Be the hollow bone
The time I almost got killed
Hullo! Last time, I said I’d send a piece about making time for creative projects “by next week”. It’s now two months later. I am so sorry for promising that and not delivering it.
In preparation, I was reading Jenny Odell’s Saving Time and talking to people about time all the time. Slowly realized I’m not here trying to chit-chat about TIME in a one-off “tips and tricks” post.
What wanted to come out instead is the piece below, which started as a wee Facebook post in 2015. It’s about hands-down one of the most important events of my life.
On Labor Day 2014, I was hit by a car at 35 mph while biking home from yoga.
It happened at the edge of dusk and nightfall, on the corner of S. Van Ness and 23rd in San Francisco. Thirteen eyewitnesses, spread across four corners, saw a light blue sedan run a red light and collide into a young woman. When I hit the car’s hood and asphalt, the two blows punched my body, robbing my lungs of air.
What felt like seconds later, two SFPD officers were peering over me. My lime green vintage three-speed was yards away, the front wheel now folded like a taco shell. My helmet had stayed on but was cracked down the side.
Note to self and the sky: Stopping traffic is seriously bad. That phrase people say as a compliment about someone’s appearance is wildly off-base.
I spotted a police siren glinting off the shiny eyeballs of a couple. I’d find out later they saw me somersault thrice midair.
The driver hit the gas and ran. Probably a little drunk, maybe someone’s father or partner, definitely horrified. Fearing paralysis, I looked down at my body and gasped — limbs attached, no blood. En route to the hospital, I made cheery small talk with the paramedic to cope with the shock. My demeanor dismantled his professionalism for a moment. “You know, according to physics, you probably should have died. Crazy lucky.”
How? If the car had hit three inches to the left, my right leg would have shattered. Three inches to the right, it would have sent me careening into death.
The purest, dumbest luck I’ve ever had. Just a bruised-up pelvis. No broken bones.
The hollow bone
The brain is so weird. You’d think during all this, it would shut the f up. Instead it went, “Bones bee boop bee boop, print!”
While in disbelief over my intact bones, a core memory resurfaced. The meaning of hollow bones.
I’m in the grad library researching a paper for an archaeology class when I flip to a chapter about prehistoric bone flutes. Our ancestors, after killing off most megafauna and realizing fire + food = faster digestion, had way more time on their hands. Time to make fun stuff, like drums out of hide or flutes out of bones.
I dug (haha, so sorry) through books to learn about bone flutes found at the Jiahu site in China, dating between 7,000-6,000 BC. The famous Hohle Fels flute made from a vulture radius bone, discovered in caves in the Swabian Alb region of Germany, dating back 43,000-35,000 years. The Divje Babe "Neanderthal flute" found in Slovenia is thought to be the oldest one, potentially dating back 50,000-60,000 years. It’s made from a cave bear femur bone.
Second note to self: Not all core memories are sexy and have Main Character Energy, I guess.
From the look of these flutes, our ancestors may have noticed that when the bone was hollow, clean, and dry, the sound was beautiful. It became something different, what we call music.
To the Lakota, this is also a spiritual truth. They call it "the hollow bone", believing a person must become “an empty vessel to allow the divine power and wisdom to flow through them unobstructed.”
To become a "hollow bone", one must shed their ego, desires, and attachments through humility, selflessness, and a life of simplicity and moral integrity.
Frank Fools Crow, a renowned Lakota ceremonial chief and medicine man, has said, "The cleaner the bone, the more water you can pour through it, and the faster it will run."
Bloody, gunky bone
That car hit an anxious, irritating, control-freakish twenty-nine year old, head way up her ass. Like all humans, she was a messy amalgam of everything that had ever happened and failed to happen to her. Just a few pieces:
My parents frantically tried to understand the game of our lives called “How to Survive In America”. Sometimes they could scarcely get ahead before suffering some new, unforeseen setback. So they didn’t notice how disoriented their American-born daughters felt. We learned about democracy, Jim Crow, feminism, and speaking truth to power at our liberal public school, then went home to my dad’s unstable South Korean dictatorship. There, we were subject to his fast-moving emotions. “Abuse of power!” I furiously scribbled in my journals, unable to scream it as I’d like. Stubborn defiance builds like a callus.
It also broke their hearts over and over. Eventually, my parents’ commands for obedience petered out to mere advice. With advice, you have a choice to take or leave it. Not realizing this, I continued to play out the drama of blaming them for everything and trying to do things my way, through willpower. Really. Hard. Against. A. Wall. When they said zig, I zagged. When they offered, I dismissed. When they were upset, I matched them on upset, throwing in contempt for good measure. There were more insidious digs, too — when they were kind, sometimes I felt numb. Rebelling for rebelling’s sake.
Chewing through library books like a chubby little bookworm, my brain absorbed language, the art of narrative, ideas, arguments, rationales. I learned Korean while watching K-dramas with my mom, observing the oh-so creative ways hurt people hurt each other. Words have so much power. I could construct a technicolor, surround-sound narrative in both languages and believe it, hard. Don’t get high on your own supply.
At some point, I fully traded in my parents’ guidance for the pontificating of intellectuals or public personalities. I admired people who “knew their shit” and seemed certain. Those people were a hypnotic algorithm I could get lost in for hours. I mimicked what they modeled. Trade-offs were made, and authenticity lost. But status games often get rewarded in society. So, I managed to build a career I wanted, landing a few coveted internships at art museums and even a scarce full-time job as junior curator. Blind, running fast.
But no one tells you this absurdity: sometimes you can fake it, somewhat make it, only to realize you don’t even want to be there. Nothing is 100% bad or good, and the art world is no exception. The problem was how I had gotten there — by pushing my body and brain to a neon sign lit arrival point while leaving my spirit behind. After realizing this, I started behaving like comedian Taylor Tomlinson would call, “a raccoon trapped in a garbage bag.”
I was “full of myself”: a bone full of marrow and blood vessels and anxious thoughts and pain and other gorgeous human gunk. Flailing, trying to make things happen, panicked, lacking trust, stuck.
There had been plenty of chances to loosen my grip, let go of control, put down my stories, soak up subtle and blunt feedback, just say “Hmm, I don’t know, let me see.”
Astrologers call the years before age thirty a “Saturn return", which just means the universe has had enough of your bullshit and shakes you hard until some of it flakes off. Like mythological Saturn himself, this period is usually a heavy-handed, tough love bitch. Spiritually, materially, emotionally, relationally — it’s all up for grabs.
Sigh, this poor dum dum. One near-death experience, coming right up.
Forced to hollow out
“Having abandoned the flimsy fantasy of certainty, I decided to wander.”
— Kameelah Janan Rasheed
A few weeks after the crash, after years of hogtied indecision, I calmly told the executive director at the museum I was quitting.
“Kat, I think you’re concussed from the accident. I do not accept your resignation,” she said, looking at me in disbelief. “Take a week off and let’s revisit.” I did, we did, and I was even clearer than before.
Being the hollow bone felt like coherence, alignment, having my outsides match my insides.
After my last day, I walked into a warm, lively restaurant and asked for a job. Every staff member made eye contact with me and smiled. The reclaimed wooden tables, blue and terracotta tiles, and warm lighting hugged me as I spoke and it all felt inexplicably good being there.
It was a vegan Mexican place run by what my dad would call “hippies, like Jenny from Forrest Gump.” Before every shift, both front and back of house would sit together at a table weighed down with plates of healthy, tasty food for a heart-to-heart. It was designed to help us “get human” with one another before the stressful slam of the shift. One day, my singer-songwriter co-worker Allison read this Sufi poem to me:
The Guest House by Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Everything was gently telling me to be the hollow bone. So I did. For four stunning months, I rode an inner tube down the lazy river of life, feeling hyper present and overjoyed to be alive.
The day’s moments became a daisy chain of little surprises, gifts, and priceless lessons. I walked the same streets as before, tuned to a different frequency. What a privilege to possess one sense, moreover five! One day, Al Gore came into the restaurant with not-his-wife; we gawked and giggled hysterically, daring one another to eBay the remnants of his cashew cacao cake. Two unhoused friends helped each other try on a found pair of shoes as I bawled a few feet away. I wrote a manifesto about how love and creativity are the same thing, under the influence of nothing but a shrimp burrito.
I’d been so fixated on what I wanted to make of myself, I had not been able to hear what was seeking expression through me.
Ten years later, I’m not cured. I still worry and fuss about everything and nothing. I forget all the time that people and the universe want to help me, that I’m not alone. I fall in love with how I want it, don’t get it, and then sometimes feel chaotic or unhinged about it. Yet again, a bloody, gunky bone.
Still a dum dum, but with one meaningful difference: I have a core memory of my ego shattering, spectacularly, lasting long enough to leave a mark. When I’m being just so full of it again, I try to stop. Remember. Let go. Breathe in, breathe out. Wait for it. Dance with it.
They never did find the hit-and-run driver. But even lying on the gurney in the ambulance, I knew criminal justice wasn’t the point. Death had whispered so close I’d felt the puff of its breath on my cheek:
Empty yourself out. Be the hollow bone. Life isn’t created by you, it moves through you.
This thing could not have found its current state without the time, care, and generosity of: Vincent Tam, Camilo Moreno-Salamanca, Michelle Elisabeth Varghese, Matt Joass, Karaminder, Cam Houser, Brandon Weaver
The credited images in Quiet Confetti by Kat Koh were made by humans who got paid for their work.
First and foremost Silvio, congratulations on becoming a Substack featured publication! I needed to hear your advice on your Circle post, particularly “write when you feel like, don’t force”
Thank you 🙏🏼
Really enjoyed this piece Kat. And your writing in general. It was a pleasure to cross-paths in WOP and I look forward to reading more of your stuff!