My Internal Healer, an imaginary aboriginal Australian medicine woman, communicates with me through pictures and feelings, but never words. While I was on the acupuncture table, being treated for the side effects from cancer treatment, she would appear In my mind’s eye. Sometimes she held an object, for example one time she held a large red wing, crowned with a bright yellow epaulet, which she used to brush my body from head to foot.

I attempted to understand her messages, researching with librarian-like zeal anything I could think of that might help. I read folklore, and everything I could find about Aboriginal medicine; I studied the varied birds of Australia and their uses and relations with the Aboriginal people of that continent. Sometimes I asked my friends, without telling them about my visions, what they thought it might mean, for example,  if an Aboriginal medicine woman stroked an ill person from head to foot with a large red bird wing.

In a morning meditation, I had the inspiration that I must honor her with a gift. What do you give an imaginary Aboriginal medicine woman? I wondered. In the instant I asked, an image of a pile of jumbled rocks appeared in my mind’s eye. Rock People are the Earth Historians, they are the archives, the Library, spoke the voice in my “mind’s ear.”

I found a hefty chunk of granite in my garden and I placed it on my lap where it rested coldly, far from its fiery origins. With my eyes closed, I summoned the internal healer. As if in a movie, I saw myself offering her the heavy gift. She accepted my offering wordlessly. My body was flooded with tenderness as she gave me to know that she was “Grandmother.” This is the only word she has ever shared with me.