In a recent workshop, I offered the poem Mapping by Sneha Madhavan-Reese as a prompt to write about a map or a palm or going home. (I like to offer various ways to begin a piece because I hope to alleviate any pressure a writer might feel to adhere to any one suggestion.) When I select prompts I don’t think about what I will write or what I want to write; I simply choose ideas or poems or images that lend themselves to both personal and universal themes.
Who hasn’t considered what those mysterious maps drawn on our palms might reveal?
If you have a story to tell about what a hand seemed to tell, I encourage you to take the poem or the picture or gaze at your own unique palm, and write what comes, in whatever form it takes.
Here’s mine:
In a shop rich with sandalwood, carved elephants, jewelled boxes, and Tarot cards, a woman turned over my hand. Oh, she said, you believe that you’ve failed because you don’t complete things. I was twenty years old. “But you have lived many times. The paths are so familiar.”
In a Sicilian restaurant overlooking a Tyrrhenian Sea blue as the sky, a man who had just paid for my lunch invited me to join him for a digestive. He asked to see my hand. I was twenty-one. When you are forty-five, he told me, you will stop making love. His long sun-warmed finger rested near the base of my thumb, Because, he went on, you will not stop making love until you stop living.
At a friend’s party, a man whose name I don’t recall sat beside me on the couch and took my hand. You will have three children. My hand lay like a bird in his large one. I was twenty-three years old. But two of them won’t make it, he said with a swipe of his free hand.
His name was John Deere, of the John Deere family. He’d been a concert violinist until rheumatoid arthritis drove him to utilize his other gift of divination. In the Cozy Tea Room, he examined my life. In ancient Egypt, you were a greatly respected noblewoman but there was treachery and you were stabbed. I was twenty-eight. Your current lover is a dark person, destructive. Then: You will have a new lover—black-haired and very sexy.
At a feast following a meditation gathering, a friend of a friend from India offered to view my lines. Here, he said, pointing to a fork in the roads of my palm. This is a big challenge you may not survive. He looked directly into my eyes. I was twenty-nine. If you survive, you will live a very long life. He traced the branch that ran to and around my wrist. Sometime between age forty and forty-five, you will be tested.
At an evening street festival, a woman wearing a floral headscarf and hoop earrings, candles on her table, took both my hands. It’s as though they’ve been burned, she said. Earth and fire. I was thirty-six. So much strength and passion.
I am closing in on sixty-nine years on earth. Much of what my hands have revealed is true in one way or another.
But could a stranger actually tell me who I was? Give me something I could hold, use, or treasure?
Could these visions save my children? Heal my body?
Or was I simply lifting my skirt?
I’ve shown you mine. I’d love to see yours.
I attended a group session in a darkened board room, a facilitator taking us through a half-hour meditation. When at the end point, we were instructed to open our eyes and look down at what we wore on our feet. I can only describe what I saw as "Conquistador" boots. I was in a dense jungle with others in my army. We were fighting to survive in a trail-free path in extreme humidity. I don't believe in the suggestion of past lives, but that night, I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that I was a dying Conquistador. I've never been to South America.
A palm reader once told me that I must be very careful getting into cars with people who had been drinking. At twenty-five, my boyfriend died tragically in a car accident when late one night, he went off the road. My mother's words when she first heard the news, "Thank god you weren't with him at the time."