Faerie Lights in the Forest

How I celebrated my 21st RebirthDay--the anniversary of my big car wreck

Helloooo! If you’re Christmassing, I hope it’s a grand one! We’re Covid Christmassing here, so this year we’ll mostly be New Yearsing. In honor of the holiday, today I’d like to speak to you about something I’m very, very serious about.

Twinkle lights.

Are you aware that I have three different Substacks? If you’re already subscribed to the others and you know about my North Forest Lights adventures, feel free to mosey about your day as I recap. If you aren’t aware, then I want to introduce you to my second publication today, because I don’t know about you, but my adventures in Holiday Hell and the stories about my big car wreck and life with TBI can hit a little hard for way too long sometimes.

Tinkerings of an Elemental Alchemist is my mad scientist’s lab (short for laboratory and labyrinth) where I play with art and nature, innovation and creation, and my 5 Elements System.

(The third publication is the home of my steamy, gory fantastical romance fiction, in case you’re way more into that.)

With the theme of this month’s writing around here—December is always Anniversary Month for my big car wreck, which means Hashtag Don’t Drink & Drive Season—I can’t describe to you how much I NEED the palate cleanser of Tinkerings. If you’ve been following that adventure, I can only imagine that you probably need it, too.

All these tools and artsy toys are the things that keep me sane. They are what make the bad days worth getting out of bed for, or staying in bed for when I need to recharge and heal. Only if I’ve allowed myself the proper rest and rejuvenation by letting the miraculous machines of my body and mind, and my far more resilient heart and spirit heal can I get back to all that awesome stuff I really wanna get back to.

I have segregated these topics into two completely different Substack publications because not everybody wants to go down these dark paths that we cover in Bella & the Beast. Not everybody wants to get so NSFW.

“Ohhhh, you should just use Sections.”

Dooood.

Have you seen how many Sections I already have at the start of creating these publications? There are more forthcoming, I assure you, and at that point my Sections would need dropdown menus, and some of my dropdowns would need dropdowns! Hence a separate publication just for the SFW Ooh-Shiny factor and the deepest dives of my nerdy artistic projects and hyperfixations:

As a much needed palate cleanser today, I would like to share with you a Dain Bramagey excerpt from the fifth installment (heeee…the Fifth Element) of my faevorite art exhibit that I have EVER seen in my whole life: the North Forest Lights.

Although I’d been to see it with my mom and my friends during 2019 and 2020, and my parents took me for my birthday in 2021, I returned by myself a few days later for one last time before this wonder closed forever.

This was how I celebrated the anniversary of my 21st RebirthDay.

The experience I had as I left Memory of Water:

…Alas. Pumpkin Hour approaches too quickly. I don’t want to say farewell. My hands grip the railing of the bridge for one last moment. I let the nearest sapphire starburst shoot me in the eye, and then sigh in rapture. Again, I am astounded that, for all the whirling, pulsing, chasing, swirling patterns of these lights, I have never once come close to experiencing that itch at the back of my skull—the warning that if I don’t stop what I’m doing I will risk a seizure.

That has remained inexplicable to me from the first time I visited to this last trip. Although I had that burst of healing from photosensitivity after the 2019 retreat in Spain, brain issues have slowly crept back in every time I get hammered with long stints of being forced to do neurological tasks I was medically removed from decades ago.

I’ve started having trouble with leaves flickering through the foliage again, and strobe effects onscreen or around me have become uncomfortable once more. Yet even as I write this post in the midst of the worst neuro-season I’ve experienced since acquiring three new brain traumas from 2012-14, watching these videos don’t bother me.

Of course, this light show isn’t a strobe extravaganza. Rather than producing harmful brain stress, I can feel it every time.

It’s healing.

One of my friends had a car wreck a few years back. Apparently there are all sorts of new therapies and techniques that car insurance companies automatically send people to when they have brain trauma now. I hear some of these involve light.

Spock eyebrow: Fascinating…

I can’t help but envy everybody having their brain injuries now, rather than back when I had mine. I suppose people who had theirs in the early 90s and before are envious of the minuscule treatment I received. I bet they would’ve loved the knowledge I was able to research in other people’s blogs about why I felt like I was going crazy, and what could possibly be done about it. Such is the nature of progress. I am thrilled for everybody receiving way better care than I did, but I admit it. I’m jealous, too.

Who would I be if I’d gotten to have those cutting edge therapies back in 2000?

Tell ya what. I probably wouldn’t be standing on a bridge in Arkansas—Arkansas?! Yes. Beautiful Arkansas—getting shot in the eyeball by a glorious blue starburst with glowworms and faeries all around me so…

So I let these light-water waves wash away the last iotas of my stress. Although I have come here on the 21st anniversary of my big car wreck, the memories do not haunt me tonight. They exist. They’re all back there in the dusty file folders of my mind. They always will be.

But here on this bridge, they don’t distress me.

---

…Once bundled into my car, I plug in my dead phone and head home through the Christmas-lit neighborhoods in silence. Yet the hush is full of cello chords and tinkling percussion, chimes and harps and drums. Those North Forest tunes stay with me for the rest of the night, through my dreams, and on into morning. They are destined to linger all week.

On the highway, headlights flash into my rear-view mirror and my heart races for a second, so I pet down my internal warning hackles that remind me how close to December 21 it still is—

“And you know what happens on December 21 when you drive at night!”

Yes. I know. But this night?

Nothing but bliss.

Want a taste by the creators of this amazing extravaganza?

You can immerse yourself fully in each of the installations over on Tinkerings of an Elemental Alchemist:

• Intro Walk into this 5 piece outdoor winter wonderland of LED lights, music & nature - including the Chihuly blown glass sculptures, the Buckyball, and gobs more art in the forest

• Crystal Grove

• Forest Frequencies

• Whispering Tree

• The Hearth

• Memory of Water

• Nerd Alert: All Hail the Tech!!! - The North Forest Lights by sunset. That day I was depressed about this exhibit closing forever and ever so I took myself into the North Forest and discovered all the amazing tech that created it.

‘TIS THE SEASON.
DON’T DRINK & DRIVE.

© 2023 Hartebeast

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