Strange news – conclusion

In previous episodes of Strange News, Big Bro told me his once-a-week East Bay healer wanted to see me before I left to walk the Camino. She said I needed to work through seven generations of static, and she could help.

With trepidation, I went. I lay down on her table; New Age music and incense wafted through the air. An hour later I emerged, blowing my nose and daubing my eyes, feeling like I'd run some Class V rapids without a raft, but also feeling lighter and clearer than when I’d arrived.

Neither a fortune teller nor a masseuse, she nevertheless did lay hands on me, percussing and prodding and chanting me into scenes from an imagined past. Imagined in that my memory is poor and when asked about the past, my answers are as much invented as remembered. And imagined in that sometimes I seemed to be remembering a mythic past—shared by many and just now accessed by me.

At one point she had me picture myself at two years old. That girl and I were supposed to commune and embrace, which was hard since the tot was one-dimensional, coming from my memory of a family photo album rather than from remembered experience.

The healer told me to imagine that younger self hovering above me. “She can be a big as she needs to be,” said the healer.

Picturing a toddler the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float, I stifled a laugh. But when the big little girl drifted down to fit herself in to the body of the adult woman—like a doubled TV image brought into focus—the laugh caught in my throat and turned to tears.

A lot more happened, too much to describe. I’m not sure what it’s all about but I can say with conviction that it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.