I Think I Might Have Almost Died on Friday.

I am not easily bored. My mind is always abuzz with activity even though my body hardly ever is.

Sometimes, I'll just randomly wonder how close I am to the nearest grizzly bear at a given moment. I've occasionally wondered at what point in my life have I come nearest to dying. Or what's the nearest I have unknowingly been to a cougar. (Yeah, go ahead and make your smart-ass comments, but I'm trying to make a serious post here.)

There is so much going on in the world around us that we are completely oblivious to. I also believe we are mostly clueless as to how much is really going on in the spiritual realm as well.

While I firmly believe there is an active spirit world, I am not one to seek to find a spiritual meaning for every physical thing that happens here on earth. But I had an odd thing on Friday.

I was driving alone along Highway 5 from Kamloops, through Valemount and on to Edmonton, listening to the audio version of Girl, Stop Apologizing, which is the sequel to Girl, Wash Your Face.  Both of which I recommend.

Somewhere in the valley between Blue River and Valemount I came to the end of the book so I started to fiddle with the infotainment screen to find a playlist of music. As I am driving along with the cruise set at 118km/h and scrolling through my playlists, my eye briefly catches, off to the right, lower in the valley, there is a little dust devil swirling up from a bit of gravel/dirt area I can see between the trees. I'm not sure if it was a gravel pit or a gravel road - I couldn't see much of it and really wasn't thinking much about it at the time.

The swirl of dust came swirling up and didn't just sort of dissipate leaving dust in the air like they normally do, it was swirling and then it just disappeared completely in an instant.

I didn't pay too much attention to it as I was focussed on finding my play list... er, I mean I was completely concentrating on driving. But my mind clearly heard, "The Angel of Death has been fought back."  Which was a completely random and bizarre thought and not the sort of think I would normally think. But again, I didn't overanalyze it, I had other things on my mind.

I selected playlist "37" which is 37 various songs by 10 or so various artists, and carried on my merry way. (There's a story behind the play list, but I'll save that for another day.)

I listened to the first two songs which were by Mumford & Sons and decided I wanted to shuffle the album so I didn't hear songs by the same artist all in a row. Francesca, my car, is still relatively new to me so I can't mindlessly operate all the functions yet. So I looked down to find the 'random' button to adjust the song order.

When I looked up I was basically on the yellow line. And the semi truck headed south was about as close to the yellow line as I was. I'm pretty sure he scraped the bugs off my mirror. It freaked me out a bit and I'm sure the driver behind me damn near had a heart attack.

Anyway, I arrived safe and sound in Valemount a while later happy to discover there is a Tim Horton's there now.

It wasn't until I was laying awake at 4am in my hotel in Edmonton that I wondered, "Is the 'Angel of Death' even a thing? Does he live in dust devils? Did he want me to encounter a semi?"

While driving in that 5-minute timespan, I didn't correlate the semi and the dust devil at the time, but my buzzing mind can't help but ponder what really took place. But I think I might have almost died on Friday.