This art featured in my memoir, Incandescence: Rising Above Darkness is included as a moment of serenity between chapters and does not necessarily have any literal connection to the story.
Incandescence: Rising Above Darkness Excerpt Chapter #48 Passing Through Walls
The dawn has a stillness, infusing the sky, mountains, and air with otherworldliness. The rarity of the sparkling white on the mountaintops melts as the wind blows. The shining dust is magical this morning. Everything is glowing from the inside. The red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet arches over the valley. It is soon followed by hail. It is exhilarating and frightening. The mountain looks like a landscape painted with royal foliage and a perfectly blue sky. The beauty is intoxicating. I imagine dancers sprinkling snow on the peaks. Flurries rise up and circle in graceful turns. I sense fantastic power all around. I become aware of how small I am. Everything about this day is wild and beautiful and suggests I should predict the unpredictable.
I call Glenda and say, “This is the sort of day where anything could happen. I feel it would be good for me to come off the mountain I live on and go out tonight and dance and celebrate life.”
Then I remember what I said to Glenda less than an hour before I needed to hear it. As I pass vehicles spinning, sliding backward, skidding sideways, rebounding off the median, I start feeling terror rising in my body, and I start chanting again, “Keep breathing, keep choosing to protect all life.” I focus on hitting nothing, floating, gliding, skidding, and choosing a path through the chaos.
Having no way to slow my vehicle down, it gets harder not to panic, and I chant louder, “Keep breathing, keep choosing to protect all life.” Then I see my long-departed mother out in front of me in the blizzard. She is made out of a cloud and is reaching her long delicate fingers down to the icy freeway and gently sweeping a path for the spinning and sliding vehicles not to hit each other and clearing a safe passage for me. My feeling of panic turns to trust in inexplicable forces. I have just enough turning ability to take the safe path through the wreckage and chaos by making minor adjustments, and I continue past crashed vehicles, one after another.
Clare Cooley
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