The Queen’s Chronicles: MORE LESSONS OF THE FALL

just when the power of positive thinking
had me thinking i had some control
i got knocked to my knees by a hot dog wagon.
not flattened not thrown not knowing what hit me
just knocked to my knees and forced to bow down.
—DH 1974

This is the 10th week after the fall and I am pretty much back together again. While I was fortunate not to have had a more serious injury from my December fall, my convalescence has been quite slow, nonetheless. Shocking, really, just how slow. This winter has been a long and leisurely one during which I completely hibernated. I concentrated on healing myself and also worked to understand and integrate the many-layered lessons of the fall.

Gratitude, first and foremost, was Lesson Number One. While normally I am quite conscious of my appreciation for my life and living, everyone’s attitude of gratitude can stand a periodic upgrading.

I fell at home in my own office, rather than somewhere out on the road during all my travels of the past three years. Cookie was there and helped me instantly. I was nursed and massaged and reikied and shiatsued and reflexed, accupunctured and blessed, and materially supported in every possible generous manner.

Grateful hardly expresses how I felt. I celebrated every tiny victory of movement and mobility as a dramatic miracle. I was ever so thankful for each small pleasure. The first time I could roll over in bed! Hurray! The first time I could bend my leg! The first time I could put on my own sock! The first time I left the walker and used a cane! The first time I took the dog out! The first time I walked around the block! And this morning when I left the house for the first time without my cane! Life is such a miracle. I am eternally grateful to be part of it.

Miracles seem to rest, not so much upon
faces or voices or healing power coming
suddenly near to us from far off, but upon
our perceptions being made finer so that
for a moment our eyes can see and our ears
can hear that which is about us always.
—Willa Cather

Beyond the parameters of this particular incident, I was reminded of how much I love this world — life, nature, creatures, comforts, beauty. Just how precious and tenuous it all is. In light of September 11th and this horrible war, we are all struggling to keep that crucial 911 emergency lesson foremost in our minds at all times. How important it is to raise and praise the universal spirit at every turn. Be Here Now. Live Life. Be Great and Full. Thank All Goodness.

When I first landed on the floor, I thought that I would just sit there for a few seconds, catch my breath and then continue with my packed agenda. I would shoulder through, like always. But within minutes of the fall it became painfully — excruciatingly — obvious that there was no way that I could possibly carry on as normal. I had fallen down on the job, as it were, and my only option was to sit still.

Letting Go, Lesson Number Two, was an insistent, obstinate, merciless task-mistress who would accept nothing less than total vulnerability, absolute humility, and hopefully at the end of the day, some measure of grace.

I do not understand the mystery of grace —
only that it meets us where we are, but
does not leave us where it found us.
—Anne LaMott

Asking for Help, Lesson Number Three, always a hard one for me, became much easier after I allowed myself to let go of all those macho martyr assumptions that I perpetrate upon myself. Such as thinking I can be a bottomless source of never-ending energy without ever having to replenish my own reserves. Such as feeling — like so many caregivers, healers, and light workers do — that everyone else’s needs must be dealt with before my own, me being in the line of service, after all. Such as resisting well meant offers of assistance.

Before the fall, if someone volunteered to give me a massage, I would invariably demure. “Thanks so much. I really appreciate it, but that’s O.K.” Meaning what? That I didn’t need anything? That I didn’t deserve anything? Now, during my winter of healing, I was becoming able to over-ride my ego and say, “Yes, please, I do need help. I am in trouble here. Thank you so much. I am so grateful”

Learning How to Attend to My Own Requirements and Boundaries and how to take as loving good care of myself as I do of others is Lesson Number Four. I have been struggling to learn this lesson for decades. It is clearly my Life Lesson. I keep thinking that I have learned it. But then something comes along to remind me how much more I have to improve. I have managed quite well over the years to sustain myself spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. It is on the material and physical plane that I tend to fall down, as it were. As the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes has reminded me time and time again over the past thirty years, “Feed the cow.” How else can the poor dear give milk, after all?

So, the lessons contemplated and understood, if not yet completely integrated, I emerge from my accident determined to heal myself for once and for all. It is time. I cannot continue to push myself beyond the max. I definitely can’t keep falling.

I acknowledge that though I am most definitely a Queen, I am not omnipotent. That I do need help from time to time. That I do have needs and that I need to honor and enforce them. That in addition to being Mama Donna to the world, I need to be mother to myself, as well.

I promise myself to respect my limitations of strength, energy, time, and resources. I promise to continue to be grateful for each breath that allows me to live this precious life and to value it in its entirety. And most important of all, I pledge to allow myself to sit down occasionally, to lie down, even, so that I don’t have to fall down to get some rest.

L’Chaim,

xxQueen Mama Donna