When we touched down on the tarmac in Nosara, the doctor who had treated me the night before was waiting to greet me. He wanted to see for himself that I was okay, he explained. I thanked him and expressed my appreciation in every way I could think of—in English, in broken Spanish, with smiles and hugs. Nothing felt like enough.
On the drive back to the house, I was hit by a feeling that I shouldn’t be there. The reality of what I had just survived was sinking in more and more; I felt half out of my body and was trying to reconnect with this existence again. But I wasn’t sure how to simply go back to the house, where it felt like I needed to just pick up from where our glorious retreat had come to a crashing halt for me. The mood had changed. I was eager to reconnect with everyone, yet something felt off.
I tried to block that out as we arrived at the house. I walked in and dropped my backpack. When I found Stephanie in the backyard garden, we hugged as if I had been gone a year, not a day. She was still pretty emotional and having a hard time processing everything that had happened. And she wasn’t the only one. She told me that some of the other women on the retreat felt like they were hearing too much about the accident. They felt bad, but they also wanted to move on and continue with the trip as planned.
“They don’t want to deal and I’ve been dealing with it on my own and…” Stephanie put her hands over her eyes and rubbed the tears before they had a chance to fall. “It’s just been hard. I’m sorry.”
I hugged her.
“I’m sorry, too.”
We offered each other much-needed support. But I had a hard time accepting the attitude the other women had expressed to Stephanie. After a few hours there, I picked up on the tense dynamic and told Stephanie that I sensed the resentment boiling beneath the smiles and hugs. However, I had no energy or interest in confronting other people’s issues. I was the one who’d been involved in the accident and suffered the cuts and injuries. I felt horrible that this all had happened, but no matter how much gratitude I expressed, it still felt like it would never communicate how much I never wanted any of this to even happen.
Late that afternoon, I walked out to the back and found a little overlook area where I could sit and be with myself. I felt like I was on acid. Everything within my perception felt tangible, even my existence.
I tried to be still and meditate. I was sorry if I’d ruined the day and night, upset everyone’s sleep, and cast a pall over their morning yoga and surfing. I was also sorry for the ways it deeply affected my friend. Stephanie was really unmoored. She had come to work on herself, and I had blown that plan to smithereens.
The sun shifted and began to sink beneath the treetops. I looked out over the Costa Rican jungle and the dense greenery as it sloped all the way down to the beach. Thoughts and emotions swirled through my head. I seemed to experience everything all at once. Calm, anger, confusion, heaviness, gratitude, pain, sorrow, isolation, connectedness, and eventually the lightness I had experienced earlier in the little plane that had ferried me back from the hospital.
I thought about the eagle that had followed me as the women carried me through the jungle on the makeshift stretcher. Later that night, I was browsing in the house’s library and found a book titled Animal Speak: The Spiritual and Magical Power of Creatures Great and Small. I turned to the page on eagles and read this majestic bird was long considered a messenger of God.
It made sense to me. When I was being carried through the rivers and down the trails, this great creature who symbolized eternal life had flown with strength and grace directly in line with us. It was a message to me, and I was only just waking up to it. I would need much more time before I would understand the meaning and know how to act on it. But I was a survivor. Why couldn’t I see that? Why did it, continuously, take me so long to listen?
From the day my mother, newly pregnant with me, fell down the stairs and feared she lost me, to this very day, and through the umpteen close calls I had in between (a terrible crash I took when I was seven, a thirty-foot fall off a cliff when we lived in St. John, slicing my vein on a coral reef, causing profuse bleeding, and more), I was meant to live, to be here, to be alive—and loved. The Universe was showing me how much it loved me. I just had to quit doubting it, quit fighting it, and learn how to love myself.