A column of indigo, fitting the fullness of her cranium descended. A soft turquoise light shimmered and flashed around her head and a full white halo circled it. I resisted the urge to bow before this magnificent spiritual being. Possibly I didn’t because her mother was sitting across the table from me; not that her mother would have been unreceptive. It’s just that I somehow sensed that it wasn’t entirely appropriate.

 The young woman was fiddling with her bracelets—her usual autistic-ism—to twist something on her body, her eye to twitch, or something needing scratching if she wasn’t otherwise occupied with something on which to focus her attention. She repeated the usual mantra, “I’m hungry. When are we going to eat? Are you done yet?” I’d heard it at least once in every session, multiple times in our earliest sessions together, so that equaled into the hundreds if not the thousands. I can imagine how many times her family has heard it.

            The illumination was at the end of her session. She had just a few days before been rushed to the emergency room because she had contracted the H1N1 virus, the so-called swine flu. There was concern about her getting pneumonia. Fortunately, she recovered well; however, it was still a strange juxtaposition of what Jean Houston might have called a “fractal pattern” in her life. She was three when she got the pneumonia that brought on the developmental backslide that took away so much of her earlier neurological growth and inhibited her future progress.

  I work with kids like her as well as adults of all backgrounds and abilities or disabilities. Those are such strange terms in that every one of us has abilities and disabilities. It’s really a matter of perspective. When she came to me several years ago, she couldn’t read, write or tie her own shoes, drooled a lot, tripped over her own feet (and sometimes stepped on mine). If she communicated at all, it was usually monosyllabic. Mostly she shrugged and/or made a series of sounds—uh eh uh—that translated to “I don’t know” whenever I asked her a question. She didn’t make eye contact or follow my arm and hand if I pointed to something. Still I knew there was something much more to her.

Her amazing growth says as much if not more about her and probably her family than it does about any teaching I may have done. She is in mainstream high school classes now. She reads well. Recently she took over her mother’s checkbook to write out a check for me. She rides a bicycle long distances with her dad. (She couldn’t sit on a bicycle only a few years ago). She holds conversations, though occasionally her comments are not always appropriate to the topic. There are still things with which she struggles. Even though she still can’t completely control her tongue, she rarely drools now. Her finger dexterity still needs work, though her mom and I were both surprised when she was able to screw a light bulb in and out of a lamp. (We had decided to put gloves on her in case she couldn’t adjust her pressure and broke the bulb).

A guest at her older sister’s wedding last year, I observed my student read a (well-practiced) long and difficult passage from the Bible in front of the couple of hundred people in attendance. I restrained myself then too. I wanted to stand up and cheer loudly, put my index finger and pinkie in my mouth and whistle loudly, to do some kind of celebratory dance like football players do when they score a goal. When I mentioned that to her sister, the bride, she said, ‘You should have. Everyone should have.”

When I saw the fullness of the radiant being that she is, I didn’t bow, but I did tell her mother.  Her mother responded, “I wish I could see that part of her.” The mom sees with ordinary eyes, yet she sees the person where others probably see the disability. The tone of the mom’s voice reflected an acceptance of her daughter just as she is; and yet I could only imagine how she would have to have long ago begun to look past the obsessive movements, the repetitious words and sentences, the need to attend to her daughter minute after minute, day after day, year after year, for the past fifteen years in ways not required for most children, not required for her two older girls. I know that she senses her daughter’s spiritual perfection, and trusts it, even though she can’t see it as I can.

I don’t need special vision to see their great relationship, the mom’s amazing patience, love and determination, an almost complete transcendence of the idea of disability. I can probably imagine better than most what the mom has been handling, though I doubt that I have an inkling of the full reality of it. I don’t always see the transcendent being; and when I don’t, I see the same outer things as the mom has had to see past long ago, and it can strain my patience. But sometimes the true being comes through, mostly when I or she or they need it to, when it serves a bigger purpose, or maybe simply because some days I’m just more open to it than others.

I’ve always known that she was aware of so much more than anyone could have guessed from the surface. One time, several years ago, when I was doing a session with her mom, and I was intuiting well; I got particularly excited about a point I was making and became—how shall I put it?—a bit overly loquacious; so the daughter looked up very briefly from the skills book in which she was drawing to let me know, “You’re off track.” It was humbling. I said, “Thank you,” became quiet and continued paying attention to her mother instead of my own theories, checking in now and then to make sure I continued to be “on track”; and each my student, who in this moment—as in many moments since—was my teacher, nodded. She often indicates by smile or frown the progress that I am making. She’ll nod yes or gentle shake her head to let me know something is moving forward or not.

That’s the thing. She knows she’s special and not in the way we usually mean it when we talk about ‘special’ or ‘special needs’ children. She isn’t capable of arrogance or egotism. She simply knows that she knows at a higher level of reality. It is a fact of nature.

After I told the mom about the indigo column, she told me that years ago she had gotten a video by Neal Donald Walsh on indigo children and that her daughter had dragged her in to see it, saying, “This is about me.” It has only been in the last couple of years that she’s really let on about her self-awareness as a spiritual being, even as her self-awareness as a physical being has its hits and misses. She only very recently let her mom know that she saw purple around her when she is teaching.

What I learned from during our most recent session together, seeing her in that manner on that particular day, is that there is a higher being that stands behind all of us, and I realized that probably none among us reflects it perfectly. I understand that if she were not in that family, their entire constellation would be drastically different and not for the better. She holds a space that allows them to be big. She has come to them in the form she has come to them as a great gift, one that is not always obvious and not in the way that most people think. Her presence alone transforms the people around her.

Through her I have come to understand that we can look at the imperfections of the people in our lives, their outer expressions only, and totally miss something so much truer and more important. That is not to say that the higher being is always giving. Sometimes it needs something from us. Sometimes we are here to serve the growth of a particular soul or group of souls. In the case of my young lady student, it is the other way around. Even though we have something to offer her in the physical realm, spiritually, she is the blessing in a disabled girl’s clothing.