I sat on the couch most of that first evening, taking 2 tablets of percocet every four hours. Max sat by my side the entire time—about nine hours—even though I spent the entire time in a kind of torpor—immobile, depressed, and scared. I finally climbed the stairs and went to bed at 1 in the morning and took another two percocets.

I woke up at 4 a.m. and realized that the percocet wasn’t working—not because I was in physical pain, which I was, but because it seemed to be exacerbating the pain in my head. So in a state of desperation I picked up the phone and left phone messages at work for two of my friends, asking if they had any “herb” they could lend to me or sell me. The minute I hung up the phone I realized what a serious lapse of good sense I’d just exhibited. Once again, I’d picked up the phone and involved someone in my story and made them responsible without even consulting them. But what could I do now?

When I woke up in the morning I felt sluggish and clouded. But, instead of reaching for another two percocets, I decided to stop taking them. Within an hour I had more energy than I’d experienced at any time since my “accident.” I began motoring around my house like a madman—just because it felt good to move freely again. And then one of my friends called and said he was on the way over to bring me some herb. I apologized profusely, told him that I realized afterwards how inappropriate I found my own behavior, how ashamed I felt, but in that moment I was in total despair—I was feeling so depressed, so desperate that I felt I had no choice. He ended up hanging out for a while and when he left I thought about smoking the marijuana but I didn’t really feel like it anymore. I was slightly whacked as it was—would it be safe to be high and whacked at the same time? What if I hurt myself and I was stoned—would I even know how badly I was hurt or would I be thinking clearly enough to know what to do? What would it be like to be stoned and throw your neck out? How stupid would I feel then? I had been released from the hospital the day before. I couldn’t possibly be healed enough to take a chance like that.

So I did the dishes, read some magazines, and listened to some music until it was time to go to bed. Then I decided it would be safe to smoke a little pot. I sat at my kitchen table and smoked a bowl. I got high. But I wasn’t tired. In fact, I was kind of antsy, the music was good, and I began dancing around the living room.

Then I saw a manuscript on my dining room table. I was getting bored with myself and thought maybe I’d just read a little until I got tired enough for sleep. Plus part of me was curious to see what I had written—who would I turn out to be this time?

I picked up the manuscript and realized that it was a book-length collection of poems I’d written a couple of years ago on alchemy, mostly during a trip home for my father’s funeral. In the introduction I mention that I had seen a book called “Hermeticism and Alchemy” at the Tattered Cover Bookstore and knew instantly that it was going to be the basis of my “next book.” I also had a clear vision that it would take two years of my life to complete the book.

The idea of spending two years writing a book of poems on alchemy was positively annoying. Would it be any good? It would certainly take a lot of hard work and time commitment to find out. I had no vision for the book other than as a two-year-long crossword puzzle that in all likelihood would never work. I decided I’d be better off doing something—anything—else.

After a couple of months I took the book off my coffeetable and put it in my bookshelf, more or less “abandoning” the project. And then a year and a half later I got a phone call that my father had died. Leaving the house, I threw the book in my bag, thinking that spending 2 years writing a collection of poems about alchemy might not be a bad idea after all.

I wrote about 60% of the book in the evenings after returning from the events surrounding my father’s death, and when I returned to Boulder I completed the rest of it in a couple of months, still not having a very clear idea of what it was about, or if it was even worth “finishing.” Then a few weeks later I went to sleep and woke up in the middle of the night with what I realized was the beginning of the coda for the poem. The only thing I could find to write it down on was a Kleenex box by the side of the bed (Amy Hayes has it now) and I wrote on it until I filled every white space on all six sides of the box. Later I went back to my journals and found out that I had finished the book exactly two years to the day that I found the “Hermeticism and Alchemy” in the bookstore. I published it, quickly, as a Laocoon Press edition and forgot all about it.

What was interesting to me in re-reading poems that night was that although they were written more or less coincidentally as a “project” to help me through the social requirements surrounding my father’s death, it was suddenly crystal clear to me that both the collection and alchemy itself are both about death—death in life, life in death, what’s worth preserving and how, what do we have to let go of and how, where are we going when we think we’re going forward, why don’t we seem to ever really get anywhere, what’s quantifiable about what survives, is there any point to surviving in any form, what does nature and science have to teach us about what’s important and what’s ephemeral, and how insignificant our lifespan is in the context of the complete concept of time, or even compared to a redwood or tortoise. And you still have to try to explain the importance of suffering and death. And, especially, what’s really going on here and who are we really?

Michael Taft, who did my Vedic astrology chart shortly after my accident, picked up immediately that my injury wasn’t self-inflicted but had something to do with my father’s karma, so my attraction to this work written during my father’s death doesn’t really surprise me now.

My relationship with my father was constantly problematic because he was a very large and angry man, and physically abusive to me the entire time I lived at home (I left at 17 and never went back), and was also a practicing alcoholic until the day he died. But about a year after his death I had a sudden, fully formed realization while I was walking down the stairs into my living room, thinking about something else entirely—I realized that I had always loved my father and really wanted him to love me too and that my persistent sense of loss had something to do with the constant rejection and erratic behavior, but it had more to do with my inability to access the strength and energy that I needed to see positively exhibited by my father. But now that he was gone—and I really felt in that moment that he was helping me from beyond—the only thing between me and claiming that masculine power was to erase the sole image I had of it—that it was cruel, that it was insensitive, that it was unreasonable, that it bullied, that it somehow got pleasure out of being mean, that it was even crueler when it thought it could get away with something.

Obviously, I have a lot of karma to work out in that area myself, and avoiding it (like my father did) isn’t going to help matters much. The mythological motif is of the elderly, infirm father crawling back to his children with complete and sincere contrition, only to suffer further humiliation. There’s a great Sufi story about a boy who gets upset when his Prodigal Father returns to make amends, and he picks up his father and drags his ailing body back out to the road across an orchard. At one point his father begins to shout, “Stop! Stop! I dragged my own father no farther than that first peach tree!”

Anyway, I began revising the text—editing out entire poems, seriously contracting others, creating one poem out of two, adding new sections, and moving things around until I got to the end. I finally went to bed at 9:45 in the morning. I’d never even gotten out of my chair.

I spent the next five nights in the same state—late at night I smoked some marijuana, I pulled out a manuscript, and finished it before going to sleep, and began seeing how they were the pieces of a much longer 5-volume work. By the fourth and fifth nights, I’ll admit I was pretty tired and not as excited (or enthusiastic or inspired) while working on the texts—it became a real chore—but by dawn they were finished.

Michael Taft’s Vedic Astrology reading included three pieces of advice and a comment. The comment was that the “Finger of God” was protecting me—which I found completely believable, considering the impossible sequence of events that had resulted in the cancellation of my back surgery (if the orders had been delivered to the floor, I would have been prepped and on my way to surgery by the time the surgeon arrived), and the long and painful recovery and rehabilitation that would have necessitated.

The first piece of advice, as I’ve already mentioned, was that my illness was not related to me or to my body, but rather karma—and specifically my father’s karma. This didn’t bother me. Thinking about someone else for a change would be good for me.

The second piece of advice was that since this wasn’t about my body that I should seek out an energy medicine practitioner instead of someone into physical medicine. Physical medicine wasn’t going to help me. Well, I’d already come to realize that. The one thing that I found impossible to consider was to trust anyone anywhere near my back for quite a while, and I knew an energy medicine practitioner didn’t actually need to touch you.

But the third piece of advice was something I was not ready to give up. He told me that I should temporarily just stop everything—including my writing—and concentrate on creating and deepening and developing my soul. And that if I did that, I would be soon be surrounded by Blakean cherubs and hymns.

But the problem was that I hadn’t meditated since that Sunday morning. Would you? I was in a state of bliss, the most complete I’d ever had in my entire life. I was completely relaxed. And yet in that state, a subtle turn of my neck had brought about all of this, and almost a whole lot more. My immediate response to the thought of meditation was “danger.” I would never be able to get to that state of mind again because I’d be scared of it. So what’s the point? It was just something that was given to me and taken away. Over thirty years of meditation without missing a day—and now for the first time since then I hadn’t meditated in a week.

I even wrote Michael an e-mail which explained why stopping everything—especially my writing—wasn’t something I was willing to consider:

I’m hearing from every corner that I should just STOP, but what if working on these books is what I’m doing to create and deepen and develop my soul—this is what I actually feel is happening. The Finger of God, if it’s protecting me, has also led me to this work, and I really believe it’s God’s work. Plus I feel better—more alive, inspired, creative, productive, joyful. How can this be bad?

I know, it’s impossible to understand without the books in front of you, but I think you’ll understand better when they are. And your Blakean reference is so apt—there are moments in these works where I actually sound like Blake! I realize now how he did it and I share his confidence!

And then something came to me tonight that explained everything.

As I said at the beginning, I have been meditating for over 30 years as a kind of mental hygiene, without goal. I had a goal when I first started—I hated myself. And then I met two people who were the happiest and the most attractive, attentive, genuine, healthy, and engaged people I’d ever met. After a couple of months one of them mentioned they were off to a dinner and meeting with some other practitioners of Transcendental Meditation.

I’d heard about Transcendental Meditation of course. This was 1973. It was something of a fad following the interest of the Beatles, but things fell away pretty quickly when the Beatles left and the backlash began. Meditation always kind of intrigued me, but I’d had no specific training. A few months earlier I had read the general instructions in The Whole Earth Catalog on basic mindfulness meditation and I sat on a hilltop and tried to concentrate on my breath one or two afternoons, but I spent nearly all of my time constantly checking in—was I “meditating” yet?

But this seemed different. It was an organization, it was a traditional practice, it was taught by an acknowledged master of a respected lineage, there were classes led by skilled and long-term practitioners. I was unhappy enough that I saved up the money for the training ($350, a lot of money at the time, when I was working at an egg packaging plant for minimum wage).

One of the reasons I was so unhappy at the time was that my roommate Michael had just committed suicide. He put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger in a Cistercian monastery’s garden. He left a note saying that he thought that if anyone could handle finding his headless body, it would be Cistercian monks.

My other roommate’s mother called to tell me the news, and I picked up the phone during a loud party at my house. She asked me if I was okay. I said I was. She asked me to sit down, could I hear her? I said yes, I was sitting down. Then she told me that Michael had blown his head off.

When she told me, I was staring out into the party, surrounded by all of Michael’s friends, and I knew something they didn’t know. And I was going to have to tell them very soon. There were two realities in the room right now—there was mine, where I knew something no one else would know, and there was another where Michael was alive and well and off visiting his mom in Stamford, Connecticut. But when I finally opened my mouth, I would essentially be killing the Michael in their heads. I could wait a minute, I could wait five minutes, I could go outside, I could consult with a friend, but I finally just stood up and blurted it out as loud as I could without shouting: “Michael’s dead. Michael shot himself in the head with a shotgun. That was Henry’s mother.”

Somehow by the time I’d finished the first sentence, the entire room was quiet, and the last two sentences were spoken into a sudden silence, like one of those carnival rides where everything is spinning and then suddenly stops. I watched the words settle into their faces, saw the different reactions—there was genuine grief, stunned silence, bewilderment, some kind of confusion I’d never seen before, as if their minds were wrestling with the information. Then the wailing began.

That’s when I started to laugh. I don’t know what the hell was so funny. And in that second I felt my head split into two—there was the part of me that was laughing, and there was the part of me that was horrified that I was laughing. Many years later I learned that uncontrollable and inappropriate laughter is a hallmark of stress, but I didn’t know that then. I only knew that I had proven myself—under stress—to be the most horrible person imaginable—as the kind of guy who would laugh at his best friend’s suicide. It didn’t seem to help that no one else seemed to notice—in fact, when they gathered around to comfort me, I felt even worse, like I had somehow struck them blind, or that they couldn’t see the real me, or that even though I knew that I didn’t deserve their comfort, I would still accept it.

After the original shock, certainly by the time we were driving back from the funeral, everyone seemed to be back on their feet except Henry and me, Michael’s two roommates. We went back to his empty bedroom and began cleaning up, trying to decide what to do with his clothes, his laundry, his curtains, his mattress, his records and books. We ended up burning everything except the mattress (which we junked in the woods), and his books and records, which we divided between ourselves.

Henry took Michael’s death particularly hard, as they had been childhood friends. Henry even began a series of suicide attempts where he’d take pills or drink leather dye and then call someone and we’d have to search all of our favorite haunts around town and eventually find him and take him to the hospital. By his third attempt, less and less people were getting involved, and he actually had to call back to tell us where to find him. By the fourth attempt, it was just an ex-girlfriend and me searching for him. His girlfriend at the time (and future wife) didn’t even bother to visit him in the hospital.

The split in my head not only continued but worsened until it was constant. Whenever I was talking to someone, or even talking to myself, there were two separate parts of my head—there was the part that acted, and thought, and responded to others, and made an effort. And then there was this other half that constantly criticized everything I did, said, thought, or hoped for. It told me I was a phony, that everything I said was a lie and couldn’t be trusted. If someone believed me, then I was doubly bad, because they had fallen for my lies. Why couldn’t I stop lying? I decided the only way to stop lying was to shut down as much as possible. I began drifting away from everyone, even myself. I was lost and getting more lost every day.

That’s why I hoped meditation might help me to become as happy and spontaneous and life-affirming as my two new friends were.

In fact, it did exactly that. When I was given my mantra and began repeating it, I felt as if there were two high beams shining from the bottom of my spine crisscrossing into my skull and as I repeated my mantra these two erratic beams of light slowed down and came into focus and became one undifferentiated light.

And that’s how things stayed for about 30 years. What I got was deliverance, and it seemed impolite to ask for anything more. When people asked me how come I wasn’t enlightened after 30 years of meditation, I’d tell them that maybe enlightenment doesn’t exist, or maybe it’s that this is enlightenment, living without enlightenment or the search for enlightenment. Or that I didn’t want to get enlightened until the last possible moment—that as I was going out the last thing I wanted to realize was, “Ah, now I get it!” And then die. I was certain that would be better than figuring it out too soon. I wanted to enjoy the entire trip before canceling it out.

Then on top of this 30-year practice without a goal, I had recently asked for, and gotten, a mantra—and the Gayatri mantra of all things, or the highest perfect wisdom mantra for the benefit of all beings—the mantra intended not to help yourself but others. And I had been practicing it for almost 6 months now.

I’d also recently exchanged my traditional goddess for a new one. As far back as I can remember, I’ve had a crush on Lakshmi. Next to her, Quan Yin seemed cold, and Aphrodite remote, and I found nothing even remotely attractive about more worldly images like the Venus of Willendorf or the Venus de Milo.. Lakshmi, however, was like the girls I loved in high school. I always felt that way about the Virgin Mary too—that she was soft in a pleasant way, but you could long for Lakshmi the way you couldn’t with the Virgin Mary. Lakshmi is always proud of her beautiful body, and offers it to you for your pleasure. So for many years I’ve always had a special Lakshmi shrine someplace in my house and I had been practicing the Lakshmi mantra on my own for years before I was given the Gayatri one.

Everyone who knew anything about Hinduism knew that it was wrong for me to be honoring Lakshmi. She would make me weak. Since I was poet, I should be honoring Saraswati, who was the goddess of poets, of pure speech. So I went to three different stores selling Vedic statues, and found only one (not very attractive, very masculine) statue of Saraswati, and no thangas (sacred tapestry paintings). Well, that’s not really true. I walked into one store and they had a beautiful feminine Saraswati on a thanga. I waited for the clerks to stop talking and then asked them how much it cost. “Oh,” he said, “I’ve got to take that down. It’s already sold. But everyone who comes into the store asks about it.” I finally ended up with a brightly colored cardboard icon of Saraswati playing the vena, and an imposing and gloomy black resin statue.

Divorcing Lakshmi was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. On the night I was to “marry” Saraswati, I spent an entire evening performing the traditional puja ceremony in her honor, but I also incorporated a spontaneous section where I apologized to Lakshmi and tried to explain what was happening and why, and that she would always be the one nearest to my heart, and that this was strictly a practical matter, me being a poet and all, and that she would still be the center and target of everything I did and wrote. I even promised her a special place in my Saraswati shrine, in front of Saraswati, and that I would always make my second offering to her (after Ganesh’s). And later, when I added Shiva to the mix as well—under advisement that I had to have at least some male energy on my shrine—I placed him in front of Saraswati too. And, probably the biggest insult to my new wife, on the day I bought her statue, I bought another taller, more beautiful and expensive statue of Lakshmi, and placed Lakshmi’s beside my bed, on the level of my heart, and pulled out the “good incense” to burn at her shrine alone.

Needless to say, Saraswati and I didn’t get along too well at first. I resented her for one thing. I found myself hardening, and I didn’t like it. I missed the softness of Lakshmi. Plus I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with my writing either. There were several times I walked back past her shrine and threatened her in my thoughts. “You don’t know how close you are to getting sacked, young lady.”

Further complicating the transfer was that Saraswati’s byline is “I make he who loves me formidable.” I didn’t want to be formidable. My father was formidable. I didn’t see an upside to that

Anyway, so I’ve been meditating for 30 years, I’ve added the Gayatri mantra, I’ve changed goddesses, I’m in a continuous state of bliss when a trembling spark travels up from the bottom of my spine and breaks my neck! And then miraculously I escape the hospital without having surgery, I’m back home in three days and, more or less, feeling fine. I stop meditating for the first time in 30 years and in a matter of five days I’ve finished five books, I’m writing more than ever, I’m happy and alive and full of energy (obviously, having written this all in one sitting).*

Then tonight I’m on my back porch thinking about nothing in particular when I suddenly realize something—what if all the work I’ve been doing over all these years has had a kind of accumulating effect, and that I hadn’t been ready for more because I was kind of scared of anything more? But even so maybe a lot of things happened only because of all that work—like ending up at Sounds True and meeting Thomas Ashley Farrand and asking for a personal mantra and being given the Gayatri mantra because of some clumsy and barely intelligible answer that turned out to be the right answer. And maybe that extended period of bliss is what allowed the shakti energy at the bottom of my spine to shoot up through my neck and BREAK IT in order to BREAK IT OPEN. She seems to have put it back together pretty well. And maybe she was even my Virgil, guiding me through the bardo of the hospital with equanimity and humor. Maybe it’s best to wish for something bad after all. Maybe that’s how she makes her lovers formidable.

* Rereading this years later, it’s important to state the obvious: that the dexamethasone I was taking also has some amphetamine-like side-effects (including the crushing depression that follows discontinuing them). That could help explain how I wrote (as I say) the entire first part of this memoir in one uninterrupted session written in longhand at my dining room table on a yellow legal pad.