reflections on a broken ankle

i have been sluggish with work this week, lazy from the heat or just the general mid-summer vibe – i’m not sure – but it is making me unproductive and distracted.

i worked from home yesterday, too disenchanted with the city to leave my apartment and get myself to the office – toodled around on email, fixed some documents i have been working on, and occasionally throwing things into boxes around my apartment which has steadily grown in untidiness. i did manage to get some of the items i am giving away into my car and to their new owners at the end of the day before meeting my friend steph for a early-evening hike at lynn headwaters. i forgot my hiking socks and did over half the hike in my sandals which was not as bad as i thought it would be. apparently my joints and tissue are pretty much back in order, a year after the accident – though i still am leading with my left side, a compensation i haven’t given up on.

funny enough, exactly one week short of the one-year anniversary of breaking my ankle – i am embarking on another 4-day (42 km) trip with friends in manning park. we will leave next friday morning and return on the monday – hiking in the sub-alpine meadows surrounded by the rising peaks. this is a spectacular time of year up there, with the fragile grasslands in full bloom, ripe with the brief spring of the mountains.

so here it is – testing myself like this for the first time, carrying now extra weight in my body in the form of 2 plates and 6 pins my bones will forever grow over, causing a hardness to the outer skin that could only exist with the insertion of foreign objects. if i meditate briefly on the event of last summer, i can access the immediate fear of the moment which gave way to the care and support of my hiking partner and close friend who washed my hands and held me in the sunset waiting for the rescue to arrive. my wool sweater and his head resting against me will forever be etched in my memory as a flashflood of a total love and support that i had never known existed before then – though possibly i had accessed it as a child, not so consciously.

breaking my bones was a gift of self-reflection and a lesson in self-knowledge – and prepared me for the things that followed, paring me to the core so i could learn to walk again, and live a different way – something i am getting better at as i work my way through each new door that opens. i am trying to keep back the fear that makes me cautious, trying to open myself without feeling foolish or having reservation, and watching for the moment i see the whole healed against all the heart-sickness of this world.

i am eager for this trip and at the same time hesitant, for while i crave the sky and the meadows, the mountains and the pine forests, i am reminded how easy it is to fall or to fail – and how a part of you can get broken through no real doing of your own.

this is the practice of living i am working at.