To be blessed just once is a rarity, a singular act of divine deliverance. And yet, as I sat hunched over my laptop stewing over this very column, I set to counting my blessings and discovered that they numbered a staggering two over just this last week.
The first was received in a suitably mystical location: a natural hot spring tucked between snow-laden mountains. A cold snap had coated the trail up to the springs in a layer of ice, causing tourists to stumble and slide back down. This left the steamy, sulfuric waters free to locals and those of harder heads (and tailbones) who still made the climb.
Nose filled with the thick scent of rotten eggs and ears bitten by the cold, I burrowed deeper into the narrow tub of warm water, compacted on either side by my friends. An elderly woman, dressed completely in purple — bonnet, bathing suit and bright violet slides — took notice of her young American neighbors and remarked to the open air, “Young people: You are the future.”
Taking it as a vaguely encouraging, if fatuous, show of solidarity, we all thanked her awkwardly on behalf of our generation, which prompted her to continue, “You will lead the revolution one day.”
The nature of this generational revolution was never made entirely clear, but the conversation quickly veered into the unforeseen and bizarre, guided solely by this purple mountain mystic. She extolled the virtues of vegetarianism and a life without sugar (impossible!), explained how our hair functioned as an antenna to conduct energy and walked through past lives as an Aztec, all with a pleasant, matter-of-fact tone.
This dialogue culminated in her promising to pray for us and for the United States, before we thanked her again and extricated ourselves from the springs into the bitter cold that we had all but forgotten.
A true blessing by all rights, including a sermon, ritual bath and prayer. Yet, naturally, my friends and I took the interaction with the flippant cynicism typically afforded to such ramblings. It was a funny story, an inside joke and an absurd punctuation to our expedition into the mountains.
A week later, I played the wanderer once again — this time pushing deep into the deserts of Turkistan (a city and region in southern Kazakhstan) to visit an ancient mausoleum that had stood hundreds of years ago while caravans of silk-laden camels traipsed past its ornately-carved doors.
Here, the wind bit with dust and sand, and the bright, cloudless sky dazed me as my friends and I stepped out of the mausoleum into the faded courtyard outside. An elderly woman relying upon a cane at her side gestured us over to draw water from the well beside her. Upon doing this, she explained that it was holy water and had a healing power stemming directly from the might of Allah, and directed us to all drink from the ladle.
Then, spying those few of us (myself included) with glasses, she instructed us to come before her and have our vision healed. This healing ritual consisted of a cry to Allah for help, three vigorous splashes in the face with well water and another gulp from the ladle.
Although respectful of her fervent belief in the water’s healing power, we again donned sheepish grins and made knowing laughs; such a blessing was an absurd and comic thing, especially alongside the long list of other absurdities we had met in our travels through the Kazakh desert.
Not 10 hours later, I felt the sheer power of this cleansing ritual in full force, as I staggered off the train back to Almaty to immediately vomit the contents of my stomach into the grass, literally in sync with another traveling companion with glasses who had also been encouraged to glug an inordinate amount of the well water.
In that moment of riotous sickness, and in the day of stomach pain that followed, I adopted the bleak, pained and intensely earnest conviction that often accompanies sickness. The world becomes painfully, unflinchingly real (in my own over-dramatic way). There is no cynical veneer to disguise that things just suck.
In a way, this escape from the aloof indifference and irony that ordinary life often lulls us into was a welcome form of clarity. The blessings had worked. And our unsought patron saints had found something even more rare than clarity: a deep, profound meaning to their lives that imbued even minor details with a divine sanctity and drove them to help others.
I can only hope that next time the blessing of sincerity will come to me without the vomit.
