I have heard the sirens.
As a firefighter and EMT, they were part of the job. They were part of the adrenaline rush. Like the bugles announcing the pending arrival of a cavalry, the sirens let those who had called know we were coming. I have always loved the sounds of the sirens for that reason.
Then one day the sirens came for me.
I was blinded by a brain injury so I could not see them. I could only hear them, and I knew what story they were telling. In all the times I had ridden in the back of an ambulance with a patient I had always wondered when it would be my turn. That time had come.
Some I had ridden with were taking their last ride in the back of the “bus”. I watched some take their last breaths. I heard some whisper unintelligible prayers just before the end. I always had wondered if the language of the afterlife was something none of us were meant to understand. Even when those final words were words I knew, they always seemed to have some meaning I could not fathom.
Sometimes I would hold their hand at the end and feel the energy drain from their flesh.
I felt that their energy was not gone, it was just not there. It had traveled somewhere else, somewhere I had been before and would see again. As I took my ride in the bus, listening to the sirens play their bugle call, I insisted I was not ready to go. This would not be my last ride and this would not be the end of my story.
Fear and Focus
I was, however, afraid. More afraid than I’d ever been in my life. I had decided a short time before they arrived that I would take this ride to its fullest, but something about being on a stretcher in the back of the ambulance unnerved me. Each time I had been in the back of a bus I was the strong one, the one who was there to help. Now I was the patient, blind and weakened in my condition. Yet in that numbing darkness I could still see a tiny flame that pulsed with the rhythm of the siren. I focused on that fire, the tiny glimmer of hope of survival.
That flame was tiny, but it was mighty.
The paramedics were asking me questions and offering me reassurance. I told them I knew the drill and that I had lied to many people in the back of a bus. They answered that they weren’t lying, and I believed them. The little flame suggested that they were telling the truth. I just had to believe.
Things to Say
I knew I had things yet to say. There were the visions of my children that flashed across the darkness. My eyes had failed but my heart had perfect vision. The eyes are not the only parts of me that could see and I was learning that with each passing second. In my heart I was telling them how loved and admired they were. Had I told them that before, I wondered? Of course I had but this time seemed different. It wasn’t my mouth talking, it was my heart.
I hugged them too, a hug that felt more powerful then it ever had. I wasn’t hugging them with my arms, I was was hugging them with my heart. There was such a vast difference between the two.
I saw the Sun rise in my vision and I heard a poem recited in the wails of the siren. The vivid colors of the dawn and the beautiful rhythm of the prose rose from someplace new. My heart was painting on a new canvas and the words flowed from a place I had once only small glimpses of. I still had things to say, stories to tell, but they would not come from my head. They would come from a new and mostly uncharted territory.
I would let my heart tell the story. My heart would be the artist. I would surrender thought to feeling and let instinct be my guide.
Lessons in the Darkness
There were so many lessons learned that night. Time is short. Our moments are fleeting. Bad things happen to good people. The sirens and those sounding those bugles are heroes.
There were some, however, not so cliche.
When my mind is the guide, I see things through clouded and cracked glass. However, when my heart is guiding me my vision is much clearer. In doing something heart-centered I do it with a clear purpose. Mindfulness is not a practice worth much time for me, heartfulness is.
“Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” My mind will always be burdened by scars and the traumas of living, but my heart sheds them in the purity of forgiveness. Scars and scabs cannot stain a heart that is pure; such anomalies cannot exist there. What I learned on that autumn night was that my task has always been to reduce the focus on my brain and let my heart lead the way.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~Rumi
The barriers I had built against love resided in my mind and all its traumas. It was time to tear them down and burn them to ash in that little flame I saw in the darkness.
(Coming soon, a short story based on finding the flame in the darkness. Follow my Amazon page here.)