Experiences — What happened when the world stopped? What does complete autonomy look like?
Part 1 — Spiritual Awakening
As with the Second World War some people found positive experiences within the lockdowns, but sadly for the vast majority on the planet the pandemic was hellish. My father passed away at 3am on Christmas Day a few months prior to the start of the March lockdown in the UK (a significant time in itself). All of the bustle and activity around me gradually disappeared and by March I was plunged into an isolated silence that lasted nearly a year. The pause button had been pressed and I was given a privilege and experience I doubt few people on this planet will ever have. 2020 became a contemplative monastic-like existence for me. This is an account of a spiritual journey, an account of my groundhog day alone on a space station.
I lived alone in the rural English countryside in a small self-contained wooden bungalow. A simple building I called my shed that I lovingly made my home. My nearest neighbours in their late 90s were 500 yards away being shielded and supported by their family members. We were all told by the Government to stop work. So after a lifetime being a highly disciplined time-keeping obsessed workaholic engineer/scientist it was incredibly uncomfortable during those early weeks, as it was for most of us. I was ineligible for financial support, but was fortunate to have some savings. I took COVID-19 seriously, did what I was told to do and bunkered down calling on that fabled wartime spirit. I wanted to do my bit because I was acutely aware of the pressures my NHS friends were under. I signed up to volunteer with the NHS Nightingale Hospital and drove to London along an empty M25 to the O2 arena for training. It was a type of training no-one will want to read about or ever use. I then waited at home in anticipation for weeks to be rostered. I prepared an overnight bag and wrote a will. But my distance from London meant I was not required. I then trained as a vaccinator, but the required policy changes through Parliament for utilising former NHS Scientific staff lagged behind the needs of locally outsourced recruitment agencies. I signed up with voluntary organisations and downloaded the apps. but was too remote in the countryside from the requests that popped up. With the best intentions I reluctantly accepted those barriers and resolved to create a daily routine in the idyll of seclusion I had crafted and cloistered myself in over the past twelve years.
“I have given to you every plant whose seed is sown, that is upon the face of all the earth, and every unfruitful tree for the requirements of building and for burning; and every tree on which there is fruit whose seed is sown shall be yours for food”
From day one I instigated very strict rationing. At the start of 2020 I had a stocked cupboard of raw dried ingredients for baking, but my diet gradually tended towards pasta, tinned tomatoes and tuna, complemented by vegetables and salad from the garden, and fruit foraged from the surrounding countryside.
I cycled to a supermarket once every two or three weeks wearing PPE, to buy bread, butter, eggs and dark chocolate. The only other people I had interactions with over 2020 were discussions with a therapist on the phone, with family members via Zoom, and briefly tutoring students through GCSE revision. These shared moments were a lifeline, but appeared fleetingly.
I kept up-to-do date with the pandemic heat maps, statistics and advice from the WHO, Reuters, BBC and Dr John Campbell’s excellent channel.
I was not strictly alone. Out across the fields and around my shed the noisy screeching of foxes pierced the night air, cattle lowed, badgers, deer, moles, and rabbits bustled around me, mice and rats burrowed under and into the property, mice and squirrels rustled in their nests inside the wall cavities and tapped their claws across the floorboards above my bed. Woodpecker tapping resonated across the fields, blue tits burrowed holes into the eaves of my shed to build nests in the roof. Mice darted underneath doors in and out of the kitchen. As a gardener of twelve years I had slowly learnt to recognise what the birds were signalling to each other, and to me they warned of the arrival of a cat, fox, bird of prey or stray dog. Because the shed was so embedded in the woods occasionally birds would strike the single-paned glass and briefly knock themselves out before getting up dazed, flying off in wonky directions. Wildlife would often come inside. Woodpeckers, blue tits, robins, rabbits, ducks, snakes, stray dogs, and insects in abundance shared my small living space. This all necessitated the need to put masking tape across windows, set down traps of varying levels of inhumanity, copper strips, pine cones and chestnuts, and build up a range of netting of different sizes and heights, interspersed with scented herbs and repellent plants. It took twelve years of reading, listening to advice, trial and error and fine-tuning to find a balance that suited us all.
The sky at night was a pitch black canvas behind a spectrum of stars I had watched slowly rotate season by season.
In the immense natural silence social constructs eventually disappeared. These are by no means minor things. Time took on a different meaning. Working 8 till 5, schedules, diaries, calendars, appointments, busyness, hustle and bustle gone. The demarcations between working days and weekends had gone. I had no need for clocks, diaries and schedules. I took the batteries out of the ticking clocks to reduce the deafening noise they added to the birdsong. I used the sun. Social hierarchy. Managers, people organised by rank and importance gone. I was alone with my brain and the Internet.
My purpose had also gone. But before I could dig out the water colours and put my feet up, a referral for alcohol rehab. therapy had arrived and a retired psychodynamic therapist made contact, providing me the basis to structure a routine.
The routine was quite straight forward initially and refined as the months went on. I kept my curtains open and woke up with the rising sun, with a notepad by the side of the bed taking notes about the dreams and thoughts that entered my mind as I woke. I meditated, showered, prepared simple food, walked, tended the garden and had a phone call with the therapist which gave topics to reflect on and discuss. In the evening I meditated, took notes, slept, woke, took notes. Repeat. Repeat. For months.
The therapy was a process of taking off the shell and examining each and every trauma and event of the past 45 years and back through generations that made up who I am. Every piece of barbed wire sticking out of the shell that caused pain in others. It was an agonising process family members later became involved in as we reflected on different interpretations of past events. Days became weeks became months, laying my life bare on the dissecting room slab. There were many tears, much frustration, anger, moments of revelation and many many painful sleepless nights. As unusual as it may sound to Western audiences, I could feel a channel of energy opening up within me. Within which was a stack of compacted traumatic events making their slow way up through the core of my body, up into conscious awareness, to be examined, acknowledged, honoured and then thrown away. Gone. One by one in their own time old events appeared as I woke up as if to say “you need to work on me next”. When they left, space was created for the next one days or weeks later. Michael Singer describes this healing process in his book “The Untethered Soul”. It was a process of breaking chains that left me feeling lighter with each passing event.
It was not obvious to me at the time if there were any implications of undertaking this deep therapy in isolation. It was not carried out in person, but on the phone, and I was not in a position to integrate what I was learning into a normal pattern of life with people around me. This would become painfully apparent later.
The sessions came to a natural conclusion and I was encouraged to 1. Find an outlet (a voice), 2. Turn my scientific lens inwards and 3. Consider working in mental health or the prison service due to my experiences, familiarity in distressing environments and newfound knowledge. After a lifetime of alcohol use my mind had become free and clear, and had a voracious appetite to study, to quickly fill gaps in its knowledge; in history, philosophy, psychology, politics, anthropology, religion, theology, social justice. I had worked on my personal library over the years, making crude furniture in the tool shed to make best use of the tiny physical space; and collecting many of the “must read books” — Dostoevsky, Huxley, Orwell, Dante, Gilbert Ryle, PG Woodhouse, St Thomas Moore (who coincidently had a connection with the Estate my hermitage was in). This was an opportunity to read or re-read them. I went into a frenzy of printing charts, historical timelines, trees of knowledge, looking at the roots, branches, divisions, similarities and patterns across various fields of study. I listened to an abundance of free lecture material available to us all online.
I visited local churches and asked theological questions local clergy had not tackled since their seminary days. The responses were unsatisfactory to me, but it was then by some incredible fortune that I met a highly informed and engaging theologian at my local Parish church. We walked and talked about the big topics, different beliefs and practices. I wanted to know how others gained strength in faith, so that I could live a better life and be a better person. I most certainly did not arrive at a faith in Christ in a conventional way by studying the Bible. I wanted to know the deeper common message across all faiths.
I also turned the scientific lens inwards on myself and meditated deeply in silence, seated, in bed, walking in the garden, around the local countryside and lakes. The more I meditated the more it became apparent that meditation is more important than sleep. There were days I meditated for more hours than I slept and felt more refreshed. I had discovered a powerful spiritual battery within me that was being charged for the first time and wanted to be fully charged. We all have one. I continued feeling blissfully at peace, by this time completely oblivious to the modern world. Between meditations I watched Buddhist Dharma talks and discussions with Ram Dass, Eckhart Tolle, Alan Watts, and Thich Nhat Hanh, learning about letting go of imperfections, deep listening and our interbeing with the natural world. I listened deeply to Sanskrit meditations of the Bhagavad Gita, becoming lost and mesmerised by the ancient tonal language.
In addition to deep contemplative practice I also watched videos and talks about positive activated psychology, Wim Hoff and Anthony Robbins, how to change your physiological state and attain goals. I practiced breath work from different traditions with different purposes. I was attempting to learn as much as possible and make the best use of this unique time. I had become my own case study, peering through windows in my mind. I pushed myself physically too, cycling around the local Hills. Where once I struggled with the slightest gradient, by focusing solely on the breath rather than the biomechanical forces of leg muscles, and allowing my legs to operate autonomously, cycling became a breathing meditation. It didn’t take long before I was effortlessly breaking personal bests on a day-by-day basis, in distance, ride times and elevation profiles. The steepest of gradients disappeared in meditation. I felt physically stronger than ever before and was high-fiving personal trainers in the local park. I lost 41lbs in body weight during 2020.
A turning point occurred during one very intense evening, in bed listening via headphones to the Corpus Hermeticum being read on audiobook. The ancient book recounts the teachings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (a Hellenistic combination of the Greek God Hermes and the Egyptian God Thoth). Every single word resonated with me. I writhed in bed, not in pain, but in a jaw-dropping awe, confusion and wonder that the landscape of humanity being painted by an Egyptian possibly 8000 years ago seemed identical to the landscape emerging in my mind. It was as if he were alive in my mind through those words, pre-empting everything I wanted to say. We stood together and alone that night in the desert looking at repeating patterns of human history, alongside the statue to Ozymandias.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”
It is hard to describe how I perceived the environment around me over the next few weeks. I walked in the countryside at a pace that matched my heart rate. As I slowed down I lost awareness of my feet, my legs, my body, torso, arms. I became an observer floating through the natural environment, watching the intricate interplay and delicate movements within the environment in slow motion. Bees slowly flapped their wings as pollen gracefully swirled in eddy currents towards them. It was blissful. Whilst the natural environment and I were in slow synchrony the human elements appeared as if through a veil of history. A tractor in a distant field could have been a shire horse with a plough. As I slowed down, time did too and then it stopped, and it became Divinely blissful. I felt I saw the complete diamond, with rays of sun refracting out into different perceptions, but all facets of the same diamond. Allah, Buddha, Jehovah, Krishna, Christ saw the impermanence of human activity and knew that God is Love.
Love. That blissfully divine immeasurable force that unites all living beings. Love. Tough, kind, elusive, harsh, gentle and ever present throughout history. Conveyed and shared through art, music, poetry, in giving food, with time together. It is comforting and painful. We express it badly and through love languages, we cry-laugh at our stupidity at not expressing our love when it is needed. It brings us to tears and to our knees begging forgiveness. We aspire to love what we do, love others as ourselves. It is the spirit within us that when handled with divine reverence keeps us safe and allows us to sleep peacefully at night. Rejoice in it because by simply breathing and by being alive you are loved. You are love.
How does any person come back from that experience? Little me.
Western psychiatry may give my experience labels like ‘dissociated, depersonalisation or derealisation disorders’. But “I” simply took the shell off, left my “self” and became an exposed soul, an untethered soul seeing the world anew.
Similar experiences came in the following weeks listening to interviews with Ram Dass and Eckhart Tolle. I would later tell my theological friends “They were the words I would have used!”, “That is what I would have said” if only I could articulate those profound ideas and understandings so eloquently with my own words.
I can rarely find the words but have since met monks of various orders, and other spiritually inclined people who are quite at home using the language of “spiritual experience”, “mystical experience” or “peak experience”. Buddhist monks and meditation teachers have listened with horror at the meditation practice I undertook and have told me to “Attend to the physical world!”. Two years ago I was an atheist scientist trying to get by, living by my personal code of gaining skills and helping people. This was all very new to me.
Yes I said horror. I stopped my monkey mind, but I did so in isolation, without a spiritual instructor, without a community. I didn’t integrate my faith or meditation practice into my daily working life.
“The Buddha made a distinction between physical and psychological solitude and considered the first to be the more important of the two (S.II,282; V,67). For him, psychological solitude meant isolating the mind from negative thoughts and emotions. He recognized that people can choose to be physically solitary for a variety of reasons, some positive, others less so. Some wish to isolate themselves from others, he said, out of foolishness or confusion, for some evil purpose, because they are mad or mentally unstable, or simply because he praised it. Even if one seeks prolonged physical solitude for the right reasons one still needs to monitor oneself carefully and intelligently.
The joy of aloneness can subtly deteriorate into a shirking of one’s responsibilities. One can overdo it, over-reach oneself and end up straining the mind. Hence the Buddha’s caution: `One who goes into solitude will either sink to the bottom or rise to the top’(A.V,202)”
Rodney Frey, Professor Emeritus of Ethnography, University of Idaho.
Part 2 — Clearing the Sand Mandala
The sound of the first aeroplane overhead was very noticeable. It was like a boat on the horizon of my deserted island, leaving a contrail through the sky. It was the first reminder of man-made movement in the wider modern world. It was a clear day and I was standing outside gazing up in wonder as if like a caveman wanting to lower myself to the ground on all fours. But I walked inside and sat down to pause and level with myself. Over the coming days cars arrived around me as people returned to work and the lockdown rules eased up. I realised I needed to return to the modern world. My little bungalow was in a poor state and beyond economic repair, as hard as I had tried to keep it upright. The rent would need to be increased to market value (a three-fold increase) in order to meet habitable regulations. I would need to find a new job and move house at the same time. A daunting prospect but an opportunity I viewed positively, viewed as a second chance at life. I later suggested to a friend I felt like a born again human.
I decided I wanted to re-join the NHS, with the aims of supporting the covid-19 recovery efforts, regaining my Clinical Scientist registration and working my way up into a post like a Deputy Head of Clinical Engineering. That would hopefully allow me to go on occasional sabbaticals to Africa to help train medical engineers make a dent in the medical equipment graveyard problem — the driving force throughout my life.
I had accumulated twelve years’ of stuff in the bungalow, garden, shed and the two hand-built outbuildings I used to store ‘skip finds’ for upcycling and re-purposing. I decided it all had to go because I would need to scale down to fit into a normal flat. I didn’t tax my car through the pandemic and it was in a sorry state, so had it towed away. I cleared the rest through a poor attempt at a yard sale, cycle trips to charity shops, giving things away to neighbours and friends, upending the planters and then weeks of bonfires — burning university notes, books, garden furniture and the skip finds. I discarded over two thirds of my possessions. This was in part a cleansing process like sweeping away a sand mandala, preparing for a new life, but equally very painful. I was about to take a leap of faith.
Part 3 — Shock
With help from family and friends I moved into the top floor flat of a terrace house in the centre of a metropolitan town. There was no staff accommodation available and this was the only available property I could find. Dark, smoky, barely a tree in sight.
I was terrified and surprised I was terrified, surrounded by boxes, wearing noise cancellation headphones. The new job required me to attend a residential training course set in the grounds of a country house. So no sooner had I left my hermitage in the woods in the grounds of one country home, there I was again staying in the room of another, surrounded by history. I continued the early morning runs through the countryside before the training course sessions. The course was quick, concise and straightforward and I returned to the town and the flat I had yet unpacked and settled in to.
It is also hard to describe what I saw as I walked through the town for the first time. My perceptions were flitting between different periods in history. I was seeing snapshots of history in the architecture, streets, in the activities and faces of people around me. The repeating pattern of history. The overriding sense that struck me the most was in everyone’s faces, it was that of a mental health crisis. My mental wellbeing benchmark was off the charts. I later met a group of Thai Buddhist monks in the street. One gently smiled and said “Yes of course you can see things differently now”.
A week prior to starting my new job I walked through the hospital I would be working in. I saw the same picture with much greater intensity. The history of the buildings was palpable. I walked through the corridors seeing anguish and suffering in the faces of everyone who bustled passed. I introduced myself to everyone and anyone with a huge beaming smile. Everyone turned their anguish into smiles and welcomed me to the hospital. But I was shocked at what I saw in place for staff and patients, from the dilapidated buildings, the quality of the food, access to water, fresh air, lack of seating, the bewildering signage, the absence of green life. But above all, the noise. From my dark crowded smoky flat to the hospital, the noise levels were utterly deafening, from the roads to the clanging of trolleys in corridors. A vast complex noisy production line of activity devoted to keeping people physically alive. In the week prior to starting work I had numerous informal conversations with caterers, visitors and volunteers about improvements that could be made for the wellbeing of everyone.
I then entered the workshop I would be assigned to work in. It is very difficult today to write about what I experienced in those first few days. Many of those individuals are there today working very hard, adapted and habituated like lobsters in boiling water in what is considered normal. I felt I had walked into a warzone, with a wellbeing benchmark off the chart and an empathy sensor set at maximum. I was overwhelmed, but rolled my sleeves up. There was a lot of work to do.
Since I had forgotten about social hierarchies, my frame of reference was from previous work in the NHS, when I worked with patients in an MDT (multi-disciplinary team) reporting to the Consultant. Recalling that reference I met the Consultant and conveyed as much as possible. I was then asked to work on a large scale problem whilst also working in the role I was employed in. I distinctly remember entering a part of my brain I don’t like using — the Asperger’s part I use to solve complex problems. It felt uncomfortable because the vast majority of my brain enjoys helping and encouraging other people. As time went on it became apparent that there were managers between myself and the Consultant in a bewildering hierarchy. I had already entered Asperger’s space — a space that once hyperfocuses is very hard to move freely in and out of, I was looking at a complex disordered problem that needed solving, organising and tidying up. A vast machine that needed fixing — a department.
Switching between two roles in a hierarchy trying to fix everything and help everyone, de-escalating tensions, trying to inject energy to lift a beleaguered department up. I was made aware of flaws in productivity measurement that formed the basis of mine and my colleagues pay. I was made aware of complaints and development needs of my managers. I was putting myself in everyone else’s shoes and modelling the whole machine from the outside, looking for an ideal solution. I felt I was in the cracks in the system and as the system moved it hurt.
I don’t know how I was perceived by managers. They operated from a different building and often from home. Numerous discussions took place about the scale of the brokenness of the department. Very quickly I felt like wings had been sawn off, and my mental health spiralled down. As if I were being sucked through the earth. I tried to reach out many times but to no avail, repeated stress risk assessments came to no avail. In the free fall as I reached out my hands grazed against the sides of the rocky interior of a dark tunnel.
The emotional effort required to walk into the hospital became greater and greater and I was often exhausted by lunchtime. At one stage I began searching for hope. In Victor Frankl’s “Mans Search for Meaning” he recounted his experience as a psychoanalyst in Auschwitz. The smallest sign of life, like seeing the living growth of a leaf on a tree through the slats in the dormitory walls, was enough to give some survivors hope. So from my dark smoky flat, through the road noise and the grey concrete in the short walk to work I stopped at every plant to acknowledge new life, before going in to the cacophony of boiling water. The sight of those leaves clearly did not change the situation I was in and eventually I was too exhausted to go in. I signed myself off sick and used the whistleblowing policy to highlight everything I had seen and experienced — the wellbeing of my colleagues, my wellbeing and the state of the department. My anxiety then turned into 2 months of panic attacks, alone in that flat, in what was perhaps autistic burnout.
As we get older we all present a façade to the outside world and maintain boundaries with those around us to protect our fragility. We all mask our true selves. We all grit our teeth and say we’re fine when we’re really not. We don’t talk about mental health. As with the title character of Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Ernest, people often use different masks or facades in different settings, at work, home, or in front of a press briefing. It is our name, our story, our presence in the machine. I arrived wearing a rice paper thin mask, an identity that was quickly split between two levels of an organisation. Across that hierarchy some were struggling to maintain healthy boundaries, I certainly was, and there were arguments and tensions I tried to defuse. My rice paper thin psychological mask was ripped into two and came off.
To imagine what that physically feels like for someone suspected of having autism, you might have to imagine your brain exposed to the outside world, attached to electrodes that are violently and haphazardly controlling your arms. The pain was unimaginable, throughout my brain, behind and around my eyes, for months. I wanted to separate my brain from my spinal cord to make it stop. I had become hyperfocused on my own mental health, under the spotlight of a large complex machine. My leap of faith had made me frighteningly vulnerable.
In those two months of panic attacks I walked around the town, asking for help, yet not knowing how anyone could help. And when help arrived I was overwhelmed, spending more time attending to mental health appointments than living. I was on foot, but in my head in Ecclesiastes, back with the Egyptians, in the belly of the whale, walking aimlessly outside the machine.
One day whilst walking through the town I met a young girl reading the Bible, we sat and had coffee together. I was in awe of the way she read and spoke about her favourite passages and the strength she got from it. We parted company and as I walked back to the flat I felt a chill to my core, standing under the warm sun shivering, as if the warmth of my soul had been extinguished.
I spent the next three weeks in that flat, on my bed staring at the ceiling waiting to die. Jordon Peterson is noted for saying that anyone who stops and realises we are hurtling on a ball of rock through the universe is bound to feel lost. We are all making it up as we go along.
Part 4 — A Strange Sangha
Inside this acute psychiatric ward (37) I can see too much too. It is sometimes hard to distinguish between the patients and staff. Agency staff come and go without lanyards and name badges leaning against walls watching distressed patients. It is hard to distinguish between managers, nurses, support workers, healthcare assistants, agency staff and patients. It remains unclear to me who the staff are, what their roles are and what progress is being made. I see faces come and go having good days and bad days — sometimes being open and chatty one day, closed and aloof the next. There is little consistency. Some staff search me, some don’t. Some come in to my room and treat me like a human, some stand at the door without making eye contact, saying things I can’t hear and then disappear without waiting for a response. When I first arrived I spent two days trying to get someone’s attention to get a glass of water. The person assigned to me changes every day. I don’t know if I have a care plan or what I am supposed to do. Neither do my family. One might assume that when someone tries to take their life, family would receive advice and support.
Patients who shout the loudest or go into crisis receive attention and one-to-one support, whilst quiet patients, like me, quietly fear becoming institutionalised. One loud patient who told me about their criminal activities has played the game and is now discharged. I watched one patient eating stones in the courtyard while the person assigned to them was looking at his phone. Another patient walking through the corridor crying and talking about her miscarriage while staff were in the morning MDT meeting. I asked someone to unlock a side room to give her some space and dignity but they were not allowed to. “If it distresses you, you can go back to your room”. She slumped to the floor crying near another patient who told her to f off. I cannot see therapy taking place. Treatment appears to be purely pharmacological to even out emotions. The outcome measures on the noticeboards measure patterns of aggression towards staff, not patient success. If you lose your autonomy it would be clear to you why there is aggression towards staff. If you are left in a room for a few days without clean clothing, dry towels and clean bedsheets it would be clear to you why there is aggression towards staff. I renounced everything too soon and now have 1 ½ years of buried emotions and anger I don’t want to take out on staff or myself.
The staff have their routines and activities to keep themselves busy and content, operating the machine.
My sessions with the psychiatrists haven’t amounted to anything yet. These are important and fleeting moments in the lives of the patients. The psychiatrists and Doctors often sit looking at their laptops, barely making eye contact, and then ask similar questions in different orders. “Tell me about y z x” .. “Your thoughts appear disordered, you are anxious, let’s increase your medication”. “Dr, if I ask you about y z x, your thoughts might appear disordered too. I am a sequential thinker, can you let me tell you about xyz?”, “Perhaps next time”. “Could you let me explain what has happened this year?”, “Perhaps next time”. In the canteen patients tell me what is going on in their lives and their frustrations with psychiatrists. It seems clear why some need an advocate with them.
Our minds are subtly influenced by the people and events around us. The words we hear resonate in our dreams overnight and influence our thoughts and decisions the following day. Which is why it is empowering to surround ourselves with role models and those who share our values. SO psychiatric wards are certainly not therapeutic environments to find your self!
What I experienced Stanislav Grof calls a spiritual emergency. A biblical fall. For anyone experiencing spiritual turmoil the single-most important skill that has kept me alive is to breath. Breath slowly and let the world go by, breath deeply hearing the sound of your breath, and give thanks for the miracle that life is.
The pandemic was an act of God and I took a leap of faith. What is God telling me to do now? I keep asking and for the first time in my life I cannot hear.