When Carolina Carlessi moved from Peru to Spokane, Washington, she left behind a culture that trusts intuition, superstition and personal healing. She is adjusting to Western culture's reliance on reason and science. But she knows deep inside that modern science owes much to the world's mystical women.

I don't call it magic, folk medicine, cosmic energy or superstition. I just live with it.

It has been with the women of my family for generations, and I have been blessed with its influence since the moment I was born.

My life started in Lima, Peru. My father was on a business trip and my young mother was alone in an apartment, about to give birth. Frightened, she shouted loud shouts, hoping they'd pierce the walls and get to somebody's ears.

She heard knocking at the door, but couldn't move. After some minutes, a woman, "as big and square as an armoire," broke open the door with her shoulder and flew into the apartment.

Mamita Carolina was a healer, a medicine woman who had arrived from her village 300 miles away. The night before, while listening to the waves, she had heard her niece's cries and had boarded the next bus to Lima, not even knowing my mother was pregnant.

Dios te salve Maria, llena eres de gracia. Mamita Carolina chanted the Hail Mary while her skillful hands freed me from darkness. They named me Carolina after her.

The women of my family were so nurturing they would do anything to heal and protect their own. I've always wondered if their drive was so strong as to transcend the limits of time and space, even of life and death.

Some years ago, I attended an international women's conference in Bogota, Colombia. We were all preparing our material for the closing ceremony on Sunday, the highlight of the meeting. Nevertheless, on Saturday morning I awoke to the presence of my grandmother, Dona Elena, who had passed away several years before. She urged me to leave immediately. When I looked around, the luxurious country resort nauseated me. I had to get away. I couldn't breathe there.

I could give no words of explanation for my sudden departure. I simply told the organizers of the conference, "I have to go, sorry." I kept repeating these words to myself while I left hastily in a grocery truck.

That Sunday at breakfast, while hundreds of women were gathered in the dining room, the photographer who was filming the event fell from the second floor and landed on an empty seat in which I could have been seated.

Dona Elena had always amazed me when she was alive. When I was 7 years old, I was sure she could heal anything. I was a living proof of her medical talent. When I turned over a kettle and spilled boiling water on my chest, Dona Elena covered the burns with thin films of onion skin. By changing them over and over, their substances eased the pain and prevented future scars.

What I didn't know then, was that Dona Elena also healed other people's babies.

One Friday evening, I followed her to the river and hid behind a bush to watch. She planted her feet on the sand. A mother handed Dona Elena her sick baby. Dona Elena rubbed a fresh egg on the baby's naked body and then broke it with one hand to diagnose. The moonlight illuminated them as the woman wrapped her baby and Dona Elena gave her a dosage of medicinal herbs.

Finally, the healer squatted down, wet her fingers in the river, as if it were holy water, and traced a cross on the baby's forehead. She tied a red ribbon around his wrist.

That image has remained in my mind as a symbol of women's wisdom. It represents the connection of the women in my family with nature and the goodness they imparted to others. That image has resisted my brainwashing by Western science.

Even now my mother takes care of her loved ones by battling against evil. She constantly expels it from our home. Every Tuesday and Friday she lights rosemary leaves in an iron pot and blows into it until smoke pours out. With that scent she cleans all corners of the house, getting rid of any bad energy that might have stuck in a crack on the wall.

I know my modern life has separated me from my roots. I know that I have become a "patient" to a doctor instead of an active agent of my own healing.

My journey that separated me from the women in my family started in college when I adopted historic materialism as a philosophy. I see it ending now as I discover that life is more complex and deeper than tangible things. Now that I know that the Western world benefits immensely from the wisdom of women in all parts of the world, my respect for my ancestors grows.

I see them humbly and generously granting their knowledge and skills without demanding the respect they deserve. We know now that 50 percent of all drugs are derived from plants, and much of that knowledge came first from women like them. Pharmaceutical companies take the healer's prescriptions, scientifically research them and later put them on the market. In the process, the product acquires the validity, the label, of Western science.

Sometimes I wonder if Western science looks down on women like the women of my family because they cannot keep up with them. These women have a deeper knowledge of nature and are able to control its energies to a level this world cannot yet understand. I see them holding a votive candle, a small light that frees the world from darkness and disease.