Once, while visiting Los Angeles, a friend urged me to see her healer. She wouldn't tell me anything about how this healer practiced his craft. "Trust me. Just go," she said. So I made an appointment. My friend was a walking advertisement for the healer; she was radiant, joyful. I was not, nor had I ever been, joyful. I had moments of contentment, but euphoria wasn't in my emotional range. I parked my car in front of a bungalow, then pulled open a painted wooden gate and walked through lush gardens to a converted garage in back, where the healer-a tall man with flowing gray hair and lively blue eyes--explained to me that he would be plucking out the seeds of childhood sorrow and pain, so that they would no longer be sprouting tangled weeds in my adult life.
I sat opposite him on a sofa, and answered a series of questions.
Parents?
Dead.
Children?
One.
Married?
Happily.
After a little while, the healer came over to me and placed a hand on my solar plexus. "You have many beings inside of you," he said. "Are you ready to release them?"
I nodded, though I felt as if I was acting in a play. I focused on a painting of the Buddha sitting in a field of psychedelic flowers. The healer made slow circles just below my rib cage.
"What was your mother like?"
"Difficult."
"And your father?"
"Kind."
"Your mother's mother? Were you close?"
"Not particularly."
"What did you call her?"
"Grammy."
The circles got faster. The healer instructed me to lean forward and exhale forcefully, three times. And again. "There," he said, his gaze trailing away, as if watching someone leave. "Now repeat after me: Go to the light, Grammy."
"Go to the light, Grammy."
My own voice rang in my ears.
"Again."
"Go to the light, Grammy."
The process was repeated for my mother, my father, several aunts and uncles, and finally the healer asked if I'd had any childhood pets.
"A dog."
"What kind?"
"He was a poodle."
"Name?"
Here I hesitated, embarrassed. It wasn't even a name I had made up. I copied our neighbors, who had named their poodle first.
"Poofy," I reluctantly answered.
"And you loved Poofy," the healer said.
Honestly, I didn't remember feeling very fond of Poofy. He was a bit short on personality. But I reached back in my memory for that small body, that curly black bundle.
"Good," the healer said. He seemed to be watching Poofy trot out the door along with Grammy. "Now tell him it's okay to go."
"Go to the light, Poofy," I said. "Poofy, go to the light."
At the end of the hour-long session, my solar plexus was sore from all the rubbing, but I didn't feel much else. My friend had promised that I'd feel changed, transformed. That I'd feel an infinite ease. Instead, I felt silly and a little sad. As I drove the streets of Los Angeles, I thought about my parents, my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and even Poofy. Did I want them to leave me? Did I want them to go to the light? The healer had talked about seeds. Even if those seeds could be plucked-the healer had made a pincer out of two fingers and pulled through the air-it seemed to me that they were important, and that getting rid of them might not be a good idea at all.
Who are we without everything that's ever happened to us? And if we are writers, how can we do our work without the grounding of our own history? Flannery O'Connor once wrote that anyone who has survived his childhood has enough material to last a lifetime. Those seeds are the material. When I am writing, when it's going well, I have traveled to the place inside of me where I can locate them. They're very small, and not always easy to find. The way my grandmother said my full name, emphasizing the first syllable. Dan-eile. The crinkle of newspaper beneath Poofy's feet in the kitchen. My father's favorite piece of music: Dvorak's New World Symphony. The shortcut through the woods to school, the canopy of trees. These are words, phrases, faces, animals, street corners, strains of music that I need to hold on to, even if they sprout tangled weeds, even if remembering them causes the sadness and inevitable pain of loss. They contain within them the whole world.
