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Healing

Great-Mullein

Healing of various sorts plays a key role in In Search of Lost Girls as was the case in Boy & Girl. The photo above is of Great Mullein, reputed for its ability to heal bronchial complaints and coughs. Here’s a short extract in which Kate talks of mullein.

“One of the sisters has bronchitis, what would you give her?”

Kate immediately thought of mullein, like a long finger pointing at the sky thick with tiny yellow flowers, but it would not yet have flowered. She searched through the sprigs of flowers hanging drying from the storeroom roof, but found none. So she wrote mullein on her notepad. Good! the Sister replied and pointed to a jar of dried flowers.

See also a short story called Inside Out which was inspired by the approach to healing of Peter and Kate in Boy & Girl.

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Healing in Boy & Girl

art

An important aspect of Boy & Girl is the ability Peter and Kaitling develop to heal people from within. I wrote a short story based on that idea, called Inside Out. Here is the beginning:

It seems so strange to our eyes, but at the time they couldn’t see things otherwise, the healer explained, talking mind-to-mind to a handful of apprentice healers around the world. In those days, they came at the body from the outside. It wasn’t simply that they didn’t have our techniques to enter the body with their minds. Their whole attitude was extrinsic. All their knowledge about the body resided outside of it, buried in books, in scientific papers and in data gathered by machines. They only dimly grasped what was going on. They kept new healers away from people in need of healing. Instead, they had them study books and photos and films. They would have been horrified if anyone had tried to heal others without all that knowledge. For them, it made medicine legitimate and efficient. In reality, the accumulated knowledge blocked access to what they really needed to know… (Read on)

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Inside Out

Inspired by a short extract from my new novel, the story fragment Inside Out is part of thought about the future to be carried out in the Writers Circle in Basel. In this case, it is about the future of medicine, learning and knowledge. Here are the first few sentences:

It seems so strange to our eyes now, but at the time they couldn’t see things otherwise, the healer explained, talking mind-to-mind to a handful of apprentice healers around the world. In those days, they came at the body from the outside. It wasn’t simply that they didn’t have our techniques to enter the body with their minds … (read on)