Intro

This piece is from my book-in-progress and tells the story of how illness, the natural world, and the Amazon rainforest shaped my healing path.

On Writing a Healing Scroll

There are cultures where prayer is seen to be a necessary food for the gods. Where words—the words of writers, the words of those who talk to spirits, or to spirit, or who talk from the place of spirit dwelling within them—are seen to be food, sustenance for the gods, or God, the One who creates our world.

There are cultures where prayer is a form of daily practice that must be done three, four, five times a day or more. Facing Jerusalem, facing Mecca, facing the sun: prayer, honoring the sacred, is seen as necessary, for the world to go on.

There are cultures where the ill are seen as messengers, as chosen for a life of the spirit, chosen perhaps to become shamans, people who travel between the worlds for the purpose of healing. Part of the training of the shaman is often a time of breakdown, dissolution, a separation from the ordinary world where most people live. Only certain foods can be consumed. The normal tasks of daily life, including the usual relationship to time, become impossible, while the shaman in training passes through many stages of breakdown, a rending apart of the fabric of her being.

In Ethiopia, a person afflicted with an illness engages in a process of making a healing scroll. The scroll is made in collaboration with a cleric, whose role is to listen to the story of the one facing the illness.

In my tradition, the Jewish tradition, the text we read every week is a scroll. In order to be properly clothed to approach this scroll, one wears a prayer shawl, a Tallit. I find that my illness is both text and shawl: the scroll I read and the scroll I write, and also, the prayer shawl I wrap around my body to prepare for my daily work.

In reading the text of my illness, in writing the story of my life as an act that might heal me, I am aware, again and again, of how the body is not wrong in its relentless litany of symptoms. How the body always has something to say. How what is wrong, if something is wrong, is the culture in which we live. In our culture, the body is objectified and trivialized, anything but heeded.

If I lived in Ethiopia and were making my illness into a story that would be wrapped around my body to help me heal, I would say first to the cleric, to the one who was assisting by listening and witnessing, “Help me to pray, friend. Help me to make of my story good food for the gods.”

Sunderland, Massachusetts to Peru, 1992

“What is healing but a shift in perspective?”

—Mark Doty

I am being stripped down so that some other way of being can be revealed.

I take a trip to the center of the world. I wear a mask at the airport, use oxygen on the plane, and find myself in the Amazon rainforest swimming with pink dolphins.

I choose to become a sensitive to all of life. I did not choose consciously to be so chemically sensitive. I can’t change my body to become something other than what it is. I can change my relationship to life.

My relationship to all of life—my relationship to life itself—my relationship to life on Earth becomes the focus of my days.

All around me I see the evidence of a broken relationship with life on Earth. Most people in modern culture aren’t even aware that they have a relationship with the Earth. For the indigenous, this relationship is the heart of life.

When I became too sensitive to take part in the structures and edifices of the modern world, I turned to the world outside my door. The path that led to the river, across the street from my house in Sunderland, took me into the world of oak trees and willow, blue heron and bald eagle—

I leaned my face into the ridged bark of a maple, rested my hand against the trunk of an oak—

In this world symptoms did not rule me. In this world the language that mattered was touch.

I needed to be held by something that would not cause me harm—to walk in a world where I did not have to be constantly on guard. I was soothed, comforted and embraced when I walked in this place.

The river bank, the grove of trees that lived there, became my companions, my friends, the company I sought. I knew in my bones that what we were doing to the Earth we were doing to our own bodies.

I gathered prayers in my hands to carry home.

My lungs were sick, quite often. Infections came with fevers and coughs that wouldn’t go away. I read about the ozone being depleted, the rising numbers of childhood asthma in cities with the highest levels of pollution.

In college and in my twenties I was a political activist, protesting nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons. In my thirties, the protest became more personal but I had no energy to march in the streets. Fatigue shaped my days.

My whole life became a kind of protest. I became Cassandra: the woman with a message no one wanted to hear. We are dying. We are killing our world. All our lives are at stake, just not as obviously as mine.

Cancer comes from the same things that cause chemical sensitivities. It seemed to matter so much—how I saw the world.

No one listened.

I kept going back to the trees.

I had a dream one day while in a workshop for people living with serious illness: a dream of pink dolphins.

A few months after this dream, I got a brochure in the mail from a woman who leads canoe trips for women around the world.

She was leading a trip in the Amazon in Peru where there were pink river dolphins.

I had never heard of pink river dolphins but I knew I had to go.

I went for the dolphins and also because the Amazon is called the lungs of the world and we were cutting down the great trees of the jungle at an alarming rate.

I went out of solidarity and wanting to protest.

What I found there was not what I expected at all.

Yes, I saw clear cuts that broke my heart.

But what I found mattered more and stayed with me and healed my heart in ways I could never have imagined—

All that I knew and loved about trees and rivers was magnified in the Amazon.

The Connecticut River was outside my door in Massachusetts.

I came to know the oaks and willows at its banks.

In the jungle I was in the center of the world.

A primordial life force hummed and buzzed in the air.

Countless tree frogs, blue morpho butterflies, bright orange-winged parrots, a canopy of so many shades of green—the river itself—the dolphins.

Life itself was alive and well here, right beside the blackened stumps of the trees that had been cut down.

Unlike the wasteland I expected to see, my eyes instead were filled with the evidence of life unspoiled.

Yes, damage was being done.

But the life force itself was stronger than what was being destroyed.

This is what my body responded to.

Joy was palpable for me when I watched the pink river dolphins leap out of the water and spin back in.

Joy filled every cell in my body when I slipped into the water beside them.

I had forgotten about joy—this kind of joy.

My best friend Linda had died, my mother was someone I could not recognize; my own life had become a study of loss and survival, letting go and caution.

But life is more than that.

Only I had not had a way in.

I loved the trees outside my door at home, but they were refuge more than celebration; solace more than ebullience.

I couldn’t stop the joy when I saw the dolphins or swam in the water beside them.

If joy still existed, if joy and bliss were the essence of life itself, I knew there was something resilient at the bottom of this environmental crisis I seemed to be embodying.

Cassandra crying out in warning was one part of the story but not a place to stay.

Life wants to be lived and despair is not enough to live on.

Despair still filled my days and seeped into my nights but the Amazon changed the conversation inside me.

Hope had a place at the table even if I didn’t always have a place at the table beside her.

Hope was no longer foreign to me.

I tasted it in the air in the rainforest.

Life was too strong to be destroyed, even when trees were cut down, even when lives were lost.

Life itself was indestructible and worth living for.

Green and beautiful and luminous.

A light filled my heart when I left the Amazon that had not been there before.

I was still sick but I was finding my way back to life.

Even now I rest my heart on the heart of the Earth and find myself there, in the Amazon, on the banks of the river listening to the pink river dolphins leaping and spinning through the water.

I am held.

I had become the broken Earth,

the damaged Earth,

the laden-with-pollution Earth

crying out in distress.

Could I also become the resilient Earth?

The life everlasting Earth?

The inviolable, ever-returning Earth,

the beautiful Earth?

Make of my story good food for the gods

In Tai Chi I learn life is a circle.

Movement is an unbroken circle.

When I lose the use of my hands

and can’t do yoga, can’t hold myself up

in downward-facing dog, I learn a practice called Continuum.

I learn we are—

I am—

movement.

When I write in order to write a healing scroll,

to make of my story good food for the gods,

I learn I am prayer.

I am the breath I take in.

I am a song singing that renews itself.

Life renews itself.

I can renew myself.

If and when I become a prayer for the rainforest,

I become a prayer of the rainforest breathing.

Despair lives deeper in my bones than I could have imagined.

I don’t yet know how to pray.

I do know that I have become a prayer.

I am a prayer.

I pray

to become life.

“Make of my story”

I pray to you, God,

gods,

who I tell my story to now.

“Make of my story good food.”

I am your food.

I am.