The Art of the Healers

Every single morning, I write. Stories, myths, legends. Because sometimes the pain we carry feels that real, that big. It isn't a tear, it's the vast desert of "not enough." It isn't a longing, it's an ancestral pull. Grief, hurt, trauma can grow too large to metabolize through ordinary language. So we create myths. Some last generations. Some live only as a family story, a whispered superstition. My line begins with Zahira. The first Arab mermaid. A powerful enchantress who loved completely, lost herself in that love, and in one moment of grief-born rage, destroyed the very thing she treasured. Consumed by what she had done, she cast herself into the sea. The Canaanite gods had mercy on her and turned her into a mermaid. What they did not understand is that grief does not need legs to travel. It moves through water. It moves through blood. It arrives in the ones who come after as a pull they cannot name. Her children did not know her name. They only...

An Invisible Burden People call it strength. After a while, you start to believe them. You're the one who shows up. Who steadies the room. Who makes sure everyone else gets through what they're feeling. And because you do it well, because you do it without flinching, it becomes who you are. People stop asking if you're okay with it. They just lean. And you let them, because somewhere along the way, this became familiar. This became yours. What nobody sees is what it costs. Here's what I've learned, in the work and in my own life: most people aren't asking to be rescued. They're asking to be witnessed. But some of us can't just witness. We move toward pain like it's a call. We pick it up. We carry it home. We tell ourselves it's love, it's loyalty, it's care. And maybe it is, partly. But it's also something else. It's what we know. It's what feels like purpose when nothing else does. The burden doesn't announce itself....

  Arslan gave up so much to save me. His childhood, his identity. The world demands a sacrifice. In order to win this life, you must lose that which you love. I sat with her as her life was leaving her body. Her arms kept jumping. I read it's from the morphine. I also read it's from the nervous system shutting down. I held her hand. I sat and asked myself if this could be real. The protectors came up, helped me walk out of the nursing home. When I walked out, it felt like the longest hallway I had ever seen. Like if I kept walking it would take me to the other side of the earth. The person who kept me steady is gone. What is hardest now is going outside. Grief lives out there. When I stay inside, she can't get to me as easy. She means no harm. She is the price. The price of love. After the hallway, the hollow came. The place in my chest that continued to reach for her, for something to tell me it would be okay. But, if we are being honest, what does "okay" lo...

  Arslan screamed as he fell into the hollow, deeper, and deeper, and deeper. The kind of falling that takes everything with it: sound, name, breath. Until there is nothing left but the fall itself. YA ALLLLAHHHHHH. Into the void. Into the emptiness. The cry went out ahead of him and the void gave back nothing. And when the last of it had left him, when his voice found its floor before his body did, he opened his eyes to the room. That room. The one he somehow always knew. Grief was sitting in the corner, the way she always sits. Blue dress. Tan skin. Wild black hair loose around her face. Eyes like ice, pale and still, cold in a way that has nothing against you. She was waiting. She was always waiting. Waiting was what she did best, not in a hurtful or mean way, not the way of someone who withholds, but in a way that is absolute. The way stone waits. The way the dark waits at the end of every day. He found the floor. He stayed there. She didn't move toward him. She didn't look...

There's a thing that lives in the chest of men like me. Not a wound exactly. Wounds have edges. This has none. It's hollow. It's the specific emptiness that gets passed from one set of hands to the next before anyone knows what they're holding. My father had it. His father before him. Men who didn't have words for what moved through them, so it moved through them and kept going. Into rooms. Into the people they were supposed to protect. Into me. I received it young. I didn't know I was receiving it. That's how it works. You don't get asked. You're simply the next open place and it settles into you the way cold settles into a house when no one's tended the heat. Quietly. Completely. Until you can't remember a time before it was there. I tried to fill it with everything I could find. Some of it numbed it for a while. Some of it made me feel, briefly, like a man who didn't have a hollow center. None of it held. It never holds. The holl...

Higher than the oldest tree, whose breath began with the universe. His smell intoxicates my loins, his touch excites my soul. His love ignites it all. Your absence reminds me of the warmth. The pain crashes away and I am the sun. When nighttime comes, I am the darkest side of the moon, raging for the Sun again. II. The Night Rumi Broke Me Open Since Mom-mom died, something has been turning in me. Not away from her. Toward something underneath the grief. It actually started before she died. I was doing somatic work, trying to move the trauma my body had been carrying. What I did not understand then is that the body does not only hold what happened to you. It holds what came before you. The line runs through the tissue. As I cleared space, something older became audible underneath. She was the crack that let some light in. Tonight I was reading Rumi. I learned that his greatest work came out of grief. The reed flute in his most famous passage cries because it was cut from the reed bed. T...