My occasional escapes were led by Spirit inherent in music. “The Flight of the Bumble Bee,” “Andante Cantable,” “To a Wild Rose,” so many LPs gave me space to soar.

I had another encounter with the sounds and smells of ether when my tonsils were removed. I felt oddly bereft. We moved often and listening to music and reading became my constant companions — particularly in nature.

Being held in the branches of the crab apple tree in Plainfield, Indiana — reading one library book after another.

Every year until my early twenties, the barium enemas and x-rays persisted. Finally, a doctor in New York told me that there was no evidence that I had polyps as a child or that they had been removed surgically. I have never understood this, but I stopped having the dreaded procedures.

I had sensed confinement and the release of spirit at age 9 at Girl Scout Camp in Brown County, Indiana, when we made frog cages out of small milk cartons and mesh. I experienced escape of the frog and the explosion of the self.

I believe these experiences were instrumental in convincing me that my body was a cesspool of shame for which I was to be punished. The medical establishment was utterly complicit in this brain washing.

Yet there was always Spirit teaching that the violated body was part of something grander.

I remember staying up very late searching for the spirit of my grandfather who had died the day before. Staring endlessly at the stars — I had been told the night sky held a new star and it was “he.”