terar dum prosim

i read tonight's open journal before doing the dishes, so that i'd have something to contemplate while doing the dishes, but that was hours ago and i can't recall all that i wanted to write about.

i've been in a few car accidents. i was the driver in every one of them. sober every time. only one of them involved a collision with another vehicle. no one's ever been hurt, including me. but there have been some close calls. after the last one, about 20 months ago, i gave up driving.

the two most amazing ones involved ice and rear-drive vehicles. in the first one, north of lake superior, i rolled a jeep down an embankment. it landed on its wheels. after i checked for fluid leaks, i put the jeep into 4-wheel drive, drove it up the snowy embankment, and back to the opp station in whiteriver.

the other amazing one was on the 400 southbound going through barrie approaching the anne street overpass. the car fishtailed and shot off the road. the last thing i saw before the snow flew over the windshield was the telephone pole coming straight for me. i remember calmly saying, "Oh well." the car somehow missed the telephone pole, slid up the side of the overpass embankment, then slid backdown and came to rest against the inside of the guardrail. the width of the gap between the telephone pole and the guard rail at that time through which the car had shot was only a few metres, maybe 3 or 4.

i've been lucky so many times. and those are the accidents or near misses that are obvious to me. what about the ones i don't know about, the ones where had i done something a moment sooner or a moment later... ?

dumb luck? first of all, i think somebody's been trying to tell me something: "you shouldn't be driving." but maybe somebody's also saying, "not so fast. i'm not done with you yet." maybe, because i keep asking what i should be doing in this universe, to best serve it, somebody's saying, "you haven't got the answer yet." i don't know. i don't presume to know how god works. i wouldn't know a miracle if it hit me in the face.

about a year ago, my cousin-in-law suddenly ended up in hospital in hamilton, with leukemia. all her platelets, her white blood cells, everything was gone. she was given 24 hours left to live. she stayed like that for weeks. there were vigils, there were intercessions. i didn't pray, but i wrote her a poem. in an email last week, her husband, my first cousin, wrote very humourously of how last week they spent her 44th birthday going to 6 or 7 medical exams, how she's almost fully recovered and will be off meds in the next month or two. at the hospital they call her the miracle girl. she set some kind of record for being so close to death's door for so long.

a jungian analyst once told me that all the people i dream about are not those people, but facets of me, and what do i see of myself in those facets? a friend and counselor once told me that my son, who has aspergers syndrome, is there to serve a purpose in my life. by extension, i wonder, does everybody serve a purpose in my life; does everybody serve my purpose? and the corollary: do i serve a purpose in everybody else's life? do we all serve each other, in one way or another, whether we like it or not? ("it's not an option.")

my high school motto is: terar dum prosim, which means: may i be consumed in service. the school is named after bishop nicholas ridley, who was burned at the stake in tudor england (that's him being burned at the beginning of the film Elizabeth).