Feeling My Fear, A Moss Covered Tree and Mushrooms

“You awake?”  I quietly asked Jon just in case he was sleeping.   But Jon isn’t the best sleeper.  “I can’t sleep,” I said when he answered me, “can you put on a story?”

We use the Calm app a lot.  Mostly the bedtime stories work, we never hear the end or sometimes even the middle of them.  Same with the sleep meditations.  So Jon put on one of the meditations and a woman with a soothing voice told us….“I’ll be here for the next 45 minutes to help you sleep.”

I dozed in and out waking to her suggestion to take any thoughts that were keeping us awake, hold them in our hands, then let them fly away like a butterfly.

That’s when I started to cry.

Every since the car accident last Sunday, I’ve been telling myself how grateful I am that it wasn’t worse than it was.  And whenever I began to think about how much worse it could have been, I stopped myself.

“You’re so busy being brave,” Jon said to me, “you haven’t let yourself feel what you’re actually feeling.”

He was right.  Ever since it happened, I’ve been telling myself how lucky everyone involved in it was because we weren’t badly hurt.  That  the damage to my car could have been worse and now, statistically speaking, the chances of me being in another car accident anytime soon are slim.

And that’s all true.  But it’s also true that the road I was on is a busy one.  Cars and trucks speed by at fifty five to sixty miles an hour.  Logging and milk trucks use the road regularly.

And as lucky as I and the other people involved were, it was also frightening.

A moment after I looked in my rear view mirror and saw  the car behind me wasn’t slowing down,  I was struck from behind and pushed into the north bound lane where my car spun around.  Luckily the passenger truck that I had been waiting for when I stopped to turn, witnessed the whole thing and was far enough away to be able to stop before hitting my car.

I knew why I couldn’t sleep.  I had to acknowledge the fear I was feeling.

So I took the advice of the soft voiced woman from the Calm app trying to help us sleep.

In my mind I let my imagination go wild,  picturing the different horrific outcomes that could have happened.

When I’d had my fill, I tried to hold the stories in my hands.  But they were too big to hold and too  heavy to float away like a butterfly.

So I stood at the scene of the accident and put my stories in a big mesh bag.   Then I started to drag them to the farm where I would bury them.   But when I got to the farm, I couldn’t find the right place for them.

Then suddenly,  the mesh bag was back at the site of the accident, the road was buckling and the mesh bag full of stories was under the broken pavement.

And from the stories and buckled pavement, a huge tree sprung up.  Its trunk was covered in thick, soft green moss and around the tree, all kinds and colors of giant, spongy, mushrooms sprouted on the road.

Now the place where the accident had occurred with cushioned with moss and mushrooms that would soften any collision that might occur in that spot.

When I opened my eyes I felt a great sense of relief.  Now when I think about the accident, my mind lingers on the reality of it for only for a moment before I see the moss covered tree and mushrooms.

I got up after that.

I made some hot cocoa and sat on the back porch, Zip on my lap, watching the shift in colors as the night faded and the day grew brighter.