Pop 89: A Change in Circumstance
By Madonna Hamel
If the laws of science and nature describe how things have been observed to behave under certain circumstances, then a miracle could be described as what happens when circumstances change.
I read this somewhere recently and scribbled it in my notebook. I like this definition of a miracle. The world is changing every minute, and with it our circumstances, sometimes against our desires and most times without us knowing or imagining. But change is the one thing we can all count on- so by that line of thinking- miracles abound.
Of course, much depends on the magnitude or unlikelihood of the observed circumstance. Seeing another moon appear in the sky warrants the heading: miraculous. Listening to a local rancher describe a difficult calving without f-bombing his way through the story might simply be described as a pleasant surprise.
Also, much depends on the where and when of the circumstance. When I toured with a band, finding a parking space for a van full of equipment at 6 pm on a Saturday night in front of New York City’s Terra Blues club was extolled as a bone fide miracle. Finding a spot in front of The Lyric Theatre in Swift Current, not so big a deal.
On the other hand, the transcendent momentous mystery of bringing a child into the world can only be described as a miracle- every single time. Also, consider photosynthesis- how plants can covert light into energy to be stored to fuel a plant’s growth. And also how no snowflake or grain of sand looks the same as another.
And then there is neuroplasticity. Anyone who has had a brain injury or a stroke or knows someone who has is counting on the miracle of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity refers to neural networks in the brain capable of changing through growth and reorganization. Meaning, the brain can be taught to function in ways that differ from how it functioned before damage.
After my brother had a stroke, I loaded up on books about the brain. Books like: “The Spiritual Brain,” “Into the Magic Shop,” “Neuro Dharma,” and “Proust and the Squid.” And, yes, I read the popular “The Brain That Changes Itself” by Norman Doige.
My brother cringes when well-meaning friends start a sentence with the words: “Have you read that book by that guy…” because invariably, they haven’t read it themselves, but they feel compelled to recommend it. I suppose they feel they are providing a kind of service. But we are being hugely insensitive to someone who has been through a massively life-altering and traumatic experience when we give casual advice or recommend books we haven’t even read ourselves.
At the moment reading Doidge’s “The Brain’s Way of Healing”. And I am scouring it for miracle exercises that will change things and slow down the neurons leaping and diving around my brother’s annihilated lobe, looking for a place to land.
I’m always on the lookout for miracles. Not just in the heady language of science and medicine but in the words of writers who have seen hard, hard times yet still believe in the miraculous. Such writers belong to a particular street-smart heart-of-gold kind of God whose full name is Gift of Desperation. They tend to be the biggest believers in miracles because they are walking miracles.
One of them is Brian Doyle. His brother died young of a brain tumour; then he died soon after of the same thing. He wrote often about the intense world of childhood surmise, about ever-present mysteries that continued to amaze him into adulthood. Like my brothe, he observes things and never stopped living in the acutely sensitive land of childhood. Here’s a bit:
“I know without even opening my eyes that everyone else in the house is asleep, for when you are a child, you have the most extraordinary senses, and can tell the colour of a bird by its song, and the day of the week by the thrum of the rain, and how amused or annoyed your dad is by the tilt of his hat. Why do we not sing these things as miracles?”
Somewhere in my travels visiting my stroke-stricken father and brother over the last nine months, I picked up a beautiful book of essays called “The Depositions” by Thomas Lynch. Lynch is both a poet and an undertaker.
In an essay called “Miracles,” he writes about the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who woke one morning, after festivities at a friend’s house, paralyzed by a stroke. His wife and friends had to load him onto a gurney and carefully manoeuvre him down a narrow staircase. He wrote a poem about the experience, comparing himself to the paralytic who was lowered from a rooftop by his friends to be healed by Christ. But the agents of Heaney’s “rescue and restoration,” writes Lynch, were his faithful friends. “Their friendship is miraculous. Their hefting and lifting and large muscle work is the stuff and substance of salvation.”
My brother’s been living with me on the prairie for nearly a month now. Every once in a while, he will come up with a description of what the world looks like to him. It’s devastating to hear him tell me that for a year, he’s been seeing the world through a spinning kaleidoscope, and all he has to focus on is that tiny white circle you get at the centre of the whirling toy. Or that it’s like the ground beneath him is water, and the stepping stones in front of him are floating chunks of styrofoam.
Yet despite the ‘swirlies,’ as he calls them, he marvels at the sunsets. And his willingness to be inspired, to be touched by the beauty of the outer world when his inner world is tossing his head about, is a miracle in itself. And still, I will begin and end my days praying for a miracle and for circumstances to change.