The Tireless Healer

When Margaret first called me, she was sixty-seven years old and waking up every morning, as she put it, "completely freaked out." Five years earlier, her sister had died. In the rawest part of the grief she had done something decisive: she sold her old life and bought a large abandoned farm, certain that returning to the land — clearing it, mending it, working it with her hands — was exactly the medicine she needed. It had not worked out that way.

"I still haven't moved in," she admitted. "Not really. I've been here five years and half the rooms are just boxes." The boxes, it emerged, were full of her sister's things — photographs, clothing, a whole life packed in cardboard and stacked against the walls of rooms she could not quite bring herself to enter. Meanwhile she was out in the fields from first light onward, doing every bit of it herself. She is a gifted healer in her own right — someone who does intense, serious shamanic work for other people. For herself she had arranged something closer to a sentence.

"I have to get it all done," she kept saying. "There's so much, and it's all on me, and I have to do it all." That was the loop. Not the farm, not the weeds, not even — directly — the grief. The loop was: I have to do everything at once. She experienced time as something rushing at her, an avalanche of undone tasks, and she was forever a half-step ahead of being buried by it.

I induced a trance and brought her somewhere she had not been in a long time: a place to rest. A hammock, slung between the trunk of a single tree, on a hill, with a long unhurried view of the sun going down. A rest stop outside of time. I let her lie there a while before we did anything at all.

Then, from the hammock, I had her watch the wheels of time turning in one great clockwork. And I asked her to notice something about that clockwork. It was not bearing down on her from somewhere out ahead. It was unspooling outward from her. The ripples of time were spreading out from where she lay; they were not crashing in.

Everything she had to do became leaves drifting on the surface of a still pool. She could reach into the water with her own hands and move them — this one nearer, that one further off, in whatever order made sense to her. She had the whole overview, and all the room in the world to breathe, and the authority to set the pace of her own reality.

When I counted her back, she was weeping. "I didn't know," she said. "I didn't know what kind of tyranny I'd been living under." Nothing about her circumstances had changed. But the direction of time had reversed. It came from her now instead of at her, and that one reversal changed how she met every hour of her day. She was, in her own word, overjoyed.