My father lived in a caravan. I live in a caravan now. I used to tow a caravan behind my red Fiat Cinquecento, 899c. Three kids, our dog Coco Coburn, and our cat Patches. Coco Kane had a different ring to it, so she adopted the kids’ father’s name, Coburn.
Up an doon the gairden, through the lobby whiles we went in, “Ma Wee Rid Cor”.
Our first destination took us to Dungloe, in Donegal. I sweated buckets with fear and my spine was rigid. Every bump and turn in the road fired up my nervous system. Nobody was allowed to speak or even breathe. The heater was off, as the music. Fear and panic lay heavy, beneath the low roof.
By my third time of going around the same roundabout, hysterical laughter broke out. Mine and theirs. The sweat broke, the window got opened and everybody began to breathe. I’ll never forget that laughter. Hysterical laughter in the midst of angst lasts a long time in a shortening memory.
I bought the touring caravan after a camping disaster that involved gas, a naked flame, two kids and me, all in the tent. Kid number three was playing kick about. Guilty feelings consumed me in the same way the flames consumed the tent. I had nightmares and flashbacks. I couldn’t sleep. As a parent, I felt so guilty. I went to the GP and got a seven day prescription for sleeping tablets. I went back for more. The only prescription I got that day was a prescription to get myself better.
The shorthand for prescription, is RX, taken from the word for recipe. In medieval times, RX was a list of ingredients or activities the patient was to imbibe or undertake to resolve a stated ailment. Healing cures or therapies given to people were recipes for their lives. Lauren Walker – The Energy Medicine Yoga Prescription
That’s when I realised my mental health was shocking, and my coping mechanisms even more so. My kids were on their Easter holidays with their father. I was home alone, with the Irish Sea between us. That was nothing compared to the gulf I felt in myself. My hands were still bandaged. Fingers and thumbs bound tightly. I could do nothing for myself but go dangerously quiet within.
I was so cross the next morning when I woke up. In fact, I was raging. Up to that stage I had been raging and cross for years. As a teenager and young adult, I literally fought with my own shadow.
The camping incident was the straw that not only broke the camel’s back but mine as well.
I got on my bicycle one sunny morning, steering with my elbows, riding along the country roads. Seemingly, out of nowhere appeared a man at the side of the road. My first instinct was to get off the bicycle and run. I couldn’t hear him speak or what he said. My heart thundered so loud. It was last Monday afternoon in Straiton when I realised I didn’t need to look to see or listen to hear. I heard the non verbal and saw the unseen.
I don’t fully remember the words he spoke. I said nothing. I remember just listening. I didn’t know what was said, but I knew it was said. I was still startled, but instinct told me it meant something. I’m guessing that’s how some blessings come, in different disguises. It takes a blind person to see.
None are so blind as those who will not see.
At my Aunt’s wedding, I was probably only primary school age, but I clearly remember Amazing Grace being sung. The words stuck a chord with me. I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see. That’s what it felt like the morning I woke up cross.
That was in the Easter of 2000. By the September of that same year I enrolled in Coleraine College to train as a Reflexologist.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” Lao-Tzu
So began my soul path in the healing of myself and others. Twenty-one years later and every waking hour, I’m still walking.
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