I held on tight to that flawed world, and let the others fall away. I let it pull me in and I gave myself over to its embrace. And as I did, I heard it whisper in my ear.

“Welcome home, Ashley Bowman. Welcome home.”

29

Red

Blood cells are too small to be seen by the naked eye. To show up under a microscope, they have to be magnified four hundred times. Yet without them, we couldn’t exist.

A red blood cell doesn’t know it’s part of a larger organism. It only knows the job it’s been given: to carry oxygen to the far reaches of its known universe. If it was self-aware, it might long to be part of something larger than itself, never knowing that it already was. It might dream of a greater purpose, never understanding that it served the most noble purpose of all.

We are those traveling cells. We pulse in the artery of a single organ that is one of a billion organs unaware they’re part of something even larger. I know that has to be true—because if life exists four hundred times smaller than we can see, it must also exist four hundred times larger than we can see.

We’ve come up with a lot of names for the grand whole of it all. And although we do good deeds in those names, we also go to war for the names as well. As if we can’t be on the inside unless everyone else is out. Basically we’re idiots from a universal perspective. Because whatever name we choose to call it, it’s the same thing. All those lines come together at the horizon.

We’re always trying to see that horizon, striving for wisdom enough to grasp that bigger picture . . . but we’re hopelessly limited. At our best, we only see a glimpse of the universal gearwork, and even then, we don’t understand what we see.

Some people find that demoralizing—but to me it’s comforting. Because if all of existence was something a human mind could comprehend, what a sad, pathetic universe this would be.

I guess my own spark of enlightenment is an acceptance of all the things I’ll never know. And I breathe easy because of it. It leaves me content to be a blood cell, bright red with life, carrying oxygen to the brain.

30

A New Kind of Balance

Consciousness didn’t come in increments. When I opened my eyes, I was awake. Highly medicated, but awake. I had a throbbing headache, but it was a different kind than I had before. Other parts of me hurt as well. My whole body actually. And there was a terrible tingling in my left leg that felt too deep to scratch. I didn’t want to take an accounting of the damage. I’m sure someone had already done that.