While it is still fresh in my mind, I entered the world of the subconscious this morning, a powerful experience. It is the place we enter in sleep and childhood, we carry it with us forever, it is the everlasting realm of my soul, the true and ever present self. All the magic and terror of childhood are there, everything that shaped me.

I was taken back there this morning.  I died, I think, and was born again.

Maria and I had a meeting to go to today,  it was early and a couple of hours away. It was an important meeting, but a painful one, we are confronting some issues in our lives having to do with money and security, and I have been worried about it, money and security always brings me back to the age of five, to a place of helplessness and confusion,  I sometimes feel like a five-year-old boy with a farm and a book contract and a blog and lots of bills to pay.
I was sitting at my computer preparing to post a photo, as I always do early in the morning when my fingers began to tremble, and I broke out into a cold sweat, and it felt as if my stomach had dropped down into the ground, I felt nauseous. I felt as if I had left my own body and was flying through the air, under the power of something other than myself.

I called out to Maria and I said something was wrong, she came running. What is it?, she asked. “It is my mind, I am feeling an overwhelming amount of fear, I am back in Providence.” I remember Maria coming into the room, and she was talking to me, but I could not hear her, my eyes were closed, my heart was racing, I was soaked in sweat, it was as if I was underwater, in a bath tub, I heard sounds but could not make them out, it was as if she was speaking in slow motion.

It was not my heart or something I ate, or a stroke. She looked worried, it must have looked like that.  I knew what it was right away,  it was much more painful than anything I felt in heart surgery.  Yet it was familiar, after my surgery, after they stopped my heart, I felt I had gone to a different place, I  had traveled outside of my body.

This morning, I also felt as if I left my body and was standing outside of Summit Avenue Elementary school, a place of horrors for me, afraid to go inside. I was afraid of so many things. Of wetting my bed, of having an accident, of being beaten up, of my teachers, of getting a polio or measles shot, of my father, of undressing for the gym, of climbing ropes or doing push-ups, of the other kids in the dressing room, the playground, the school room.

I was afraid of so many things, I can never know if any of these fears were real, or lived only in my subconscious. Seven years of analysis could not tell me.

On such days, I pretended to go to school, but did not. I hid in the bushes, even in the middle of winter, I wandered the neighborhood, visited the library – they gave me refuge there, I hid in the back of the Quaker Meeting House, I was also welcome there, I walked for miles and miles, hid in a cemetery crypt, and when school was due to end, I’d make my way back, often numb from the cold and from hunger, and come home.

I did this often, but this was a different world. No one seemed to notice or care where I was, my teaches and my parents never asked me, not once in a hundred missing days.  I was caught once or twice and scolded, and got some detentions, boys will be boys, after all. I lived in a daze of terror and paralysis. I learned nothing, had no friends and hid myself from everyone.

I was back there this morning, every detail of it was fresh and vivid, even the smells of a dirty New England industrial winter. I had died, I was sure.

How one comes to accept that life follows death is an individual choice, a way of looking at the world. It is, for me, the key to understanding to much of life.  Joseph Campbell says that only birth can conquer death – the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body’s spirit, there must be a continuous recurrence of birth to wash away the relentless recurrences of death. In our own lives and dreams, in the world around us.

“For it is by means of our own victories,” writes Campbell, “if we are not  regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought; doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare, war is a snare, change is a snare; permanence a snare.”

When our time is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then be reborn.

So that was my journey this morning, my experience, it has left me spent  and bewildered. And grateful. My life is a victory, I am regenerated. I left myself this morning, I felt  death closing in, I unleashed the dreadful things that live inside of me. It was a death of self, suddenly released. There is nothing more healing for me than to tell my story, that has saved my life more than once. And here I am, with my partner and love, my work, my dogs and donkeys, my  blog and camera.

It is my resurrection, a recurrence of birth.