Awake in the night because of pain, I finish Karen Darke's book, "If You Fall". When she was 21 she fell from a cliff and broke her back. The first half of the book frustrated me: her recovery seemed too easy and swift with little reflection or learning. One minute she's on bed-rest, the next, she's competing in the London Marathon. She leaves hospital and is soon crossing Central Asia on a cycle tandem. It's all too beyond my experience to have any resonance for me.
But halfway through she has a series of revelations that challenge her and take the book to a far more interesting place. She meets a healer who works on her with crystals. She begins to meditate. And she goes to Brazil to meet Rubens, a man who's supposed to be inhabited by the spirit of a German surgeon from 1914. After reading about him and watching him work, she allows him to operate on her without anaesthetic, sterilised equipment or medical assistance in a Rio church. Rubens has no medical training or expertise but proceeds to cut open her back and manipulate her spine. Karen's uncertain it will work but asks "what have I got to lose?" I admire her attitude but surely there's a limit? No training. No backup. No sterilised equipment.
Amazingly, she feels no pain as he operates. Amazingly, she doesn't die from infection. She doesn't regain the ability to walk but she does live. And she does learn to accept her paralysis and live fully in the present. There's a great quote from Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh: "We all cling to the past, and because we cling to it, we become unavailable to the present." The book ends with her in a kayak following the route of the historical Inside Passage, a journey of over one thousand miles, paddling for three months with friends and without a wheelchair.
Reading her blog, I discover that she's subsequently skied 600km across the Greenland ice cap and climbed the kilometre high overhanging precipice of El Capitan, a giant granite rock face in Yosemite National Park, USA. She sounds pretty extraordinary! She's currently on a speaking tour and I'm going to hear her in Poole on Wednesday. I'm intrigued.
