The Tireless Healer

When Margaret (name and other personal details changed for privacy) 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, mowing,
weeding, replacing window frames, wrestling with the plumbing and the wiring, doing
every bit of it herself. She is, for what it is worth, 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.
So that is where we went.

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 — seconds, minutes, hours,
days, weeks, months, years, centuries — 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 — the fields, the boxes, the wiring — 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. The farm was still the farm. The project was
still the project — she is, in fact, still working on it. 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 described the relief as tremendous. She was, in her own word,
overjoyed.

It was the most urgent thing she had carried for years, and one session was enough to set it
down. She may come back to me one day for something else. For this, no further sessions
were required.