Emerging

"In October 2004, my physical body lay in a hospital bed, still, quiet; machines keeping my heart beating, my lungs expanding and contracting with oxygen--comatose after a catastrophic car wreck. My spirit, however, kept busy."

The book begins with a brief introduction of where the author found herself in 2004--in a hospital, slowly returning to consciousness after 10 days in a coma. Then, jumps ahead 3 years to a numinous, yellow, bearded, double blooming iris. These two events are yoked together to tell the spiritual journey of Angie Dortch, an ordinary woman who found herself in extraordinary circumstances. The facts surrounding her accident and her subsequent medical conditions and spiritual growth consume the next five chapters. She recounts events experienced while in a comatose state. Her recollection of an existence in neither this world nor the next is unique from most life-after-death experiences. This is not life after death, it is life in between life and death; not sub-conscious but supra-conscious. Not a dream, an experience. Her coma resulted not from manmade interventions, but from the grace of God. His protection from the pain her physical body would have been experiencing, His grace in allowing this "Mommy" to return here, and His continued embrace of her life then and now are part of what makes this story unique. First, she recalls sounds then sights while emerging from her coma, then therapies both in and out of the hospital, the impact her traumatic brain injury had on her, her numinous, mystical experience of God in this world, and the resulting art exhibit she produced and exhibited. These five chapters are anchored by her original artwork, an artistic medium she'd never tried, a medium in which her baby sister, Amy, excelled, until she met her untimely death from leukemia at age 24. The numinous Iris grows from a rhizome abiding under the surface to a double-blooming, bearded flower and becomes a metaphor for her own emergence from coma to fully conscious and present.