Rasami’s Gold Leaves
She was a bit of an alchemist, sorcerous, witch, none the right word for a female being who can just with her wishes make magic. I turned up in her shop, a small shop, filled with light and lightness both. She stood behind the counter strewn with cut flowers holding tiny plant leaves between her fingers. Lightly she worked her way up the stem to the broad expansion of green, touching gently, purposely. She smiled at me, said she had been expecting me. A wave of coming home came over me. The crowd who had followed me squeezed into the space around me, behind me. The weight of expectations and neediness and want gathered behind me, pressed against the walls trying to be quiet but spilling words, and breath as their plump fleshy bodies filled the less spacious space. In the middle of this confederacy of dunces and bloated desperation wanting a piece of me I stood holding space, watching her with the leaves. The leaves turning to gold in her hands. The tips of the former green leaves gleamed in the light. Pure gold. She smiled and looking over my shoulder to the door behind me said “someone is here to see you”. I turned around and this small man with the sweetest face looked up at me. A familiar face but unfamiliar body, his ruddy complexion and reddish blond hair in curls he reminded me so much of someone I cared for once upon a time, or maybe he was the face of many. It confused me and comforted me at the same time. He emitted a light much like the light inside her shop. His head floated low, bodyless, his beautiful eyes looked up at me and he spoke so many things. He told me how perfect I was, how much he loved me, how beautiful I was, how kind, how gentle, how talented and smart and creative I was. How he couldn’t believe how someone like me existed. Until this moment I had unknowingly been guarded and I felt my heart open, my walls fall, I felt such relief. I struggled to memorize exactly what he was saying so I could remember later and he then told me that I didn’t need to do that. He was going to pack it all up and put it inside me, that that is where it lived and would always be with me. He changed before my eyes into a mechanical flattened shape that hovered in the air folding itself into a compact box that gleamed like the gold in her hands but with buttons and hinges and fasteners. After it’s last fold it rushed towards me and into the open doors of my heart. My body filled with warmth and I felt stronger than I ever had before. I felt loved. Supported. Important, valued. I felt too that I radiated that which filled me. Love.
I turned back to her, still at the counter, massaging leaves into gold and she said “There. It was always there. Now you won’t forget it.”
I turned again to look behind me and the obese crowd had disappeared. I breathed in the light, the floral sweetness, the clean bright sunlight air holding me.
She smiled as she continued to turn leaves into gold.















