Rubbing some body butter and essential oils on myself right now, post shower. Yup. And feeling it. Feeling it come into my skin and rumble my inner ears. My hands are dry from alcohol and dollar store soap. I rub body butter to cleanse my hands of the dried blood I have surely encountered by breathing in a guileful world. As I rub the body butter I imagine some song. In an effort to drift, I force this moment.

I imagine notes of the song floating above sands in Northern Africa. I drift with the song and heal.


Self healing can be so many things. For me it can be knowing I am wrong and saying so, than seeing what is next. Self healing is wiping the condensation off the mirror after a shower and just looking at myself, my face and body– catching the people that pass by my own reflection.

Self healing can be about waiting. It can be speaking to the people I love, and the people I wish I loved, and the people that I never call, and the people I never see. Self healing is about acting on something genuine because I know it to be true in the present.

Self healing is putting ones hands in the dirt and just sifting through it all.
Self healing is the long, really long, walk with cramps and sweat.
Self healing is that one yellowish-white wall, painted, and now bursting with smiles. It is all that creative energy tied up inside realized, released.
Self healing is following ones own moral compass, with mindfulness and listening. Self healing is crying when there is need, not only in grief but in joy.
Self healing is not trying to be pure.


The floating song continues.

Between cuttings of succulent and desert rose, springing up from the warm and aerated soil of a clay pot, I pick up a piece of Detroit Amber. The precious stone is still wet from my shower. It is wet in my body butter hands. I roll the amber in my palm and observe the stories I have known and the stories I have materialized through its glowing edges. I am sitting on a couch in the bathroom. All the steam has subsided. I clearly see something in this amber today. Ten years of seeing something in this amber.

In some form, I know this gem meant something to someone, had purpose. I know it was part of some past catalog of people and places and things that have since been burned away. Maybe it did not end in tragedy, but there are only so many stories a landscape of a burned to the ground home can tell. And there are only so many ways to describe the melted toys once present in the basement of the house I found this piece of amber atop. This piece of amber, some possession crystallized.

The year was 2010 and so called “blight” was ever present. But “blight” has never been my self healing moment. Though, the histories and meanings behind it do speak and can speak to us all. And so, this little piece of Detroit Amber speaks to me. Through its shrouded past I find things hidden in myself and in the dying light of the day I drift. Hands in, sifting through another self healing epoch.

Not alone.