Jim Harris
speaker
92 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Jim Harris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And then as I went to, like, get up and, like, prop myself on my elbows, I realized that I couldn't feel or move anything from sternum down.
I remember the sunset that night being just phenomenal. It would have been a stunning sunset if I'd been totally sober. But in this altered state, I remember the grass looking really, really vivid and kind of having this interesting pattern. I remember the sky looking phenomenally colorful and like it had these sort of subtle patterns and clouds that seemed to have repeating shapes.
Like inside my body, I remember the feeling of like having an increased awareness of my internal organs, like kind of like feeling my guts in a way that I didn't usually notice them. Then kind of in this altered state was like shifting my feet around and flexing, unflexing muscles.
In that state, all of a sudden, I realized there were muscles that had not worked since the time of my accident that all of a sudden I could voluntarily control.
Doing things outdoors with other people felt like an opportunity to have camaraderie that could feel hard for me to find elsewhere in life. There's an element of taking in some enjoyment and watching other people's capability, like watching somebody else who's good at the activity that you're doing. but also not really in a competitive setting, like most team-based sports matches or something.
More like, hey, let's try and hike to the top of this mountain together. There's still a requirement for some self-sufficiency, but also there's this camaraderie of this shared experience that feels really potent.
It's a really exhilarating sensation to be pulled by this invisible force of this atmosphere moving around you. Like if you've ever flown a kite, and it's maybe like a little mini version of that, and you feel that tug of the kite string. But this is a big enough tug that it can, on a slippery surface, like on snow with skis, it'll pull you across the snow.
And so there's this moment of acceleration when the wind first catches the kite. And then there's an awful lot of interactivity where there's a handlebar that's used almost like, you know, marionette strings where the kite's very maneuverable, where you can steer it side to side.
And so the skill set or part of the skill set is around this attention to where the wind is in relation to your body and in relation to the kite.
Yeah, it absolutely is that.
There is an element of surrender to it. Like I do a lot of river paddling and river activities have a lot of that where you're like moving with the current and you can learn to You can learn to read it and use it and navigate through it, but ultimately it's kind of this collaboration between the person who's paddling, the person in the water, and then the river itself.
And the river itself is this enormously powerful kinetic force that is fun to interact with, and it's also really humbling in a way that There often feels like a spiritual element of like being interacting with a force that's a large and powerful thing that maybe I don't have awareness of in my normal day to day.
I was 32 years old. It was my last week of being 32. Uh-huh. The day that I had my spine was fused was my 33rd birthday.
Yeah, exactly. It was like late springtime in the southern hemisphere.
The kites that we had were quite small, just so we didn't have to carry as much weight when we weren't using them, and because we, like, weren't trying to do tricks or go 50 miles an hour. But the allure of being able to, like, use the wind to go 8 miles an hour... without having to shuffle my feet versus one mile an hour while hauling a sled full of gear was really tempting.
Yeah, exactly. That's what we were using. That's what we intended to use them for.
So we were out in a... large open pasture, and a big wind gust came up. The wind accelerated. It was enough that it lifted me off the ground a few feet. And I wasn't particularly panicked. There's like a big red cord that you can pull that will
release some of the lines to the kite and it becomes almost just like a sheet in the wind instead of being something that's generating force and generating lift. It just becomes a big flapping flag attached to strings. But I didn't pull that cord. I wasn't panicked. I thought it was going to be okay and then I don't know what happened next. The friend that was with me didn't witness what happened.
I woke up like regained consciousness lying on the ground. I realized right away that I was concussed, that I felt dazed and realized I had just lost consciousness and was regaining it. And was lucid enough to realize immediately that I was paralyzed.
I was, yeah. I was on my back.
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