Miracle Road

This one is about healing in strange places with strange people.

It began. With the long drive up miracle road, both running on empty. Winding along a mountain face, with a sharp drop to the right, so your stomach lifts when you look down into the descent of red rock and green pine and cedar. And you can smell those trees on the air and still taste the sap you fingered from the brittle bark – the clearest droplet – that stuck to the roof of your mouth and left there a mastic aroma that’s a breath of fresh air from the usual taste of yourself, and your dad goes, my mouth still tastes like shit, you know that?

Grumpy bastard – you think. But full of hope still, after everything; and desperate for a miracle, same as you. That’s why we’re here.

 We took the long way. Done in by Google maps. Suckers for technology, the post-modern man. Incurable. He couldn’t take a dump without his phone, modern man. And we couldn’t muster the gumption to do a right (the way Sebo the carpenter said to) where Google said left, just because there was no alternate route on the map. No roads even. Just that graphic, pale green. Take a right and you’re on your own, mate – it was saying. Lost in the wilderness. Without the security of watching your birds-eye progression from A to B and no possibility of getting lost. And yet there was the road, broad and asphalted as any, and we didn’t take it, just because Google said it wasn’t there. That’s what I call blind faith. And not in a good way.

So, we get to a crossroads – the mouth of four paths, as they say in Turkish. And dad goes, this is where the devil comes for you.  

If we were rockstars, maybe, but we’re not – you think. And next thing you’ve made the plateau, and the landscape is unfolding like something out of Heidi, with snow on yonder, blue mountains and all around spring is flaunting her magic, with fruit orchards in bloom and wildflowers decorating every crack and crevice, and there’s sheep and fat goats with floppy ears gathered attentive round the one goat perched on a rock, and it looks like the sermon on the mount for goats. And then. Nothing.

She seemed to know her stuff, the bonesetter. She seemed legit. But whatever she did didn’t do much for the pain. So, it was back to miracle road.

Now you’re in the Alpujarras, at a retreat centre amidst olive trees, with a bunch of strange people who’ve also all come a long way up miracle road to be here. There’s a degree of woo woo. But strange in this instance means unable to answer the question, ‘where are you from?’ in a single sentence. Except the girl from Saudi. How sweet she is. How light and familiar her company. How delicate her little hands. And clean. Unlike everything else here.

Rustic is an understatement. The cats walk on the kitchen counters, licking at whatever they can find at the bottom of empty pans and serving plates while you stand at the cracked sink, on dishwashing duty, dreaming of a shower. And you wish Ismail would think to hose down that compost bin next time he takes it out to the chickens. But he doesn’t, Ismail; the lanky old hippy, who drinks his afternoon tea out of a soup bowl, and cares for all the cats here like they’re his children.

That first night, you stood in plastic slippers that didn’t belong to you, watching isopoda cross the casita floor, purposeful as double-decker buses on their routes. The horror falling away because what else can you do but let go of it? Holding on won’t fix things. And then there was the spider – the one that crawled up your towel with you still dripping and trembling from the water that suddenly went cold, and you’re yelling, Oi! Not cool dude! Not cool! as you ran to chuck it out the door. After that nothing makes you flinch. After that you rescue retreat guests from giant lizards, coaxed into glass tumblers and released into the wild.

But then the real work begins. Because here is Shirin at sunset – the healer from Palestine. Like a road-sign God put in your path. She burns sage and beats drums and chants with power from the Qur’an. A woman honed by the amazon and its mysterious medicines, never without Bismillah – she says, with resolve, and puts frog poison in your body. And puts her hands on your tummy. And says that in there something was weeping, but not anymore. Tafakkur – meditate, she invites. And accept. She’s just here to kickstart the process, she insists. The work is what you have to do.

Seven days in is when you realise you still have some ways to go. Of getting out of the old mind-box and into the blaring face of all the earth that’s singing for your attention. Singing to show you to be. And something must be working. Because the morning you changed your return flight, there was all the colours in the vegetable garden: the red stalks of the Swiss chard, the teal cabbage, the, vivid frilly Kale. Psychedelic. And the flowers along the path – God All Mighty – dancing! And then Abdulqadir said at breakfast, you sure you’re leaving tomorrow? So, you made a call and told the voice of reason, which has been getting more and more unreasonable these past years, to do one.

It’s not just the flowers, it’s the people too. Singing with gusto, plucking instruments, beating drums. Sheer, unabashed merriment. How baffling it was at first. How it wound you up, so that the sound of the stove-kettle, before bed, made you flinch with irrational fears of someone around every corner waiting to jump out and sing at you. But now you wish they’d never stop. The praise. It’s all praise. In strings and sonorous vocals and the timbre of the daf that galvanizes something in your veins.

And then there’s nothing like watching the red moon rise over the mountains to drive home how fast time is passing. Nor a waning crescent set over the summer mosque pre-dawn to drive home how held you are; now and always. And when the Afghan kid does the call for Fajr, because the Albanian couldn’t wake up, every word penetrates like you’re understanding it for the first time. And side by side with the convert from Chile and the lover from London, you stand in the misty cold of morning with tears; the heavens above through the bamboo slats for a roof, and the Gambian sheikh’s disciple from Somalia leading the prayer.

How do you taste that and not feel the stab of shame ever after to covet a thing? Or to regret and feel hard done by? Or to dare to daydream, when your Master has miracles transpiring instore. Here is how undoing is the key to eternity expanding from within. It takes a trick. A disappearing act; an escaping inward, to Him.

And every low, you’ll tell yourself in the ever after, is just weather. Dark clouds. Dense fog. That overcast day of oppressive heat, on that mountain, until the night cooled, and the clouds descended to caress all in vapour, and the baffled smiles were jubilant, as the rain fell somewhere below us.

Know: only obscured is Truth. Never gone. So, hold on and wait for the elements to shift.

Now let’s get this straight. If you go back there again, it won’t be the same. The people you loved so much so quickly will have gone. And is that why we were able to, love so much, so quickly? Or something else?

Something else was the sting of separation. Like a floundering fish inside, out of water. A metallic taste around everything in real life. And three weeks later you were chasing shadows on the Bosporus, saying a prayer for Dahab.

The unaffected Dahab. Brave. Proud. Bothered by everything. She was scrubbing the toilet floors without a flinch and her mind was simultaneously running a social study on humanity’s many shaped follies. She’d be on her last legs after a long day of work without siesta and while everyone else buried their weary heads under their pillows to block out the latest meltdown in the women’s zawiya, hers was the generosity to scrape the bottom of the barrel and take to her breast a girl who was twice her own size. You could sit and listen to Dahab think aloud for hours in that slow, sauntering way she spoke. A breathing lesson. A rock. Dahab won’t be there if you go back.

But I’ll go back anyway. If only to see my friend Shirin again. I want to sit and share silences with her as we smoke under the stars. I want to bungle through language barriers in the effort of two minds with so many profound thoughts. I want to learn to whoop like her, with abandon, on our walk down to the waterfall. And I want to see the waterfall, which I didn’t get to see, but which filled my days and nights there with the fortifying sound of its distant rushing.