Calm to Connected
BY MIKE COLEMAN
This piece is published in the summer 2021 issue of Refresh Journal, ‘The Deep’.
I am burnt out and I didn’t see it coming. I think everyone else around me knew I was burning out. For me it was a slow burn and now I am emotionally drained, bone tired and spiritually numb. I don’t feel God at all.
All those years of church, songs, scripture, communion, worship and now I am a spiritual nothing. My body has given up. I can’t eat gluten, dairy or sugar without bouts in the bathroom or it affecting my sleep.
How did it get to this?
What was I thinking all those years of advocating for earthquake affected people while working full-time in adolescent mental health? I castigate myself for being so stupid and not looking after myself. There’s me trying to give others life while I slowly die. Idiot. Why didn’t I listen to Fr. Niko who said you can’t give what you don’t have?
I am standing on the back porch of a bach in Granity. It is nearly dusk. On the West Coast the sun sets on the ocean’s horizon. It is a beautiful burnt orange this evening and the sun’s rays flicker in my eyes. In front of me is a bamboo grove and on the other side is the beach. I have come to the Coast to heal. My body aches and I am so tired I can hardly walk. Again, I can’t believe it has come to this. Even as I write, I find it hard to look back on.
I step off the porch and at a snail’s pace make my way through a path cut through the bamboo and find myself on the beach. I just stand there and breathe.
I close my eyes and hear the roar of the ocean like a bear hug to my soul.
It’s strange reflecting on this as it’s not God I feel, like some ritual or emotional space in a church, but something else, a quiet energy. It’s not love, it’s calmness. Nature reaching into my depths and embracing me, caring for me.
I take a few more steps, not more than a few metres, down the beach. I stop and breathe again through my nose and slowly out my lips just as I taught so many kids over the years. I can feel the air flowing into me, oxygen thawing my nervous system, oxygen healing me.
Is this the breath of God?
It’s like oxygen has the DNA of God within it. I remember the verse and later look it up. “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being.” Genesis 2:7
I walked for a week in Granity, slow breathing filling my body, emotions and spirit with the DNA of God. I was reviving and recreating.
The breathing was prayer.
I read no scripture, prayed no verbal prayers, read no Nouwen or Merton. I had no energy fo it. I just walked slowly, ate, drank and breathed.
The burnout was deep, real and only the very essence of God could heal me, the flow of air the power of the most common element in the world.
I watched the Netflix documentary, Cooked, the other week. It showed a woman’s son taking grain to a mill to be ground the old-fashioned way, using a stone grinder. The son took the new flour back to his mother and she began to make bread. To the flour she added water, a little salt and kneaded. The narrator explained you cannot live on flour and water but if you put both together and knead in the ingredient of air, bread is made. The air gives bread life, and you can live on this for years.
I am standing once again on the back porch of the bach in Granity. It is a year later. I am feeling better but not quite myself. I can walk down the beach no problem, I can read fine, but I am still not quite the person I was before all this tiring mess.
I step of the porch and walk the path through the bamboo grove onto the beach. The sun is setting. It flickers on the edge of the ocean, nature at it’s finest reaching out to me once again.
I stand still, eyes wide open, ears to the roar of the waves and breathe. The oxygen flows through me. Slowly over and over I breathe. I am feeling peace, calm but something else is happening within me.
Last year it was like oxygen soothing every electrical and chemical energy sparking within me, right at that neutron space, the flow through my organs and tendons, my whole nervous system calming down. Today this same oxygen, this same flow of God, feels like it is connecting those neutrons together, connecting my organs and nervous system.
My emotions and and body are feeling stable. My brain is firing, and I have clarity about my life and what has happened. Now as I breathe, I feel a greater sense of who I am, a greater sense of myself, my own humanity and giftedness.
From calm to connected I am sparking again, being again, becoming Mike Coleman. How I have craved to become the person I was and feel free to live and love and experience life again. As I reflect over the week in Granity, I have been reborn a third time - water, spirit, and oxygen.
Mike Coleman lives in Christchurch. He enjoys playing with his grandchildren, cycling, gardening and walking by the ocean. He works as a school counsellor and is an Anglican priest.
