What is Reiki?
Exhibit A, Part 1
Time ran out for Chris the morning the daffodils showed up.
The creek below her cottage, once a snarling, snow-fed force, had been shrinking for weeks. The birds had returned too, rowdy and bright, layering the morning with sound. The sun had started sticking around—warming the shutters, slipping into the corners of her kitchen where winter never dared. These could have been warnings, but how can you find a reprimand in the springtime after months of bitter cold?
Regardless, even if they had, warnings don’t always feel urgent until it’s too late.
"They’re coming," she sang under her breath, soft as a prayer.
Two men on black stallions clip-clopped up the path, hooves hammering. The sun, so golden a minute ago, turned harsh, throwing shadows that made her cottage look smaller, her skin thinner. She stood straight, but her hands shook at her sides.
No, the seeding wasn’t ready. No, the ploughs weren’t sharpened. No, the money wasn’t there. Almost, almost. But on the day of the daffodils, almost was the same as never.
"Please," she said. "I’m more useful up here."
One of them dismounted. He didn’t sneer. Didn’t argue. (How could you argue with simple truth?) Just walked past her, into the cottage, and returned with the chest she kept by her bed. It was small, but heavy with what she'd scraped together—tools, more seeds, a little dried meat, two folded blankets.
He loaded it onto the cart behind his horse. It knocked against other crates, each packed with someone else’s failed spring.
"By the looks, you aren’t ready," he said. "Wish it were different."
But it wasn’t. And he had chosen—just as she knew he would. She nodded, lips pressed shut. The moment passed without ceremony, but everything had changed.
Later, a different cart groaned as it lowered her back into the mines. Each jolt down the shaft shook something loose inside her, until the only thing left was stillness.
She let the hurt and the quiet sit with her for days. Let it do what it came to do.
Then one morning, underground and half-forgotten, she pressed her hands to her stomach and breathed. Deep and warm. Not rebellion. Not even hope. Just presence.
And with each breath, the grief began to burn.
The tendrils of it had grown thick, curling through her thoughts like choking vines, wrapping themselves around her voice, her will. But her breath—slow and deliberate—seemed to catch fire at the edges. She could almost see it: a glow at the core of her ribs, the embers of something truer. This wasn’t therapy, it was the energy of change.
She breathed again, and the tendrils shrank back. Things were different this time, but sometimes nobody tells you that.
"Enough," she whispered. The word didn’t echo, but it stayed with her.
The daffodils above ground bent under the coming summer. The seeds were sown, after all, and that was the important bit. Maybe there was a sharpened plough half-buried in the field. With some luck and effort it would cut and shine, and next year’s planting could roll easy. And the money - well, money always came. That was the trick about money.
For now, she breathed.
Her moment, almost swept away in that instant, was still here, here at last for her taking.
