healers

I am nursing myself back to health, being tender in the way I set myself down and lovingly spread tiger balm across the parts of me so shaken and torn. I stamped with a bamboo stick out of the jungle, determined by pain, trampling through the undertow of a darkening river, and saw the slipping of sunset on my way to the hospital. I have found so many healers since then on my unlikely path. A man whose eyes lit up to watch me, who held my ankle and gave it three days. What beautiful optimism lies in the healing power of words and brief time lapses. The powdered tea for inflammation that fills my being. The arnica gel from a friend who clutched my face in his hands and breathed, "you are the toughest girl I know". The strangers who hold my bags, who clutch my arm, who send me secret gifts of health. I know this because I do the same to you. 

Another unknown healer; a woman who became my mother in a shop where I never thought I would see such textured colors, such brilliance lining the walls and the shelves. There are no dressing rooms from what I have come to see here so I am stepping out of my white linen tucked into a back corner when she comes to watch me try her tiny leather skirts. She buttons it around my waist and finds it hanging from my hips, turns me around to see me bruised and shaken (bent but not broken!) She gasps and runs away, comes back to rub me with a healing balm across my backside. Lifted my arms to assess the scrapes. Sent me hope with a bag of treasures.

I seek out the heat when I feel cold under a stark sky. In a sauna a woman watches me pick across the wooden planks and set myself down like a secret. She passes me hot water that hinted coconut on the back of my tongue. I sweat and bent over the flame and thanked my breath. Listened to the backs of my knees purr thanks. 

There is so much doing in the passive action of healing. Everyone is your secret healer.