Midnight’s injury and recovery was and continues to be a real challenge for me personally, but it’s also been a time of personal growth and discovery. I learned or revisited many life lessons during this time.

Remarkable on this journey were the continual signs and support from my Guides on the Coaching Staff, via dreams and synchronicities. Important as these were in each moment, it was impossible for me to retain the sense of them all for the entire time.

Perhaps that’s just as it needed to be: The little events that constituted these signs of support were enormously helpful (when recognized) in the moment; and even when forgotten in the daily-ness of it all, they were recorded in my journals. Now, when things have settled down and Midnight is out of immediate danger, I can go back and examine them.

In this and later entries, I’ll share my experiences and interpretations with you. As always, comments are welcome.

This first post draws mainly from a journal entry made about two weeks after Midnight’s initial injury:

“10 November. I had such a hard time sleeping last night, kept awake by jabs and twangs of pain, the hiccups, general restlessness. All of it seemed to mirror my jagged, mindless losing or misplacing of practically everything—car keys, sunglasses, hat, Midnight’s spoon, boot, and so on.

“It’s hard for me to articulate just what it is that’s causing the huge disruption in my life. It’s not Midnight’s dangerous physical situation—not that in and of itself, though it would be easy to mistake my tension for simple worry, especially since I’m his primary caregiver.

“It’s not that, exactly, but something simpler and more elemental. I think it’s my (understandable, human) inability to just allow things to be the way they need to be. ‘Not my will, but Thine, O Lord.’ I got to that place the Saturday night after Midnight’s injury, but it didn’t last. That state of grace evaporated, unnoticed, as soon as the decision was made to give him a chance.”

A couple of weeks into Midnight’s healing process, it had become obvious that, while he was out of immediate danger from the break itself, he was in greater and increasing danger from the complications of the injury: pressure sores, primarily, and the pain and possibility of infection associated with them.

It felt to me that I was the one ultimately responsible for his condition—as though whether he lived or died rested upon my shoulders. No matter that it was obviously untrue—even I realized that. There was a part of my brain that still said that it was my responsibility.

Gone was the peace that had greeted me that first Saturday night, when I truly “gave it up to God.” And I couldn’t seem to get back to that state of being:

“I’m still pretty much in that restless place, searching for that peace, that deep sense of allowing, of giving things over to God’s Will, that belongs to the state of grace that I’m describing. I can speak the words: ‘Not my will, but Thine, O Lord,’ but they’re hollow, devoid of substance. No matter how many times I repeat them, I don’t believe them, I don’t feel their power.

“What is missing is submission…. No, even that word is wrong, because it’s coming from the dominance paradigm, which is, to me, utterly discredited. Not submission, then, but a kind of joining, a kind of acknowledgement of the One-ness of all of us. It’s so hard to describe—another of those things that you’ll never understand until you’ve actually gotten ‘there,’ even if only once and only briefly.

“Aunt Doe [my father’s younger sister, who passed on a couple of years ago] has been close in my awareness since yesterday morning, and I could almost hear her as she comforted me. I asked her how she managed to do what she did—she was caregiver to ill and dying friends and family for most of her adult life. ‘Prayer’ was the immediate response. I never knew that about her…but now it feels so obvious, and so right. And I sense that for her, too, it was never easy. No one except a saint lives in that state of acceptance all the time—and probably not saints, either. Part of the human condition is the struggle….

“It’s interesting that just these last weeks I’ve given up fighting against the ‘old ways’ of addressing the Divine, and begun to understand 1) that it makes no difference the name we give It, and 2) the awesome power of those time-honored prayers that I learned as a child. The 23rd Psalm, for instance, and the Lord’s Prayer.

“I’m beginning to sound like a religious person—that seems so foreign to me, but it’s not.

“I seek again to experience the joy and peace of Acceptance….”

(You can read more about Midnight’s injury and recovery in the blog over at The Alchemical Horse.)