the ride of a lifetime

Today has been another day of surrender, a letting go so deeply that I no longer care about the outcome of anything. I have been foolish to think that I could determine the results of anything. This train ride Tammy and I are on has proven to us time and time again that we may have specific intentions, wants, and desires, but God help us if we think for one second that we can determine what any of it is going to look like.


We have been through so much since moving to Taos especially. Last week was truly the toughest I thought I'd been through. We thought this week was going to be a smoother ride after all the purging we'd been through. And then there were the phone calls. First mine on Sunday that brought up so much crazy crap that I thought for sure I'd worked through. Great, Jill. Just great... stop your bloody thinking!

And the real life-altering, heart-stopping phone call came yesterday with the news that Tammy's son, Taylor, had been in a serious car accident. His car blew three tires and he went airborne. Three airbags deployed and he lost consciousness until the ambulance ride.

The day before that Tammy's car decided to take a much-needed rest and refused to work, as did Taylor's brother's car. Someone we had just met before moving to Taos drove us 2 1/2 hours away to the hospital, stopping an hour away from us to pick up the brother. We arrived safely. The ride materialized easily, and Tammy got to see her son and talk with the doctors. He's got two compression fractures in his lumbar spine. Fragments of the vertebrae are not threatening anything, and so he'll be in a brace for three months.

When we discovered what had happened, Tammy and I both just cried. This young man is going to be okay, and according to the insurance claims person if Taylor had been 20 feet in either direction of where his tires blew, he would have never needed to be fitted for a brace today. He wouldn't have been taken to the emergency room. We would be putting together funeral arrangements now.

Tammy and I have been stripped of everything materialistically. Everything's gone but our clothes. And yet... And yet, we are by far the richest we've ever been. We live in a beautiful house, gorgeous surroundings, and have created the most loving relationships of our lives here.

We don't own anything yet we eat healthy meals. We sleep on comfortable beds. We write in a beautiful home. The ability to shift easily, to bend and flow without hesitation has become a way of life for us here. We're discovering that absolutely nothing can be done in this lifetime right now, right here, the way we used to do anything.

In our very bleakest moments when there seems to be no fix, miracles appear. Tammy went to talk with the owner of the local paper about doing some bartering and ended up with paid writing assignments. I was led to talk to a health care facility down the road here just to tell them what my experiences have been, and yesterday I interviewed for the only position they're needing to be filled.

Neither of these positions were advertised, or in Tammy's case even "invented" yet, and they materialized just when we showed up. There's something so magical about just letting go of everything. I mean truly not caring how anything we desire comes into fruition. In that act of surrendering when we're not even thinking about what it is we want or feeling bummed about what we think we don't have, the experiences unfold as magnificent gifts. We are truly blown away by how our lives have taken shape here. We are so very grateful for every single moment of the ride because it is in this ride, this crazy roller coaster that we've been on, that the deepest and most profound joy surfaces.

And with that being said, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Tammy. She keeps holding my hand as we continually leap. I can't think of anyone I'd rather have taking these steps with me.