I’m back to treating the open wound on my thigh—the final vestige of unhealed skin. Certainly, there remain unhealed parts under the surface. Scar tissue, swelling, pinching. Deep in my left butt cheek is an abiding pain that I suppose is my sciatic nerve but it’s a single point of pain, not a shooting pain down to my heel, which is characteristic of the quality of pain that life nerve produces.
Yesterday, I had a massage. The opening—the moment when the masseuse comes to retrieve you from the waiting area, was different and strange because the waiting area was the hot spring tubs described as “clothing optional,” but everyone opts against them. To be a part of and just for the thrill of it, Billi and I also opted to shed our clothes and be naked. (There’s nothing quite like being naked right along side vivid and bare nature: the bright brute of the ocean, the flowers so lush and full that they seem almost lewd, the birds and the sunlight and the cool air. Yet, add another 20 or so naked bodies and in comes an inescapable self-consciousness that takes some of the fun out of it. Though this is also balanced with the fun of a rare form of people watching wherein everyone is naked: breasts and scrotums alike exposed just as brazenly, though not always as proudly, as those flowers.)
My self-consciousness was heightened by my scars, their purple hue appearing so dark in contrast to the pale skin untouched by the sun. But coupled with the shame was a contradictory feeling similar to, yet distinct from, pride: a daring feeling. As though the truth about all I’d just lived through—every dreadful detail of it—was freshly etched on my body like untidy badges. Scars are a universal language. They reveal in one glance the kind of hard-earned resilience that attends survival.
The masseuse who worked on me was a young man with gentle, brown eyes. He fetched me from my repose and I approached his fully clothed body with my dripping, scarred, naked one. The feeling was like being caught, and perhaps this was mutual, because he seemed eager to find my towel and hand it to me. I explained to him that I’d been in a motorcycle accident three months ago and quickly summarized my injuries. He glanced down at my right arm, the most disfigured part of me now, and a quality of feeling filled his eyes that I’m now accustomed to seeing: a mix of sadness and admiration.
On the table, I worried briefly that I hadn’t instructed him not to work on my left quad, which was torn open in the accident and now remains painful and numb and pulled in at the seem of scar that stretches across it from one side to the other. But the scar spoke for itself, and he skillfully worked around it. Similarly, when he came to my right arm, he didn’t squeeze and pull it like he had my left. Instead, he held it with both hands in a deeply tender way that brought tears to my eyes. The warmth of his hands penetrated the sensitive scar tissue and brought a sense of profound healing.
Back to the subject of treating my open wound. About a week ago, I called the plastic surgeon’s office to ask if I could please stop treating and covering it. The tedium of the wound care combined with my upcoming vacation where I wanted to be able to freely submerge my body in hot mineral water drove the request. Also, the bottom of the hole had risen sufficiently toward the surface of my skin. So I stopped with the permission of his secretary, who confidently and autonomously told me I could. Only to find out a week later when I saw the surgeon again that I wasn’t to have stopped. He angrily put the treatment back on the now dry and half-scabbed wound and covered it with a Band-Aid, shouting, “I don’t understand why this is so hard for you to do. Just let it heal.” The half that was not scabbed, I learned, wasn’t able to close because it hadn’t yet grown an epidermis: that top later of skin that becomes scar tissue. He explained to me, finally, that this was the goal. The epidermis had to grow all the way across the opening.
The treatment I apply during the day has the words “enzymatic debridement” in the label. Letting it do its work over time to help granulate the wound tissue to the point where a new epidermis is formed requires a level of patience I’ve never known. I wanted to rush through it. I wanted it to be on pace with the rest of my healing. This is an apt metaphor for the emotional healing I’ve wanted to rush through.
Later that day, I was enjoying an aimless walk with Billi around the property. She was happy because she was walking through a fertile garden swollen with new life set near the edge of a cliff that drops off to the rocky ocean coast. Behind and around it are windswept trees and bursting, vibrant flowers everywhere, each one of them in voluptuous bloom like nature spreading her legs to us. This on a backdrop of green mountains, from the depths of which flow hot mineral waters and from their peaks filters pure, cold, spring water down an enchanted hidden canyon. She was happy because she’d finally found an environment that matches her own inner landscape of mind and soul: a place where all the most fertile riches of humanity converge. She stops to gasp and stick her nose in every flower, she peeks over every enchanting looking wooden gate, she explores every dark grove, worships at every goddess statue, and, when she sees a particularly beautiful sunset, she’ll dance toward it, and make you wish you were a sunset.
On our aimless walk, we stumbled upon a gate: the entrance to a canyon trail inscribed with the words, “Be Free.” It was also adorned with a clear warning that the trail ahead was dangerous and you should enter at your own risk. We entered and were promptly captivated by the scene: Impossibly tall trees with wide trunks surrounded a babbling brook of clear and clean water. We walked cautiously and slowly uphill and down, climbing over boulders and downed trees, crossing the brook atop footbridges made of fallen trunks, stopping often to marvel at the stunning beauty all around us. On the way back, motivated by thirst, we approached the brook to drink. I knelt on a flat rock at the water’s edge, dunked my hands into to the icy stream and bowed, lowering my head beneath the level of my heart, a symbolic surrender to love, and touched my lips to the water. I drank and it was the most delicious water I’ve ever tasted: tonic to heal open emotional wounds. Swallowing, I felt some of them close. And Billi drank, too, and the wounds between us closed.
What Billi and I have lived through together these past months is something most couples never have to face. We needed this place and its healing waters to close the subtle distances between us that remained like open emotional wounds. The subtle distances within each of us, too. We needed to be darkened by this place and it’s beauty and its waters: salt, mineral, fresh. This is how she described it: “I feel darkened by the divine.” As soon as she spoke the words, I understood. The conventional understanding of the word dark as something negative or injurious didn’t apply. Instead, she meant filled up to brimming. She meant saturated and dripping. Like a red washcloth dunked into water then pulled up, how it’s now darkened: dark red and dripping wet.
We needed to be darkened by the divine. And now that we have been, I hope to stay this way. I hope to remain drenched and overflowing long after we leave this magical place.
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