Creativity and Massage

We like to think of ourselves as creative, don’t we, doing massage therapy and adapting to the moment, to the mood and the mode.

I am fascinated by creativity is my hands (oh, old fascinating me) but it is outshone by the creativity I see in my clients. I have had two (count ‘em) two authors in my quiver and have been with them through the long grueling, exhilarating, exciting months of timeful tapping as they bring their manuscripts to life.

My first author, though, I can lay no claim to massage helping in the initial stages of the project.

He had written his life story already, and was being pestered by his children for the details, the many details, he left out. He had been a guest of the Third Reich in the waning days of the war, and had left out a lot of what went on for sensibility’s sake. Sensing the missing bits, the “kids” and I must say I, lobbied for the rest of the bits.

Like the proper way to hunt for frozen turnips or the proper way to position oneself in a barn so the fulminate diarrhea did not get on one’s own pants. Or the proper way to tease new German soldiers into the no-walk zone at the prison camp so they would get shot.

“Remember the Pilgrim fathers,” I said. “They landed and took over an Indian village that had been emptied by pestilence. Most of them, and all the women, died the first winter, and they stayed on despite the bitter cold and bad soil because they felt God had brought them to a better place.”

I remembered a snippet from a diary I had read of one of those long winter nights, included a line from a founding father “My Goode wife died today of fever…. I ate a breakfast of boiled milk.”

No one would know how bad those days were, or how people persevered, if not for simple farmers and their plain speech. If not written down by the people who were there, then it is lost to history, or somebody’s story. I hope my part gave him a little spur to get the book done. It is called “Before I Forget,’” by Robert D. Davis, is as good a rippin’ yarn as any Mark Twain tale twice-told.

My other client author is just as creatively productive and has something important to say about things we use everyday. Elizabeth Plourde has written “Sunscreens Biohazard” about what we need to know about toxic chemicals used in sunscreens. They not only affect children and adults, they have severe effects on marine life and coral.

I am happy to say, on the periphery at least, that I helped these folks get this important work done. Massage of me…….