It’s not the flocked wallpaper or the massive cream and gold Persian rug on the floor nor the drapes embroidered with crystals beneath the chandelier.  It’s not the red velveteen toshaks with their matching pillows.  It’s not the eighth floor of the new building still under construction.  It’s not the ten liter water bottles Ebrahim carries from Macro or the uchuch for 3000 som to the INCETTI.  It’s not the shop windows of manikins in blue and pink floor-length hijab next to those in skinny jeans and tunics.  It’s not the taxi pit with the guys yelling Asaka! Baluchi! Jalaquduq!  It’s not the smell of petrol or of shashlik grilling on skewers in front of Mosaffa or of samosas frying in a vat of oil on Amir Segur.  It’s not the great statue of Babur mounted on his horse in front of the Andijan train station nor even because the speeding taxis down the double wide street blink their headlights so you can cross.   It’s because the students in a class you walk into stand up to greet you. Because in the registration office, the beautiful girl with an indigo band beneath her white scarf, eyes lined in black, takes your US passport–the first she’s ever held–in shaking hands. Because walking down the street, a boy in a black jeans jacket and running shoes asks what’s your name?” and says he’s never spoken to a foreigner before.  Because when you get into a taxi, the driver greets you Asallahmalecum and because the old man in his square black dopi sitting in the backseat smiles at you with a hand over his heart, Because Eshnut in his great fur hat greets you at the gate with a grin, hosht kellisiz.  Because on the way back from your teacher observation in Quergonteppa, Olim stops for the Valley’s famous lemons and because Shokizjon invites you to his family’s home to make sumulak for Navruz. Because Tamila takes a damas all the way from Asaka to meet you at Mr. Arabic for lesson planning and because Saodat runs to get a key made for your red-carpeted office where an American flag and an Uzbek flag in gold plastic holders stand paired at the front of the massive desk.  It’s because the girl who cleans it wishes you good health, a long life, and much success in rhyming Uzbek, smiling with her grill of gold, offering you a round loaf of naan speckled with sesame seeds. It’s because when your husband Ebrahim goes out into the street, everyone he meets calls him Brother.

On our first trip beyond Andijan viloyati, we travel to Khiva. The tiled minarets in turquoise Majorca rise into azure sky.  Vendors display plastic keychains, bird whistles and polyester scarves from China on plywood tables.  Madam! Come look, only look!

On the flagstones of the empty plaza are spread dozens of embroidered bedcovers of pomegranates, curved peppers, suns and moons.

Why so many? I ask.  A young woman on a wooden chair says, Two years. Covid. No tourists. We are just sewing. This one my sister made; this one my mother.

I kneel on the stones.  Her sister, the one who can’t speak, rushes to me, vocalizing, signing.

The young woman says her sister goes to a school for deaf students.  She sees, then makes the pattern, she tells me.

Her sister brings armfuls, like laundry, so many colors, so much work.  I want all of them, fan through the embroidered pillowcases.

The girl who can’t speak mimes ATM machine, pulls at me, grunting.   She runs ahead of me through the back streets, past the chaihana, the white pompom on her wool hat bobbing.

I am breathless, laughing. At the ATM, I insert a Visa card, withdraw the maximum.  A million som in 100,000 notes.  Then again, another million.  The third time, a million more.

The girl leans against me while the stacks of som shuffle from the machine. I stuff them like leaves into my crossbody bag.

We go back almost running, arm-in-arm.

The young woman folds three embroidered spreads, pushes twelve pillow covers I love into a plastic trash bag.   I give her the stacks. Three million, more than a month’s salary.   Her sister folds two more pillow cases into the bag.  They are her gift, the woman says.

Back in our tiny guest house, I spread the orange pomegranates woven with mint green on my single bed.  I’m ecstatic.

I research suzani on my iPhone, learn that the intricately embroidered covers are made for a girl’s dowry.  From the time she is small, her mothers, sisters, aunts sew sections, then stitch them together in a gorgeous pattern.

The hook-stitched ones are for tourists.

I paid too much, I tell Ebrahim.

You enjoyed buying them, didn’t you? my husband says. Don’t act stupid. Money has to move.

The next morning, from the west gate, our young guide Anush takes us on a tour through the gorgeous architecture of the 2500 years old ruins, the khanate of late fifteenth century Khiva, the treachery, tells us the central story of the Silk Roads.

We visit the khan’s summer palace, the madresa now a tourist hotel, walk between the hand-carved pillars of the mosque where once five thousand worshippers prayed.

I grew up here, Anuysh says. Sher says she ran across those flagstones on the plaza.  She knows every vendor, takes us to buy, to  ter uncle’s woodcarving shop, her cousin’s place of silk scarves, her friend with the embroidered pillow cases.

I already bought covers I say.  You know, the girl who can’t speak?  I bought hers; she was so distressed.

Xaren?  I went to school with her, Anush says.  She has four sisters and another one can’t speak, either, she says, with scorn.   You know why?

Her parents are too close relatives.

I liked her suzani so much, I say.

Anush laughs, harsh.  Not her suzani.  That girl doesn’t bother herself to sew.

Late afternoon, after writing, the sun gentle, I drive twenty minutes down an empty winding blacktop, along groves of uncleared land, past palm trees, and white picket-fenced macadamia farms, past Riley’s Dikene—his wooden table with boulder-sized unripe avocados, yellow lemons, oranges, limes and coffee-roasted from the land where a little goat grazes inside an enclosed pasture.  As at most of the roadside stops in this southern end of the island, no one mans the stand: chalked prices; tin canister with money slit; honor system.

Down to Kau Lia to turn right one lane curving at 25 mph through the little town of Na’alehu–a place reminding me of Hemingway’s Key West before that time passed—by the elementary school playground and the local police station.  After the yellow caution cow sign, pastures on the left and up to the overlook of a stunning bay: abandoned pier; white ruffles of sea foaming against a black beaded necklace of lava enclosing tidal pools: soft malachite hills on the distant flanks of Mauna Loa. A car has usually stopped there, tourists on the loop road holding a cellphone aloft to snatch the astonishing view.

At the bottom of the curve, a sharp right enters the palm-lined drive to the pockmarked asphalt lot of Whittington Beach Park. In my water shoes, a towel over a shoulder, my rental car key pinned inside my swimsuit top, I walk across the green turf by an immensely exuberant monkey tree to the piles of lava rocks that form the northern edges of a tidal lagoon, waves crashing outside the rock enclosure on the southside.

Near high tide, this is a natural Olympic pool, both protected and scary:  water in murky light, darting things, unsuspected twigs, seaweed rising in dragon kale arcs, sharp knee-scraping boulders, warm and shivery cold currents against my skin.

Through my swimming goggles, yellow and black angelfish, a neon blue minnow, school of soft striped greys. An extraordinary Hawai’ian green turtle flying underwater, flipperwings, dragging paddle feet like I do behind my stroking upper body.  Entranced, I follow her meandering path forgetting to mark the dark shoreline.  A wave knocks me into a sharp lava ridge.  I’d missed the edge that forms the outer ring of the pool.  I’d gone beyond bounds, into the open surf crashing sea.  Panic. Clinging to boulders, I climb up the black rocks, then scramble across back to the protected lagoon.

Swimming in a tidal pool is a metaphor for working in digital space.  There on the surface, my audio track, a narrative tide.  Just beneath, in the video track, still and moving images accompanied by the currents of a shifting music track.  Words, images, transitions choreograph insights in my storytimeline.  Sometimes quite unexpectedly, I go out of bounds–a synaptic juxtaposition of memory beyond linear narrative– then climb back, to the story’s meaning and theme.

In this piece, the  narrative tide moves from geological time to the present then shifts to forty years in the past to  explore the theme of uncertainty.  Click the link to view the 3-minute piece   slag 2021 

In New Mexico where I now live, cultural and historical inequities of access to education have been intensified by the pandemic. In the Santa Fe New Mexican, Anthony J. Wallace describes how COVID-19 has challenged the Navajo Nation with death and loss, upheaval and isolation. He writes about Native American youth and their interrupted dream “to graduate high school, find a way to go to college, get a degree, land a dream job.” Not only are indigenous learners in the Southwest engulfed in these challenges, but also those I know in Mongolia, South Africa, and Central Asia facing an uncertain future.

After schools were closed in Tajikistan and students in rural southwestern villages lost connection, I reached out to my long-time colleague Zebo Muradova, who teaches in Bokhtar in an after-school English ACCESS program supported by the U.S. Department of State. Though the non-profit American Space where the students had been meeting was closed indefinitely, the Director provided internet packages and loaned cell phones, so Zebo was able to connect with her fifteen English learners twice weekly on Google Meet.

That connection allowed Zebo and me to imagine a hybrid Digital Storytelling project for September/October 2020. In six hybrid workshops, five ACCESS girls wrote, recorded, and illustrated personal narratives of loss and loneliness amplified by the isolation of COVID-19. Munisa tells the story of the death of her youngest uncle: “That was the worst day in my life. I stopped eating. I cried all day. Even I got sick.” Mahina shares the story of her father’s abandonment and her mother’s second marriage and divorce. Marhabo writes of the challenges when COVID-19 canceled school and her ACCESS program: “I lost my hope and motivation….Most of my ACCESS friends experienced the sadness which came with feeling lonely.”

In the digital stories, the girls proceed to express hope and strength through their cell phone classes. Munisa finds resilience in focusing on her lessons. Mehrangez gains motivation, embracing change. Mahina says her lessons “helped me to be brave, overcome my challenges and feel connected with other students.” Sabohat shares, “I must not forget this. Never give up.” Each of the girls embodies a more resilient self, awakening to her own inner strength, her soul-force revealed in the act of making her story heard.

Gandhi says of satyagraha that one’s soul force must be “expressed in action in the service of social justice” (Sethia 2012 p. 47). In a Google Meet interview after the workshop, two of the five shared their future hopes and dreams. Mahina wants to “open a classroom in our school and teach what I have learned in this workshop.” Munisa hopes to “share my ideas with students . . . to improve my English knowledge by teaching students.”

Empowered by their identity as strong, resilient young women, the first five Tajik storytellers applied for and recently received an ACCESS Alumni Grant to share their learning by teaching girls and boys in their school.

In a small way, this hybrid digital storytelling workshop attests to the power of digital connection in a socially distanced world and to dreams that may be realized from sharing of authentic voices.

Watch the Stories

Read the Ahimsa Center Newsletter, Ahimsa & K-12 Education, pp. 9-10.

I’m packing up the guest room where I keep my travel coillection, books and a fold out Ikea bed for visitors.  No one is coming this COVID-19 spring, so I’m moving our bed into the bigger room and turning the bedroom into a WFH office.  First, though, in the soft ground by the roots of the leafy plum trees in my walled garden, I plant the tiny carved Ganesh I’d bought at Keshava Temple on a weekend trip from Kengeri Hobli.  I wrap a Japanese fan and Senegalese talking balls and Mongolian ivory babies in tissue paper and pack them in a box. I take down my SmashBooks:  thirty years of dreams and shamanic journeys, new moon wishes and lists of affirmations collected in found coffee table books, half the pages ripped out so the maps and poems, cards and photographs pasted, taped and sewn inside don’t break the bindings.  These personal archives are wrapped in block-printed Thai paper and labeled with the years:  l989 (Dakar), 1990-1993 (Tokyo), 2014 (South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland); 2017 (India, Mongolia).  On the Persian rug, I’m rifling through the volumes in  search of a new digital story: sandwiched between those covers I might find out who I thought I was back then.  I might excavate whole chunks of text, discover forgotten photos, an archeologist sifting through the years, looking for layered artifacts to juxtapose in digital space.

This piece baste stitches together narrative, childhood photos and archival text from a Smashbook in memory of my grandparents who taught me how to behave.   

Sayaka is visiting Santa Fe from Tokyo, having come to see me– her ESL teacher–eight years after the year she attended a Newcomer Program at my former high school.  In my fourteen years of teaching in public school, she is the first graduate to return, to seek my counsel as she prepares for a career as a native Japanese-speaking English teacher in the Japanese school system—her accomplishment through a rigorous preparation program with tests and interviews.

After the museum, at The Shed, we drink margaritas and talk about “wait time” in the context of emerging English learners. At the open air Palace of the Governors, we look at the wares on the blankets of the artists spread beneath the timbers. Sayaka chooses a delicate string of turquoise and seed pearls, symbolic of her Western and Asian selves: bilingual with fluent idiomatic English, bicultural American high school graduate and soon-to-become formal Japanese teacher.  We talk about identity:  the American self she developed through two years at Boulder High as captain of the swim team and her native Japanese self. She want to speak only English and identifies American. We are sitting on cushions on the floor in front of a fire in the kiva. I listen to the crack of scrap wood and observe this beautiful young Asian woman. What would happen, I ask, if she couldn’t speak Japanese? I mean, ever again. She waits, quiet, reflecting, then shares about not being able to talk with the grandfather she visits monthly in his small village.  He doesn’t know her American self, she says:  she becomes Japanese with him. And she speaks of the nuances in one Japanese concept that English only approximates: 待つ.

That evening, Ebrahim cooks planked salmon and basmati rice and we eat with chopsticks on the floor in front of the dying fire and, after, play Scrabble.  Sayaka is excited, delighted to spend a Friday evening playing Scrabble with her sixty-plus former teacher.  Unfamiliar words–jilted and queue– appear in the crossword. No matter how elevated my vocabulary, Ebrahim wins with a two letter. Oh. Sayaka asks him to take her to Target the next day to buy the game to take home to play with her parents, to teach to her students.

On her last evening, we drive in the dark to a pueblo for the Fire Dance. Firelighters with tanks of gasoline start bonfires of a dozen paired cairns like gates along a curved trajectory of the open field of mud. They flame up bright and hot. The paired fires burn, flaring with the bittersweet smell of pinion. We wait for the dancers.  The fire gates burn down to warming flames.  The Indian Officer stands by one of the fires:  he tells us to stay warm and invites us to stand around another. We wait for the dancers.  We think the men are in the kiva preparing for the dance: smoke coming from the chimney;  a door opening—light within–door closing.   The fires burn down.  Sayaka gazes down at the whitened logs on a hotbed of coals.  We wait for the dancers.  Ebrahim and I know this is how the experience goes:  we’ve asked before, “what time are the dances?”  “Later,” a passing pueblo resident says.  The warmth of the collapsing embers rise like a caress, pinion smoke acrid, the dark sky above so many pricks of starlight, the quiet pueblo adobe buildings framing the paired piles of crimson, our community of three: my husband, this beautiful young woman; me. 

When the fire gates burn to the ground, an older Puebloan comes to rake the coals into small piles.  As we step aside, I ask quietly, politely, are there going to be dances?  Yes, he says, over there. He points to the far side of the pueblo, across a sea of mud away from where we and other Anglo visitors are standing, waiting. He tells us some men will come out to light the fires and when we see that, we should go up there.  He says the dancers will come out and then they will go back in and that’s it.  He carries his rake to the next pile, scooping embers. I laugh out loud. Then get quiet in the burning. We three stare into the heat.

A few women wrapped in colorful blankets appear out of the adobe houses, stepping gingerly in white ankle moccasins across the muddy ground.   I think this is a sign the dancers are coming. We cross the space, squishing through mud, and stand behind the women in a large semicircle.  Firelighters come out of a far building with gas cans and light dozens of six foot high cairns stacked in a grand circle with pinion logs. The cairns blaze higher than our heads.  Anticipation tastes metallic.  Then the  kiva door opens, a man in leather and cloth emerges with boughs of evergreen, leading others in totemic dress. The Buffalo passes and women throw blessings. The antelope dances–in white leather with poles in their hands– step out, one foreleg then the other. Little deer dance, running behind, tufts of tail flit on the rear of their baggy brown sleepers. The dancers walk in a serpentine pattern around the central building, towards and away from us observers—native and tourist–standing respectfully, watching.   The dancers pass, to and fro, back and forth around the circle, then reenter the kiva—chief, shaman, buffalo, antelope disappear.  The firelight brightens our faces—Native, Asian, Middle Eastern, Anglo. Then, the Pueblo women turn away.  We follow them through the dark back to the parking lot under a zillion sparks, star embers in an infinite sky.

Moving here at the end of 2017 was “entering new territory”—not only high-altitude desert geography but metaphorically, as Gloria Steinem writes in Doing Sixty and Seventy (2006). She says that “fifty felt like leaving a much beloved and familiar country –hence both the defiance and the sadness—and sixty felt like arriving at the border of a new one.”  For me, grounded from international work as a traveling Specialist after the fracture and dealing with two years’ of infection and resulting surgeries, my residency in New Mexico has invited exploration not only of the Southwest but of my internal landscape—both journeys as interesting as Karnatica, Zavkahn and Govi-Altai had been two years before.  Steinem says this decade is “not so much controlling time, it’s losing track of time.” In my own flight from pain, engaging in blogging and the creative media-making of Digital Storytelling has been healing, most recently the ones created with lectio divina on Rumi’s poems, merging travel photos from New Mexico/India/ Portugal/Philippines to make one-minute devotions. Selected digital stories are uploaded under Jode’s Stories.

This coming year, I’m focused on physical recovery to full mobility and returning to professional work through this just-launched website.  A book chapter Voices of Young Women Leaders: Swaraj and Satyagraha through Digital Storytelling is coming out early in 2020, and in March, I’m presenting In Their Own Voices:  The Immigrant Experience through Digital Storytelling at the international TESOL 2020 conference in Denver. In April, Ebrahim and I are traveling to Tajikistan with support from a Fulbright Alumni grant to work with Zebo and give voice to her ACCESS girls through DST,  On the local front, I’m waiting to hear about a grant to support Santa Fe’s Southside teens in sharing their voices of the City Different.

As we each navigate crossing over into a new decade and the challenge of this election year, I hope for health, well-being, and social justice, especially for those seeking asylum at our southern border.

I ask my surgeon when can I swim?  When can I get on a stationary bike to pedal? When can I start Pilates?  He looks at me with that small frown between his brows. I get quiet and wait. No swimming for six weeks, he says.   No bicycling.  No hiking. Importantly, no driving.  You can walk. 

I take this in.  OK,  I can walk.

Richard points out that all I said before I went into this third surgery is I want to walk.  I am going to walk.  I want to keep on walking.

And I do walk out of C.U. Medical Center hospital with a Leki walking stick for balance, without pain.

Boo gives me a post surgery gift, a square black screen on a rubberized watchband.  A Fitbit.  His and her matching Fitbits.  If I’m going to walk, I’m going to focus on walking.  Each day counts.  Steps.  

At the end of the first day back home in Santa Fe, having walked around the house with the support of my wheelie, the Fitbit strapped on my wrist marks 310 steps.  That doesn’t make sense.  I realize that if pushing my three-wheeled walker, the gadget doesn’t read the steps.  So I fold up the tricycle and put it in the garage next to my Harley.  I’ll donate it to the Senior Center in appreciation for the walker, wheelchair, shower stool and elevated potty seat they’ve lent me over the last three months.   I try the walking stick around the house but I discover I don’t need it.  I have full weight bearing.  No pain in the socket.  Surgical sutures burn a bit but they are clean.  Muscle soreness in the quad.  All expected.  I can walk.

The next morning, I say to Boo, let’s go to Frenchy’s Park down the street.  There’s a sidewalk route .33 miles long. It’s 38 degrees out.   I walk the first third of a mile with extension poles, needing to rest.  At the beginning, 769 steps the Fitbit calculates.  I’m exhausted. I can’t do more, I say, and Boo drives me back home

On Sunday, we go again in the morning..  I bring compression walking poles and circumnavigate the park two times.  I stop briefly just to say OK, I can do this.   1535 steps.  I don’t think I can do anymore, I say. And Boo drives me back home.

On Monday morning, I ask if Boo will drive me over before he goes to work at St. Bede’s.  I do two times around.  At the end of the second lap, my Fitbit tells me my heart rate is up to l03 beats per minute.  I haven’t seen a heart rate that high for two years.  I’m going for it, I say,  and start the third loop.  I get up to ll3 beats per minute.  2348 steps.   The little monitor with the footprints around the loop in a data circle like the loop I’m walking at the park sends me a wrist-message:  “Hey you!  256 more steps to go this hour!”    I hobble back to the car, 63 steps.

In the afternoon of that mile walk, my leg swells up like the Dakota Pipeline. I’m worried. I call Tena. She comes over, kneels down by the low supported guest bed and lightly massages the edema, brings the congestion down around my knee.  Lying under her caring hands, I show here my Fitbit. 4623 steps!

She looks at my like I’m a lunatic and says I’m less than a week out from surgery. I need to give time for my capillaries to adjust, time to recover.

But I’m so excited that I can walk!  I just want to walk!  To keep on walking! 

She says she’s going to take away my Fitbit.

I hide my gadget but I  heed her advice, take Tuesday off, I just walk around the house, from room to room, doing light housework, organizing my files, cooking dinner. (2136 steps.)

On Wednesday, in my session with my psychiatrist, I tell Dr. Joe that I’m not doing enough, that I’ve become lazy, that I’ve lost my drive.   He suggests that at mid-sixty,  I’ve done everything I need to do.   Well, yes, he recommends, I do need to put in the effort of recovery, the rehab, but not overdo it.  He clarifies I’ve put in my time: three academic degrees, academic and story publications, dozens of grant projects and professional awards, a public school career, international contracts, and the last two years’ endurance through surgeries. I don’t have to “work at it” anymore, he says.  I get quiet. 

No one in my life has ever suggested that I’ve done enough.  Dr. Joe offers that what I could do now, at this time of my life, is focus on developing a balance through integration of intellect, creativity, insight, and love and compassion.

This is something to ponder.

After the session, I walk to DeVargas Mall (2019 steps) to get a Starbucks cappucino and write this blog. 

When Boo picks me up after his work and drives me home, he takes his gear and leaves for Chavez for his daily swim.  I take off my Fitbit to recharge the battery, then go outside in the surprisingly warm afternoon and sit outside in my walled garden on an old wicker chair, crunching my butt on a pile of leaves I don’t bother to sweep off.   I put up my feet in their multicolored knitted Tajik mucklucks on the Restore table.  I note the Mongolian tea chest at the far end of the garden, wrapped in plastic for the winter, and the drop cloth-covered tiled table.  The dried chili-ristras swing  from their hooks.  The abandoned barbecue, mid-garden the iron gate ajar, the empty hummingbird feeder, the dead blooms in the Oriental pots.  Beside me, the stick like dried stems of summer’s coleus poke up beneath Ann’s passport mask, and dried leaves cascade down the cement steps around the patio lanterns.   In my meditation on not doing, I see that I am in love with the transitioning backspace of my casita with its death and dying and its held hope for Spring.  In a few minutes, I’ll get up and walk, but just now I don’t feel like standing up to straighten or sweep, empty pots or move lanterns, or put anything away.  For the moment, I don’t want to change a thing in this November afternoon quiet of my recovery.

My surgery is scheduled in a week.  I look towards my operation with hope though I won’t know until after if the surgery will have been successful.  Not until Dr. Hogan slices open the same incision he stitched shut with the explant will he find if the six weeks of vancomycin has killed the infection.  

I hope for a different future from my recent past:  I hope to rove around the world under my own volition.

In Canyon de Chelly in Arizona this summer, we camped in the Monument in a charmed circle of massive cottonwoods, twelve druidic totems I embraced around midnight when I crawled out of the tent for a tinkle.  Each trunk a monument to longevity, dwarfing my own human decades.  They felt like rock, no sense of sap when I pressed my cheek against the petrified riffled bark.  

In the morning, the cacophony of birds woke us.  Boo climbed out to heat water in the JetBoy and made plunger coffee in the camping press.  Nothing like fresh brewed French Roast under the comforter and quilt inside one’s own screened in temporary home.  

We packed up and then hiked down the White House trail. Flawless turquoise skies above the undulating rocks and the massive curve of the red stonewalls, oranges, striations of white, yellow and pink, smell of dust and odor of dry.  A few skinny lizards; tupelo chirping from branches; pink trumpets of cactus in bloom. 

Tucked into the crevice of ledges the unmistakable ruins of the Anasazi. Six hundred feet below the rim on the canyon floor,  a green gemland of grass and blooming trees, the lovely ruins crumbling back into the land. 

Climbing out, the rise of sheer walls from the canyon floor, magnificence in their vertical striations, dripping with black like a bottleful of ink poured down the face.

My body wanted to hike, the muscle memory engaged from half a century of trails but my hip demanded my patience.  Each plant of my extension pole invited the shoulder,  quads, the glutes to take the burden, cajoling the flexor, asking for another step.  I counted 100 and then another ten decades as in prayer. I wanted to give in: my groin asked for respite each step. But climbed the entire way back out in pain, though not in grief.  That came after. The inconsolable ache of my loss

Images from White Sands National Park and Keshava Temple in Karnataka illustrate a rumi poem to celebrate the gift of recovery.     Click here to view the digital poem   rove 2020

I contemplate the circular black standing Lasko fan’s whirring propeller jjjzjzjzjjjng as it vacillates toward my lavender louvre doors and back towards the open window where the Russian olives screen the clouds and periwinkle sky.  I’m half reclined in bed, bolstered by three fat pillows against the headboard, another between my thighs to keep my hip from rotating inward, yellow smiley hospital socks on my agitated feet while vancomycin drips from the plastic grenade of antibiotics at my side through the long slender catheter of my PICC line,  At my bedside table, my purple glitter journal, ripped at the right corner,  a Lamy fountain pen and a pack of blue-black cartridges, the small jar of cannabis-infused coconut oil, a glass of cold water form the fridge in a Goodwill glass marked with lemon slice icons.  On my iPhone, I upload my niece’s 75-minute flow posted on her website The Honest Blonde, I follow her guidance,  pressing my thumb and left finger to my nose, breathing with her in pranayama.  Mirroring her, I place my hand over my heart where the PICC’s distal tip enters my vena cava, and I imagine the antibiotic seeping in to the left chamber of oxygen rich blood and through my arteries, delivering the dose to my cells. I visualize this twice a day for the hour and a half I’m hooked up to my home intravenous treatment, a sort of Fantastic Voyage of chemicals attacking the purple pompom bacteria consuming my bone. Though I want to lift my arms, like Liv, above my head to sweep the energy towards the ceiling of this small room where I’ve spent the last months, I can’t compromise the deep needle in my brachial vein.

So I  lie back and watch with great tenderness her standing poses, dancer’s arms and legs elongated, as she flows on, this lithe young woman, muscular and flexible.  By the time she is through,  all soft angles and strength, my grenade is empty, a miniature deflated football.  At the end of her practice—at the end of my treatment—she lies in savasana on her yoga mat; I lie supine on the bed’s down duvet: both of us contemplating life from corpse poses.  In Medellin, Columbia, she is inhaling the elix’ir of tropical oxygen rich air.   I am inhaling the whirring air from the floor fan as tonight’s killing cocktail mixes in my veins.

When Ebrahim comes into the room with the two syringes–the saline and the heparin–to flush the line after the antibiotics and screw on the little sterile green cap that protects the port hanging from my upper arm, I reach for hope but feel submerged in despair.  Housebound and trapped:  nowhere to go but from kitchen to bathroom to bedroom rolling an old lady walker.

In this state, I turn to lectio divina:  not unlike yoga, a spiritual solace.  From The Illustrated Rumi, I transcribe a poem in my journal and sit quietly, allowing the words to seep into my veins as irrevocably as the drug.  In contemplation, a soft tingle slides across my skin; I recognize gratitude and my husband comes into focus,  He has cared for me since the accident through the first two surgeries.  Not only these past months but in our twenty-four years together, Ebrahim’s steadfastness and loyalty have never wavered. I record the Rumi poem and pull digital images from our 2017 travel to Portugal.

In one-minute bride,  images from Ereciera and a narrative poem by rumi are accompanied by the iconic wedding walk of Pachelbel Canon express gratitude for the gift of both human and divine love.