August 4th, 2025
My fingernails have dirt under them from aggressive weeding, and I still have Hawaiian sand in my summer bag. I’ve never been a great cleaner or weeder. My first week back from Hawaii, I had an attitude, and it showed. I left the suitcase unpacked for a day or two, resisted the big food shop, did not cook, and watched the entire season of The Bear.
It also did not help that when I came home, I arrived to a relentless heat wave in Maryland and went from being outside 10 hours a day and jumping in the ocean any time I wanted to, to being inside 10 hours a day with a/c that had trouble regulating.
Through my steamed-up windows, I could see that while I was away, the weeds had taken over in obnoxious climbing victory, and my vegetable garden wandered defiantly off to the wild, forgetting all about bearing fruit and vegetables. I called out to them, “Really?” and slammed the door.
I was listless in my watering of my little orchard, moody in my decision making, sore, inflamed, buggy. Scott offered a cold plunge, I gave him the finger. Summer can be hard on my body by August. It is ragweed season, and sometimes it can do me in. I knew I needed a little help. I was not transitioning well.
I called my acupuncturist, Elizabeth, who also serves as my Peruvian shaman and wise woman healer. I climbed onto her table almost naked and offered her my wrists in surrender. “I always slide in here on fumes,” I say.
“Love… your pulses are so faint. We need to bring you back. You are still in Hawaii.”
She paused.
“Your body is so sad. Why?”
“I don’t feel sad,” I said too quickly, “I am just tired.”
She waited, and we kept silent as she listened to the deeper pulse of my liver, spleen, and heart meridians. My heart meridian, my heart…like Morse code, it whispered to her the quiet truth. I was stuck, blocked, shut down.
“I guess I am sad about saying goodbye to Lucia and Jack after three weeks….. And I only have a few more weeks with Maya. I don’t know when we will all be together again. Nothing is planned except Christmas.”
She nods. Rubs my head like good mothers do. “That is sad.”
I feel my eyes well up. The water element starts moving like a wave through my heart, a tide rising up to my neck and into my eye ducts. I can feel a trickle. Not a big damn opening, just a little segway in the creek of my electric body.
“Ok.” She instructs, “Sit up my love. Turn to the wall.
I know what’s coming. It’s one of my favorite treatments. She is going to build a grid on my back. The first 10 times she did this, I held the sheet over my chest, now I just sit there open, trusting. She knows everything about me. She is one of the people I just pour myself out to the minute I sit in the little wicker chair next to the statue of Shiva. I don’t do that with too many people. There is no such thing as feeling exposed with her; there is just the changing truth and a deep respect for it.
She takes out her ruler. I feel her measuring, then pricking the needles into a sacred geometric pattern on my back. This is a reverent reset. The reorganizing of the subtle fields of my highly sensitive energy field. She places the last needle in, and suddenly I see a grid of blue light behind my closed eyes. Like Lite Brite, one of my favorite toys from childhood, the light begins to press through the darkness, move, bounce, and build.
She lays me down on my belly. tucks a cool white sheet around me, careful not to disturb the needles and their magic. “It’s ok to feel sad. I am still sad when I say goodbye to my kids, and they are in their 50s. Let’s just help it move along.”
A deep indigenous flute plays long notes of longing and knowing from an old cd player. It coaxes my snake-like rivers to wiggle and dance a bit. She turns the lights down. “I’ll be back in a little bit. I won’t forget you.”
She always says that to me because she knows at a certain point, I’ll get impatient and worry that she forgot about me. She never does.
My face rests over a hole to allow my nose to fall through the table. I begin to soften. I allow myself time to feel my kids hugging me from behind while I chop fresh ginger, scallions, and purple sweet potatoes to a setting sun. I can feel them leaning against me on the weathered wicker couch, offering a foot for me to rub. I remember them falling into the king-size bed to lie under the palm fan for a bit to plan the next day. I recall gentle teasing, often a loud, ”JACK!” as he nudges his sisters to react. I play over and over the quiet and deep listening during dinner as each of us answered the question of the night. Questions like, “In what part of your life do you feel you have reached your full potential?” Of “What was the hardest thing you had to do this year?”
There were tender stretches of silence in the long car ride to the fiery and explosive volcano, Kilauea, and careful quiet steps along the cliffs as we hiked down the sacred valley of Waipio. I feel a deeper connection, beyond words, to what it was like to meditate with them daily, with the ocean crashing against the lava rocks. Peeking to see their eyes closed, their backs long, tail grounded, a journal propped beside them to catch realization, downloads, inner guidance. Mostly, I return to the wonder and joy on their faces when we were out on the water snorkeling with the dolphins, whales, and manta rays. I remember their heads popping up to find each other above the water, our bodies suspended between realms, treading water with big webbed flippers. At different points, our hands would take out the mouthpieces so we could laugh in awe and point. Returning to land in wet, cool bodies, we tried to find the words to ground the surreal and life-changing experience that floats just out of reach when you are in the presence of holy beings far beyond our limited consciousness. We all agreed, it was the closest we ever inched to the divine.
I lay there on the table, grateful. My heart is opening now to a steady waterfall running into streams that fill my body with vitality. Gratitude makes me strong. I am happy for the lives they live beyond me. Joy makes me strong. I can feel the well of that bubble with new memories. Scott makes me strong. He is right here with me. More with me than he has ever been. My heart opens to this. All this makes me strong. I allow myself to receive and accept all this newness. The needles begin to shift up and away from their vortex points. They push themselves out with the knowing that the river has risen up again in me, the chi is flowing, their work is done. The lights turn up. Elizabeth is back.
I flip over. She says, “Much better, now let’s get more going. What else? ”I tell her my left big toe feels numb, and my hip has been hurting when I sleep on it. She listens again to my pulse. I ask her to tell me what she hears. She “shh’s” me, then says my gallbladder is talking. She places more needles in quickly and deeply. “Sorry,” she says, but she does not mean it. She is getting me back online. Reprogramming, flipping switches. I feel wind, rain, light, embodied.
I am sensitive like this.
The session ends, and we take our time leaning over her kitchen island, sharing more before saying goodbye. In another life, we were both Peruvian. The memory of this lifetime came to me seven years ago while traveling in Peru and studying plant medicine with Elizabeth and her shaman, Theo. My vision came on top of the mountain on holy ground, high above the town of Pisac, the threshold to the sacred valley. My memories came in flashes of knowing. Elizabeth sat down on a rock beside me, laughing and telling me to drink water as I sobbed the story back to her.
I was her son. She was my mother. The shamans came and took me from her when I was very young. I was a bit strange, living between worlds, where I could see and feel the realms of light and rivers of energy. The shamans guided me deep into the mountains to train me. I was only allowed to see my family a few times a year when they would travel for miles up, and I would travel for miles down. My eyes were very large from seeing in the great tunnels of the Earth and cosmos. I missed my mother the most. I was so young, but I knew my place and knew she was proud of me. When Elizabeth says she knows what it means to miss her children, my ancient and eternal bones believe her.
The day after my session, the rain came, and the heat broke. Coincidence? I headed out of the house, leaving the door open as a fuck you to the a/c. Garden by garden, I went down to my knees with tools in hand. After a while, I carefully removed my gloves to dig up the sneaky bundles of nut seed grass, preventing them from exploding and germinating. I made pile after pile behind me as I said hello to the pink hydrangea, the fuchsia echinacea. My black eyed Susans reached out wide to me as if to say, “It’s our turn to shine!” They boldly take center stage in August when all else tires. My burnt lavender assured me it is growing fresh stems; it loves the fall.
I open the gate to the vegetable garden and hear the ripping of the grass under the gate. I pull out the stubborn kale that even the insects don’t seem to like to chew down. Easily big, brown, hollow stems of zucchini free themselves from the dirt. They have failed to thrive this summer, even my other garden friends agree, not a good year for them. I pick a few cherry tomatoes, wrap them in basil, and pop them into my mouth, knowing I did not grow enough to can. I hunt for a few gnarly cucumbers hiding in the vine. Leave a few to grow a little bit bigger. Then I move to the orchard and pull the grass and clover away from my brand-new peach and apple trees, giving them stinky fish food and encouragement.
Walter waits for me in the shade. He is not very helpful but keeps watch with a twitching nose and ears that take turns listening. He is so comfortable wherever he lies down. This reminds me that the earth holds my feet wherever I go. Our great mother promises me she is everywhere, and there is no need to miss her or be missed. I hear the cicadas rubbing tymbals one after the other, making it seem like I am in the middle of a great summer singing bowl. The sounds remind me of the shaman’s rattles that hold me suspended between realms of memory and wanting. I am home, they click and click and click. I let them sing to me, replacing the sound of surf. I am home.
