Sometimes in life we encounter horror so great it breaks our bridge to the divine. These seconds are so traumatic they render us broken and blind. In my journey I have experienced this many times, and it has granted me insight into things I wish to wash from my mind.
Within these horrors are our greatest gifts. Sometimes having our divinity sliced from our life can illuminate the realities our healthy eyes could never see. For me it was the discovery of my humility.
When I was a boy my childhood was stolen at an early age. The evils of the world forced me to feel pain no child should ever face.
My trials of terror tossed me into in the trenches of despair, and although my spirit was tortured, I could feel the radiant light of the divine.
Unfortunately this was about to change.
There was a definitive moment in my childhood when my bridge was shattered into bits. I was 15 and the sight I saw forever changed me. Thankfully most of these memories have been deleted by the stone grinder of my own mind, but the worst ones linger like a pointed finger placed between my eyes.
I remember riding down a lonely highway with my parents on a sweltering summer day. I remember a hospital waiting room filled with boring seats and stale decor. But the worst memory was with my brother. His face was crushed and mangled beyond repair. The smell of the room was haunting, I can still taste it to this day. There were beeps and bleeps of machines combined with a cacophony of slurping sounds and painful groans. Tears of fear and my hurting heart dripped from my eyes as I stared at my brother’s torpid body. He was wrapped in tendrils of darkness and sterile light, and this intensified the horror of the terrible night.
I should have never been allowed to see this. No child should see this. My heart hurts for the child-me who sat at his side watching his unconscious body writhe.
I don’t blame my parents, they’re humans just like you and me. It was an impossible situation and I know their hearts were in a frenzy.
Ultimately this was a horrendous time for my family, it changed all of us. A part of me died that day and it would take nearly ten years for my divine light to begin seeping back into my life.
Woe is me! I was only an observer of my brother’s horror. His life was destroyed in a single second, and he has been forced to live his entire life as a blind, fractured man. I want to cry as I write this because it hurts so much. Everything was stolen from him and that horror breaks my mind. He didn’t deserve this, no one deserves this!
I watched him crawl from nothing and slowly become something, but he wasn’t the powerful, masculine man I once knew. As a boy I couldn’t handle it and it drove me deeper into my own darkness.
I used to watch and wonder how he could find so much joy in life and be so positive. When it comes to the scales of optimism he is the optimist supreme! If you were to ever meet him, you too would surely know that his spirit gives off the greatest glow.
My story is about pain and suffering, but it is also about introspection and insight. Losing my connection with the divine gave me the time to witness how much wonder there is to treasure in a world of woe.
It taught me that even though our lives often feel unfair and saturated with despair, hope will always be with us when we need to cope.
Ultimately it planted the seeds of humility within me, so that one day they could sprout, grow, and bloom.
