WARREN: OUTSIDE HIS BODY

Warren is a quadrapeligic, resting on his back now for twenty-five years, able only to turn the pages of books placed before him on a special book holder. He turns the pages with a slight movement of his lower arm, as his fingers brush the pages.

This is not a feel=sorry-for-me story. It could be but it isn't. I met Warren twenty-years after he had fallen during a gymnastics meet at age 18. With a broken neck, he was paralysed from the neck down.

I unexpectedly wandered into Warren's room at a convalescent home where I had been visiting someone else. He looked up from his book and smiled. "Hi," he said with an even wider smile. He seemed to generate his own energy and life force. Over the years, lying only on his back, he had read all the bibles, the Koran, Buddhist teachings, Taoism, and most literature ever printed. Even Carlos Castaneda.

One day, I asked, "What’s it like for you to be lying on your back for more than twenty years, not able to use your body like all those around you?"

He smiled that smile again....an all-knowing smile. "Oh, I'm not in my body Bruce. I'm in my spirit."

He then handed me a book he had been reading, as a gift. Doesn't matter if you know who Carlos Castaneda was. The title of the book was Fire From Within.