After a frightening car accident, I was reminded what The Handless Maiden looks like in real life: listening to the body, choosing rest, and refusing to abandon ourselves.
If you listen to Know Thy Soul each week, you may have noticed there was no new episode last Tuesday. Those of you on my mailing list already heard why. But if you are not on the list, I wanted to share what happened—and what The Handless Maiden looked like in my own life last week.
I had decided to attend a gathering of a shamanic community I have been part of for about six years in the Catskills of New York. Part Three of The Handless Maiden was already written and ready to go. It just needed to be recorded and edited.
About four and a half hours into the six hour trip, at the tail end of rush-hour traffic on the New York State Thruway, I was rear-ended by a large Ford Expedition. My car was sent spinning back and forth across five lanes of traffic. Miraculously, I was able to stop without hitting another car or the guardrail.
At one point during the accident, I remember seeing the Expedition that hit me spinning in my rearview mirror. At the same time, I looked out my driver’s-side window and saw the entire highway barreling toward me as my car moved straight toward the center guardrail.
It felt like death was standing just over my shoulder and, at the last minute, decided, Nah, not today, and backed away.
After the accident was handled, I continued on to the retreat. When I eventually returned home, I took some time to rest my body and let what had happened settle in.
On the ride home, I wondered why I had walked away without a visible scratch—though my body was definitely feeling the impact—while others, like my college friend Beth, died in their accidents.
I do not have the answers or any special insight into the bigger picture of life. But I do know this: death walks alongside all of us, at any moment, on any day.
Sometimes an event like this wakes us up. It reminds us that although we may not fully understand death, each of us reading this still has the gift of today.
The breath of life that God breathed into the first human is still pulsing through you, through me, and through every human alive on this planet at this very moment.
That is the most beautiful gift any of us has ever been given. And we get to decide what we want to do with it.
Do you want to experience a miracle?
Close your eyes.
Place your hand over your heart and feel it beating.
Listen to your breath moving in and out of your body.
Before you made a single decision today, your heart was already beating. Your breath was already moving through you. Life was already happening within you.
We forget to live in awe of the miracle of what it means to be alive because it happens every day.
So take a moment and ask yourself:
If I truly remembered that today is a gift, how would I choose to live it?
The story in real life
The irony is not lost on me that the episode I was supposed to release is called Growing Hands. It is about healing, wholeness, and the journey from self-abandonment toward spiritual sovereignty.
One of the ways we lose our hands is by ignoring what we know. We override our intuition. We silence our feelings. We refuse to listen when our bodies tell us that something is too much because we have already decided what we should be able to do.
Last week, my body asked me to stop.
I had a finished script. I had a plan. And I could have forced myself to record and edit the episode simply because I had said it would be released.
But what would it mean to create an episode about spiritual sovereignty while overriding the wisdom of my own body?
Perhaps this is also what The Handless Maiden looks like in real life: listening when my body asks me to stop, allowing myself to rest, and choosing not to abandon myself simply because I had made a plan.
Because the stories do not only live in books or fairy tales. Sometimes they meet us on highways. They meet us in our bodies. And they meet us in the quiet moment when we are asked whether we will repeat the old pattern or choose differently.
So last week, I chose differently.
I rested.
Part Three will be here soon. The story will still be waiting for us. And I am deeply grateful that I will be here to share it with you.
If you would like to receive these more personal reflections—and know when plans for the podcast change—you can join my mailing list here.
Until next time, my friends…
May you know thy soul.
It already knows the way.
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