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Mallory & Me
By Stephanie Kemp
Mallory & Me
By Stephanie Kemp
From the (OG)Mountain Archives…
January 9, 1999
Dear You,
Please forgive the typewritten letter, but we both know this serves several purposes:
You can read it.
I don’t have to hear about my penmanship or my choice of tiny graph paper as stationary.
I can type faster than I can write, and…
I HAVE A TON TO SAY ABOUT MALLORY.
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I suppose you could call her a psychic massage therapist, although “psychic” doesn’t do her justice.
Her card describes her as:
REIKI Master
(Usui Tradition)
Spiritual Counselor
Intuitive Massage Healer
Over-toning Universal Life Minister
Shari’s only words of wisdom to me en route to Mallory were: “Be open. And it will hurt.”
“When in Rome,” I said inaudibly, not knowing what else to say about or expect from this against my will mountain town outing…….
We got there at 1:53. Mallory lives in a little house on a dirt road off of Main Street. She opened the door and Shari introduced us, explaining that I was in town for the month and she wanted to give me her appointment. (Mallory is always booked up more than six months in advance.)
She is probably around 45, with clear blue green eyes that twinkle as they delve right in. I was instantly drawn to her - she is what we would write a “healer” to be: round and warm, soft gray hair, long and tied back in a loose bun….an open smile and strong, pink hands. Clothes that swirled around her like pastel tornadoes, worn socks under worn house clogs. A TV blared in the living room, as an elderly man sat on the couch, staring but not watching, never looking up as Mallory made introductions before we headed to the massage room.
Now, you know me, You. While I am not a total cynic when it comes to spirituality, I am also not entirely comfortable with someone telling me upon a first introduction that I was a tantric (sex!) high priestess in 1142 in the border mountains between India and China. (We’ll come back to that…or not.)
“Shall we begin?”
The only thing Mallory knew about me before starting was that I don’t live here. Before she even touched me she asked, “Are you always dehydrated?” and “Would you feel comfortable telling me about your sleepwalking episodes?”
I got naked and planted myself face down on the massage table. Mallory came back in, rubbing her hands and said, “Now some of this will be easy…..most of it will not…….I’ll talk through some of it and breathe and chant…..You won’t consciously understand all of what I’m saying, but you’ll receive it…..Speak up anytime if the pain is too deep…….Ready?”
She started with my head…hard rubbing with what felt like three hands. “Oh, you’re an old bard…..a balladeer refusing to write your ballads. Not trusting your voice……oh - and a warrior too…….they cut your head off……You beat yourself up because you stay in your head too much……It’s because you’re afraid they’re going to cut it off again if you’re not here to protect it. Now, let’s open you up and get you out of that cage and singing again.”
As she made her way down one side of my body and then up the other, she was somehow able to both make me feel more physical pain than I thought I could endure outside of a hospital visit, and more physical release than I’ve ever felt. She explained this with, “It’s like great sex, isn’t it? Which, by the way, you could definitely use some more of…..a lot more.”
So off we went on this strange trip together for two hours...
In those 120 minutes she:
…freed my wings so I could fly out of my “self-imposed exile.”
…pulled a knife out of my back.
…took a harpoon out of my hip (I was also a dolphin).
…cut the cord from my mom.
…put my heart back together (it was broken in two places).
…removed the nails from the bottom of my feet.
When I asked Mallory how she knew these things she said, “They’ve always been there. You’d have known too, but you’ve been trying too hard for too long, not to pay attention.”
It was sort of like being on mushrooms - this amazing trip all about rediscovering everything we knew when we were little, or everything we once knew but tried to lose…..because of fear or shoulds or scar tissue.
While “looking for more hooks,” Mallory told me the story of the last time she saw her master:
“He reminded me that I need to work on detaching from attachment and attaching to detachment. Then you realize that it’s all the same and it’s all about nothing”
Still rubbing my back she said, “Honey (she calls everyone honey), did your brother hurt you in the last six months?”
“I don’t have a brother…”
“Well, is there someone in the form of someone else, like an old boyfriend that you realized was more like a brother, that hurt you?” (Did I tell you that X got engaged to his old girlfriend and she is moving into our house?)
“You’re a witness……and there are very few left. But you’ve only recently come to have faith in that…..Have you recently come in contact with members of your tribe? They are men - two or three of them in the last year. They’re balladeers, too. You sang at the water’s edge.” (Remember our beach day with S and P that lasted for 39 hours?)
“And Ireland is important to your tribe. Your fairies want you to get there.”
I was happy in that moment to think that she was (finally) wrong - FRANCE is important to my tribe, Mallory. At least to the tribe that is ME.
But then she added, “Do you have an Irish friend? She’s important. Stay with her.” (Anna will love this!)
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She went through my chakras (which I had just learned about the night before from the Joseph Campbell book S gave me for Christmas), saying: “You have a shaman with you in your 3rd Chakra, and he is happy that you didn’t sign the contract. Did you just turn down a job or say no to someone about something that was important to them?” (I had turned down that NY job earlier in the day.)
She went through pressure points and found things along the way:
Inner thigh (liver, spleen, kidneys)…. “Your kidney is weak. Has been for about one third of this life. We’ll work on that and I’ll tell you what you can do for it.” (Remember when I was in the hospital for a week with a kidney infection when I was 20?)
“You’re dehydrated because you’ve got a fire going on in you all the time…..Options are a problem for you. Everyone wants you to do their work…..No one will let you sing your song. And for now you have to run away to sing……Is that why you’re here?” (Is it?)
“I want you to keep taking lots of baths (!) and take a cold shower at least once a week for as long as you can stand the cold. It’ll wash off the expectations of other people. And start off each morning with a glass of grapefruit juice - it’ll clean out the mental phlegm and clear out the physical mucus that comes with the mental phlegm.”
“You’ve got guilt over another member of your tribe. He’s not one of the core I found before, but he’s important. Is he married, Honey? That’s why you feel guilty….Let’s get rid of that guilt. Love is never guilty. And there is a real friendship underneath that love and guilt…And while I’m here, you need to forgive and love that non blood related brother again…..Let him sing his songs…….Let him be in your life the way he’s meant to. He’s not a tribe member, but he is a brother…..just like your biological family is not of your tribe. Uh oh……you worry about them, too - more guilt.”
“We need to cut the cord between you and your biological mother today, Honey. Only in the cutting of that cord can you love her as she is, without judgment or fear. You’ll see after we cut the cord that the connection can become real. You won’t feel like a hypocrite anymore with your mother or anyone else…..She is taking up a lot of space. Mothers can do that.”
“You don’t want to have children, do you Honey?”
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“It’s the one thing I know I do want, Mallory.” (Furious at the question….)
“Well, let’s look…..” (This as she rubs some organ to the right of my belly that I’ve never felt before)………. “Ok. There is one cherub with you in this life. I don’t know if he’ll join you this time around or not, but he’s there and he’s strong. But you won’t be ready for him until you’re about 37 or 38. And you need to stop worrying about him. He wants you to keep dancing with the fairies.”
“You have strong ovaries. There might be some other cherubs looking for you. I’m going to take the hook out of your sexuality. You are denying it right now. It could be because of the guilt or because a part of you is nervous about being with all these gay women…..That’s ok. And you don’t have to be fearful of them….They know who you are ….They respect and love you…….Oh! It’s an 8 prong hook. This is going to hurt. It’s also shut down because romantic love is so confusing right now…… You have another guilt hook I missed before.”
(It. Hurt.)
“Love is never guilty, even if someone is married or engaged or with someone else……This guilt is also left over from when you were a tantric (!) high priestess. They killed you for who you were and what you did……You couldn’t make them understand the message that time around.”
“Now let’s heal that broken heart.”
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All I can say about that last part is that it’s 48 hours later and my sternum is still so sore that I can’t even touch it. It was the scariest part of the 2 hours because I thought she might stop my heart forever as she tried to put it back together, explaining that:
“The brother and the man who caused your guilt were both here to help prepare you for your divine compliment…..He will show up in just over a year. And remember, Honey, in order for one to be with their beloved, they have to be ready and willing to be loved.”
“B-e-L-o-v-e-d………..It’s all one thing, isn’t it?”
“Also, you won’t live in Los Angeles after May of 2000.” (I hadn’t told her I live in Los Angeles.) “If you are still there after that, it will likely be the base of your forever home……with your beloved and maybe those cherubs. It will be a challenge for you to claim this as home. Look at the challenge as motivation, not defeat.”
“Time’s up!”
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So these are my memories, in this moment, of Mallory.
I wish I could do her justice.
I wish I could share the chants and the breathing and the swoosh sounds she made every time she took out a hook or a nail. I wish I could explain how the gentle tornadoes of fabric lapped around her feet as my up side down eyes and smushed face tried to track their moves before her three hands moved onto their next target.
I love/hated my psychic massage.
As she walked me out she said, “Thank you, Honey, for being so brave. For these two hours and in your life, so far. You go tell your stories. There aren’t many witnesses left. Especially with wings as big as yours.”
“Oh…..one more thing? Pick up some black licorice every time you buy your grapefruit juice. Try to eat some every day. I’ll tell you about more about that next time. You’ll be back. The mountain likes you.”
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Dear You……thanks for staying with me. (Are You still there?).
I will digest a while longer and circle back.
You know I will.
(Don’t You?)
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January 12, 1999
7am
Good Morning!
Lucky You (?),
Lucky Me (!).
I get to start my day with you and you have to find another day, another mindset, another rant from me in the form of a(nother!) letter (you will able to read, because I have decided to type it, AGAIN)!
I wish you could see my mornings. Yesterday’s sky was like a cloud battle of under-dyed Easter eggs - pink shoving blue, blue shoving back, until white in the form of the virgin egg had to step in to call truce. I have never seen so many eggs in the sky! This morning it looks like pink is still taking a time out and blue got out for good behavior. Blue’s playmate this morning is black - in the form of puffy clouds that we never see in that color. Only white or gray.
Black, white and gray…….
“Nothing is ever black and white,” say the geniuses.
They applaud themselves for introducing and explaining the realities of gray, then sit back on their wide asses pleased as stoic punch……forgetting (or maybe they never knew?) that there are a trillion other colors outside of their newspaper spectrum. (Can you tell that I am currently mad at the “geniuses”…?)
I clearly need to to get out and play in the colors today…I’m lost in my head, and we know how that can be.
Five days after seeing Mallory, I can’t stand the thought of her. My sternum is healed and what’s left of the two hours with her is largely agitation. I reread the words I sent you and I want to curl up into the fetal position and reposition the hooks.
The day after I saw her and we spoke of it you read me some Rilke. None of it stuck because I was too distracted (and don’t like it when people read me poems), but the next morning I went to the bookstore and picked up one of his books.
I opened to:
Like a Metal that Hasn’t Been Mined
You Mountain, here since mountains began,
slopes where nothing is built,
peaks that no one has named,
eternal snows littered with stars,
valleys in flower
Offering fragrances of earth
Do I move inside you now?
Am I within the Rock
like a metal that hasn’t been mined?
Your hardness encloses me everywhere…
Or is it fear
I am caught in? The tightening fear
of the swollen cities
In which I suffocate….
And that’s a bit of my feeling this morning: suffocation with no identifiable source.
City Suffocation I know by heart:
Move too fast,
Do too much,
Hurry up, go…..
Suffocation by spreading too thin - not taking in enough air.
But Mountain Suffocation I am just getting to know. It sneaks up on you when you forget to be calm in its presence and grateful for its peace. In the last week I’ve done everything I’ve been dreaming about since I hatched this mountain respite plan: reading a ton (five books down), writing (more than I have, possibly ever) every day, in different forms…..toward many ends.
I’ve been soaking up this place - big sky nights and dog filled days. Hiking and watching and listening and driving….(and cooking!)
I find that the suffocation comes from a smothering of space and distant peaks. It’s terrifying because there is no-one and nothing to blame……(this includes me, which is new).
In the space and calm here, in the days that take their time, there are no distractions to hide behind……And I’d gotten so good at hiding!
As Mallory said (what feels like a lifetime ago), “You need to write your stories.”
So here I write and write and write.
Here I have to tell my stories and learn not to hate my voice.
It’s like being forced to listen to your own recorded voice. At first you can’t believe that’s you - it doesn’t sound like we hear it in our heads. The voice that we think we know better than anything else in the world sounds foreign.
It is awful.
Turn it off.
Hurry!
Then (but only if you keep listening) you get used to it.
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And that, somewhat anticlimactically, is as far as I’ve gotten.
Do you then come to love it and think it’s beautiful?
I have to believe that you/we do……
“It’s all the same thing and it’s all about nothing….”
Ahhhhhh, back to Mallory.
Me.
You.
City.
Mountain.
Easier to sit back in a city and judge everyone else’s words and efforts.
Scarier to look at the clouds and trust your own.
Pen to the page………..
Let’s go eat mushrooms or drink grapefruit juice. (Do we even like black licorice?)
Let’s share some poems and be himself.
And by him, I mean her.
(She is a dolphin, of course….commuting between Ireland and France, now that she is harpoon and guilt free. She is working on recognizing her voice and looking for her cherubs, wondering whether or not she should invest in bright clothes and/or call her mom.)
Are you in?
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Me