David Ronnie

The months passed quite quickly between the notification of my acceptance to Emily Carr and the big move to Vancouver. Far too much partying, a lot of work, and a lot of stress. I was never sure or if I was making the biggest mistake ever by packing up my entire life (as well as my thriving freelance business) to move to Vancouver to pursue a degree in a field I already had a successful career in. (more…)

The Accident occurred a few months before I was to start into the first intake of the Guru Digital Arts college. While this didn’t have a huge immediate impact on my spiritual awakening, it definitely introduced me to some friends who would later become my spiritual gurus for many years. (more…)

This is, ultimately, where this story starts to get really interesting.

It was the middle of February (I think for some reason in fact that it was February 17) and, being that I was still living in Edmonton then, it was cold as fuck. We had been getting quite a bit of snow for the last few weeks and it was piled up all over the place. I was working a crappy job at the time delivering drywall and, while being at work at 7am every weekday morning was slowly killing me inside, the job was alright because I had eight or nine friends all working there at the same time.

I had started seeing a new girl and I had went over to her place in the evening before to hang out. We ended up staying up the entire night and at around 6am I decided to go home, grab my work clothes and head to work. I went to McDonald’s and grabbed some breakfast. I was completely exhausted and could barely keep my eyes open but figured I could catch up on my sleep during work (two people per truck delivery jobs are awesome for this) and thought the coffee I got would keep me up till I got into work.

I, of course, decided that speeding would be the appropriate course of action because the faster I got to work the less time I had to risk possibly falling asleep. About 10 minutes after I left McDonald’s and got just outside of the Spruce Grove city limits (for the Spruce Grovians, I was coming down off the overpass on 16a by the chicken farm, a.k.a. Death Corner), I fell asleep at the wheel and went barreling head-long into a maintenance vehicle turnaround snowbank at 120km/h.

An aside for those of you unfamiliar with prairie highways: they have small turn-arounds on the highways where the snowplows can hop between opposing directions and clear the snow. These turn-arounds have super high snowbanks with the snow being packed super tight to make sure the maintenance vehicles can get through. This super-packed snow could be equated to snow ramps if you were so inclined.

I repeat: I fell asleep and hit one of these snow ramps at 120km/h. I had woke up just before I hit the snowbank and then I completely blacked-out once I hit the snowbank. The car flipped upside-down upon impact and proceeded to fly/slide roof-side down across two lanes of equally-fast highway speed traffic in the middle of morning rush hour before coming to a standstill nearly in the ditch on the far side of the highway. I woke up hanging by my seat belt starring into headlights from oncoming traffic.

The cops would later inform me that two seconds sooner or two seconds later and I would’ve ran into someone and probably killed them/us.

Instead, I had a very slight amount of whiplash that was gone within a couple days and a small scar on my left-hand that you can see in the picture below. Of course, I got the scar from putting my hand on the roof to break my fall when I released the seatbelt I was hanging by and not during the actual accident.

This, obviously, was the beginning of my feeling that something bigger than me was out there looking out/watching over me. I didn’t know how to fully engage or understand that idea though and I was completely unable to attach it to the idea of God since all my experiences with Christianity and the like had left me with quite an awful taste in my mouth around that term. After this I did, however, know that there was something significantly deeper going on outside of our day-to-day perceptions of reality. As we’ll see in the next installment, it took me quite a while to find the answers I was looking for.

My dad quit drinking when I was 10. It took him nearly losing his job, a DUI, and not being able to see me before he realized how bad his addiction to alcohol was, but he did finally come around. This was, of course, a fantastic thing. The unfortunate part was that we had spent so very little time together in the last 10 years that there was no real context for a “relationship” there, let alone a father/son one. Also, he didn’t really have an understanding of what it means to be a father because his father had been a significantly more abusive alcoholic than he was so there was a lot of trial and error during these years as well as much money spent trying to buy my love. (more…)

After the divorce me and my mom spent a year to a year and a half in the old house in Northeast Edmonton before she decided to move us out to Spruce Grove which was a small bedroom community about 15 minutes west of Edmonton. This of course brought about a flurry of changes: new house, new friends, new school, new everything. (more…)

Well, there’s no place to start but at the beginning :)

Most people don’t really remember much from their childhood simply because its so long ago. I’ve discovered over the last couple years that I had actually actively tried to negate, shut down, and all together eliminate memories from my childhood because I didn’t want to go back to that place. (more…)

Alright, so some of you reading this may or may not understand what this “return” is. If you already know about my 365 Days To Babylon project, you can skip to the third paragraph. For those of you who don’t, or are reading this on Facebook, I would recommend reading the next paragraph to gather a context of all these notes I’m going to be posting on davidronnie.ca/Facebook over the coming weeks (my blog auto-feeds into my Facebook notes, so everything posted there will be seen in my Facebook notes as well). (more…)

Okay, so my blog kind of imploded on me last week as I found out I had been hit by a spam injection hack so I will be uploading new content soon as well as getting a new design up. Talk soon.