MASSAGE AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

  
Fanny and Arveyda are naked. After leaving the hot tub and shower, they have permitted the night air to dry them. Fanny has quickly rubbed sweet almond oil over her own body, even between her legs and between her toes, and now leans over Arveyda, who is stretched out on his stomach on the futon massage mat. They have decided to forgo the sauna, an inviting cubicle off to the side of this room they are in, which contains little besides the massage mat, a shelf full of massage oils, stacks of clean white towels, and a collection, in a corner by the door of the sauna, of straw- bottomed thong slippers.
She places her warm hands first on the center of his back; one hand is just between his shoulder blades, the other at his waist. She holds her hands there while she asks for guidance in this work she is about to do for Arveyda's healing. She asks that Arveyda's spirit guides be present, along with her own. She gently presses down and with an alternating pressure of her hands slightly rocks his body. Then she straddles his body and begins kneading his back and neck and shoulders.

Fanny is very patient, thorough, and slow. She listens to Arveyda's body as she massages it. Wherever there is the slightest ache, her fingers hover, listening, and descend. Arveyda is amazed. All the pain in his body seems to be eager to show itself to Fanny, who presses points here and there that make him cry out from the pain, but which, before she touched them, felt entirely okay. And then, after she releases the pressure on these points-pressure of which he has been unaware-he feels the energy once again flowing freely in his body. He has almost forgotten what unblocked chi feels like.

It is warm in the room, and there is only the moonlight coming through the small window across from them, and the flicker of a candle on the floor.

Arveyda sinks almost immediately to another level, a very sensual level of consciousness, assured that Fanny's touch, which never leaves his body, will hold him safe. The warmth of the room makes his mind drift to Mexico, where he and Carlotta and the children go each January to see Zede. He recalls lying on the warm sand in the tiny village of Yelapa, where all of them, their "new age clan," gather, and how he and Angelita and Cedrico oil each other while the three women -- Carlotta and the two Zedes -- walk slowly, their arms loosely around each other, back and forth, up and down the crescent-shaped beach. They are always talking and listening to each other intensely, as if whole worlds hang on their words. And they are all three perfectly beautiful. Zede the Elder, the matriarch, stooped and brown, with her long, ash-white hair tied back from her face with a scarlet ribbon; Zede the Younger, full of vitality and joy, bright-spirited at last, kissing Carlotta over and over; and Carlotta, the most beautiful of all, with her short hair, her string bikini, and her skinny legs, which she kicks into the air from time to time in sheer exuberance, like a gamine in a Charlie Chaplin movie.

Arveyda lies on the massage mat but he is really lying on the sand. He watches these three women and he thinks of the suffering each of them has endured. He thinks of the pain he himself has felt, and caused. ...His heart, so often full, seems to brim over with the strange mixture of all that he feels. He finds in his mind words for the beginning, the middle, or the end, of a new song: "Isn't this sadness a part of happiness?"

Fanny is stroking his body to the rhythm of one of his own guitar- and-flute melodies, from a fifteen-year-old album called Ecstasy Suite. In her mind, "Ecstasy Is the Sea" is playing, and she imagines her hands are the waves of the ocean that shape the ocean floor, and the dunes of the beach and the tiniest seashells.

She also thinks, with something like disbelief, that one of the spirits she's loved so long is actually right beneath her, his very neck, at this moment, under her hand. Gradually, she works her way down Arveyda's body, marveling at the beauty -- smooth, glistening from the oil -- of his rich brown skin. She presses points on his buns that make him squirm, then moves down his thighs and his very hairy legs. She takes her time on his feet, slipping her thumbs between his toes, working her knuckles along the arches and the balls of his feet. Arveyda groans with mingled pain and pleasure.

He has given himself up to Fanny, as if all of himself is resting in her arms. He feels there is something about her, something in her essence, that automatically heals and reconnects him with himself. He felt this even before she impulsively kissed him on the trail. He imagines making love to her, as he feels her hands sliding up his inner thighs. He thinks that if he were to join himself with her in lovemaking he would feel literally re-membered.

He utters a deep, secret sigh at this thought.

Fanny thinks of her lifelong habit of falling in love with people she'll never have to meet. Is this how people create gods, she wonders. She thinks she has always been walking just behind (oh, a hundred to a thousand years behind) the people she has found to love, and that she has been very careful that their backs were turned.

What would she do if one of them turned around?

Fanny feels a slight quiver in her stomach. She is frightened, for a moment, as if she is about to come face to face with her own self.
She takes a deep breath. It seems to her, fortunately, that this particular spirit has nodded off. She strokes him gently, just at the back of the neck. "Time to turn over," she whispers.

But Arveyda is not sleeping. Far from it. He is thinking of Fanny and of her kiss. Of the pleasure and pain of her touch, which seems easily to find the most buried knottedness in him. And if he turns over, she will see the results of his thoughts.

Fanny waits patiently, on her knees beside the mat. Will he turn over, she wonders, this spirit behind whom she finds herself! She wonders this sincerely, as if Arveyda is a real spirit who might simply disappear by sinking through the hardwood floor.

Fanny is terribly aroused, as she looks at Arveyda's smooth defenseless back, his humble neck, his beautiful hands and nimble fingers, the tips of which, touching his instruments, have already given her so much pleasure.

With a sigh of brave resignation, the "spirit" turns himself over. He is embarrassed, and is looking down. "I'm afraid," he groans, "you have lit a little candle."

Fanny, seeing its erectness and nearly comic hopefulness, readily takes Arveyda's "candle" into her warm hand.

When she has seated herself on it, and feels how snugly it fits, as if it has found its proper niche, she looks into Arveyda's face. Into his very human eyes. There are tears in them, as there are in her own. They begin to rock, turning now so that they lie, their arms around each other, equitably, on their sides. Weeping, they begin to kiss.

Fanny feels as if the glow of a candle that warms but could never burn has melted her, and she drips onto Arveyda.

Arveyda feels as if he has rushed to meet all the ancestors and they have welcomed him with joy.

It is amazing to them how quickly -- like a long kiss -- they both come.

She is fearful of asking him what she must. Timidly she says: "And did you also see the yellow plum tree and all the little creatures, even the fish, in its branches? And did you see and feel the ocean and the sun?"

But Arveyda says simply, "Yes. And the moon as it moves over the ocean, and the lilacs, and mountain ranges, and all the colors of valleys. But best of all," he says, kissing her, "was the plum tree and everything and everybody in it, and the warmth of your breath and the taste in my mouth of the sweet yellow plums."

They lie cuddled together in sheer astonishment.

"My . . . spirit," says Fanny, at last, her face against his chest.

"My . . . flesh," says Arveyda, his lips against her hair.

-- Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar