Timberline of the Mind

Many years ago, I suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) from an auto accident, not of my making. I was unconscious and experienced three grand mal seizures during the ambulance ride to the traumatic care emergency center. During the months following the accident, I had periodic amnesia. Also, I had rehabilitation sessions with a speech and language therapist, a physical therapist, and an occupational therapist for several months. While recovering, I had daydreams and nightmares where images and words tumbled together in a kaleidoscope that I could not understand. My occupational therapist was the most sympathetic and insightful. Some said the unusual images and prismatic nature of my illusions represented my brain's efforts to sort out the sensory damages, but the occupational therapist heard and saw something different. She suggested that I write about the thoughts and images in order to better understand them; so quietly and secretly I did. Some of the thoughts were simple, common everyday observations of life but from very different perspectives and yet others were from an unknown place in my mind. As my memory recovered and my brain healed, thoughts of books, poems, and people came forth in unusual and unfiltered ways, while images, colors, shapes, and memories folded across my mind in unusual if not bizarre patterns. I described many of them through writing, but I never looked back over them nor attempted to do anything with them. Writing about them seemed to serve a need of the moment and no other purpose. Recently, while pushing through some difficult times and sorting through my files, I found my notes from the post-TBI days. The material was interestingly unfamiliar and yet familiar, too. I wondered if I could capture those same observations of life in a more contemporary mind and blend the old and the new together. The result is this book of poetry. The poems represent the mind of a person struggling to recover physically, spiritually, and emotionally combined with present-day feelings and observations of our internal and external lives from a mind that was damaged and then healed. The title of the book was not chosen at random. The poem Timberline of the Past resonated with my purpose. A timberline is a line or altitude above which no trees grow. The timberline is usually a point where there is a lack of enough oxygen, warmth, or water to keep trees alive. Each of us has a timberline of the mind above which our lives, physical and emotional conditions, our experiences, attitude, and ability to cope are not sufficiently nurtured enough to reach a place where we are content and truly happy. Let's visit those places above the timberline of the mind through poems.