The Turning

I don’t feel the heat of pain. I just go cold.

I was cold.

Yesterday, swimming in the fast-moving tidal waters of the Waihou River, I was reminded that I could not feel my feet or my toes.

And strangely, when I looked inward, neither could I feel the will to live.

To live for whom? For what?

Both good questions.

There was only the heavy collapse of momentum: the mechanical habit of waking, eating, numbing, sleeping. Occasionally, I would reach out to pat the thick, warm fur of Gracie, my bull mastiff.

At some point, anchored here in the slowly freezing reality of my own body, I began turning.

I remember the numbers. Numbers make sense to the mechanical mind: they seem real and unarguable.

15.4

I knew they had to come down. The doctor had told me. But how?

I didn’t know, so I asked another question.

What value-adding role can I play in this place?

I was met with the silence in the world.

My intellect had gone offline, my heart was elsewhere, however, I was still here in this frozen body. It was breathing, eating, peeing, and pooping while residing in an old bus parked on the coarse gravel of the Turua boat ramp, out on the Hauraki Plains.

Gracie was here too, and she was alive.

She knew this exact piece of dirt. She knew the spots to sniff, to pee, to poop, and where to scavenge an occasional scrap. She was tethered to something simple and real.

I repeated the question, letting it fall into the world surrounding me:

Can I play a value-adding role here?

This time, through a crack in the ice, my body answered:

Not in this state. You need to heal.

That was the moment I noticed how truly cold I was. I was frozen.

I asked simply, How can I get warm?

As is my way, I designed a seven-day protocol using the first principles of regeneration, leaning on my AI companion for the medical and psychological expertise.

Standard medical advice had only stopped the number from rising; I needed to heal. The goal was not to simply reheat myself like last night's leftovers. The goal was to build the capacity to come back to life and become warm again.

And it worked.

I look back now from Day 90. The campfire is blazing hot, and I can only marvel at the raw miracle that has taken place—not the fixing of a broken machine, but listening for the conditions needed to thaw the frozen earth of my own body.

Only then could I finally stand and offer something of value to the place where I was parked: the coarse gravel of the Turua boat ramp, out on the Hauraki Plains.

Question

Where in your life are you surviving purely on mechanical momentum? If you stopped and simply asked your body how to get warm, where might you find yourself?

from the campfire,

Ākāśadāka