Portals to Recovery

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Recovery, like spirituality, is such a personal thing. Well, at least it is for me. Like I talked about last week, I am really not interested in stuffing the complexity of my story of recovering from my bike crash into some readily-available story trope that we are presented with in our culture. No, I don’t think my story can be as neat and tidy to just say, “WHOA, I overcame the odds by showing up everyday and fighting back all the obstacles.” Sure, that is part of the story, but I still think its trite and played out to try and collapse everything I have learned about myself down to that “Horatio-Alger-Pull Yourself-Up-By-Your-BOOTSTRAPS” Story. Slotting my story into that trope just reifies capitalism in the end, even if my story is not about economics, because it gives folx this little nod that anything is possible if you just work hard. That’s just not the case. I don’t think any one storyline could completely encapsulate the complexity of putting yourself back together after a brush with death or with losing someone. This impossibility is only compounded by the fact that we, as a society, are deathphobic and in our infancy in truly trying to talk about what it means to come back from the brink (in all its ineffable complexity).

That sort of analysis is the occupational-hazard of sharpening my brain into a tool of analysis. I cannot unsee all the seemingly innocuous ways that we fit our stories into little molds that are offered to us by corporations, religion, politics, and larger white, anglo-saxon, protest culture we are enmeshed in. I really just want to tell stories that are meaningful to me; stories that are enchanted with resilience and happenstance magic. I know some, like Jason Ananda Josephson Storm in his book “The Myth of Disenchantment,” argue that magic and myth has always been and continues to be a crucial part of our storytelling and that disenchantment was a useful story to tell at the time. However, I am not really one to put much stock in a theorist on the tenure clock trying to create a ziggurat out of a historical fact that really is just an ant hill. I just don’t think that our dominant consciousness offers us any myth and magic that doesn’t reify grinding humans into a pulp in labor and sells them a false sense of possibility. That’s not a true form of enchantment. That’s what Marx would call false consciousness. No, I am in favor an emancipatory, participatory enchantment far away from the oppression of two-party politics, capitalism, and WASP culture. I am in favor of opening a portal to an enchantment that is part of a different future.

I suppose I am rather fond of the portal idea right now, having stepped through one on a recent ride. I was going on my first ride longer than 30 miles since the ill-fated day that I went over my handlebars and landed face first somewhere on the cherry creek trail. With a true knack for making the ride dramatic, this would also be the first time that I would ride on the cherry creek trail since I crashed. As I have aged, I have learned that my ability to expose myself to the horrors of existing as a corporeal being on this plane of existence is extremely high. I mean, I survived going through exposure treatment for OCD, which is basically willingly climbing down through through the various levels of Dante’s Inferno by exposing yourself to the thing that you are afraid of or avoiding. So, riding past where my dreams of randonneuring (and making friends) was laid to rest was really no biggie. I am a hell-walker, a dark shadow being with a rather pleasant disposition that people mistake for an effervescent lightness. I don’t think anything about me is really that light. I don’t think you come back from what I have without fully embracing the darkness.

I still remember digging graves on the doubles court while a young man. This is the dramatic way that I remind my doubles partner to hit their returns of serve low so they would pop their first volley up for us to crush. It’s funny to say it now, but I was damn serious at the time. In the grinder of post 9-11 America, It was us versus them, and I sure as hell wanted it to be me. So, I made their defeat a way of laying them down for their final rest. A little demented? Sure, but “This Is America.” I grew up watching news coverage of my country bombing people into oblivion (Still am) and invading their country under false pretenses. That’s why I am not surprised that so many people in my generation and the generation before have ended up death workers. We were steeped in death-soaked times, in a fictitious Hobbesian “war of all against all” that was completely constructed for the profit of a small group of companies and people.

On that ride, I was trying to convince myself, and no one else, that I was capable of still riding my bike far places to beautiful places. Yet, the goal wasn’t to just ride a certain amount of miles and come home. That was the big problem of trying to ride far while trying to raise a child. I was always rushing to get the ride in so that I could come back to be with my family. No, I wanted to be in and of the place. I wanted to knowingly breathe in the oxygen created by the plants and trees around me. As an act of reciprocity, I wanted to breath out the carbon dioxide that would nourish my friends. I wanted to melt into the place, not just ride through it. I wanted to slow my human-paced transportation even more so that I could really see everything that was around me. I wanted to stop that young man who wanted to dig graves for his opponents from slipping back into how I moved through the world. I wanted to be an animist, not just a bike-rider.

A little omen revealed itself under my tire to show me that change was afoot. I had already made it over half of the way through the ride, past the area where I crashed, and was circling Cherry Creek State Park. As I was riding, I remembered back to when I was taking photos in this very park right before I crashed. Those photos have an eerie quality about them now. They feel very liminal as little artifacts from a past time period right before a great change would come and my life would change.

Ugh, it still gives me the chills to look at these photos. Then, I was snapped back to reality as I saw a little snake crawling on the trail near my tire. I started to realization and thought to myself, “Oh, things really are going to change.”

I remembered back to my friend Hannah’s divination for the week. Hannah had pulled a snake card for the week and gave the following advice based on that card:

“(Snake) is the magic of the week. Yeah, we are shedding, we are death and rebirthing, and we are being guided by our intuition.”

Relying on my own intuition, I felt like it was appropriate to take the next step to re-start my little animist wanderings on my bike. The universe gifted me that magical happenstance of crossing paths with that little snake to confirm for me that I am walking through the portal of rebirth following my crash and taking the next step in my healing process. I am not chasing goals external to me that aren’t in alignment with being there for my family (i.e. trying to ride far to meet some socially constructed definitions of an unsupported bike ride). I am taking my little bike rides and snapping my little photos. Who is to say that animist magic isn’t alive and well in the world around us? This is a very different magic and myth to the one that we discussed above. I think this animist magic, which feels like it is waning in our times of climate chaos, is one worth trying to keep alive in the world we live in today in the place of capitalist mysticism.

Photo Essay from the Ride to Recovery

Thank you for being here, folx. You are the best. Thanks for encouraging me to put the pieces back together after my crash. I appreciate each and every one of you!

Best,

James