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At a roadside crystal shop, I meet an aura reader who tells me that my “female and male aspects” are the most balanced aspects he’s ever seen. I feel again, that feeling of passing and then passing through – and knowing that being seen is a choice, I take a risk and tell him what I’m here to do. Does my mom have any idea where I can scatter her ashes?
He closes his eyes, telling me to close mine too. A moment later he asks: “Your mother liked the views, didn’t she? Perspective?” That word—my mother’s endless refrain—makes me shiver. Later, when I call a female caregiver who accompanied us on our first trip, whom I haven’t spoken to since I was 10 years old, who knows me in another body and is still the same body, she will tell me that we are together. actually stopped in Sedona. My mother loved it there, she will say.
The body remembers, even if the mind does not. I don’t hesitate when the Aura reader recommends the Airport Mesa hiking loop, also known as Table Top Mountain. I will look for trees with knotted roots. The reader says that strong places where the energy of the earth rotates like a hurricane are a sign that a vortex is near. Like Cairo and Stonehenge, Sedona is known for them. People describe a feeling of peace, goosebumps, tingling, even toothaches. He tells me to listen to my intuition, my “feminine side.” I will know what to do. “You’re well-balanced,” he reminds me. am i ever
I arrive near sunset and climb a rocky trail with spectacular views of the red rocks and desert below. There is a feeling of warmth, a sense of spaciousness and joy in this place, a feeling of molting. Mostly I am alone and I breathe while walking on the mountainside. The air is soft on my face, the wind caresses my arms. I’m making my way to a juniper tree. “You only live twice,” I think.
I pour the ash on my hands. Bone cold. As I toss my palmfuls of ash around the tree, I no longer feel sick to my stomach until the branches and roots turn white with them, settling deep in my knuckles and nail bed, and painting my hands lime white. For an hour, I sit and stare at the view until I’m ready to go.
I think about what got me to this place – a pure and palpable sense of history that defies my intuition, the neat, retrospective narrative of linear memory. My instincts have been stimulated by the lives I have lived, all still present, all still within me.
On my way back through the forest, heading north in the dark, I brake for a deer standing in the middle of a mountain road. I take a deep breath as he looks at me peacefully, then returns to the red rocks. It occurred to me: My body had remembered this miracle. When I put the car in gear, I realized that my hands were no longer white. The ashes disappeared as if they had never been there. My mother was here and now she’s gone – she’s buried in my body, this body she knows even though she can’t remember, this body she gave me, this body I gave myself, this body that will also return to earth. own perfect time.
Set design by Piers Hanmer. Photo assistants: Xavier Muniz, TK Kim. Set up assistants: Neda Mouzayanni, Joseph Bell, Louis Sarowsky. Production assistant: Ryan Riley
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