About Maggie Malone
It began on a hillside in the south of France.
I was seventeen, backpacking alone, sitting around a campfire with strangers at a campground when we heard it — a tremendous, ominous sound that seemed to travel through the warm summer air from somewhere nearby. All of us ran toward it.
We found a scene of several car crashes on a sinuous, hilly road. Later I would learn that Pastis — the anise-flavoured spirit beloved in the south of France — was a regular companion on those curves, and that the crashes were not uncommon.
I ran to a car where the driver lay outside his door, in a rapidly spreading pool of engine oil, horribly wounded. He looked up at me and asked about his wife. How was his wife?
I looked into the car.
I looked back at him.
She is fine, I said.
She was not fine.
I knew, with a certainty I could not explain at seventeen, that he would not be alive much longer. I knew there was nothing I could do for him but one thing. I took off my coat and laid it over him. I knelt beside him in the engine oil. I took his hand.
And I stayed.
The ambulance and fire brigade took what felt like forever to arrive. I did not leave his side.
I did not know that night that I was going to become a doctor. But I understand now that I already was one — because I had already learned the most essential thing medicine requires: the willingness to run toward suffering instead of away from it. To stay. To bear witness. To hold a hand in the dark and offer the only medicine sometimes available — presence.
The long middle
I became a family physician in Ontario, Canada. For many years I worked in palliative care — sitting with cancer patients and, in the years when it was a death sentence and a stigma simultaneously, with HIV and AIDS patients. I bore witness at bedsides. I held hands. I told people the truth when truth was what they needed, and found other words when it was not.
I built a practice in London, Ontario, serving approximately a thousand Spanish-speaking patients — people who were invisible to the healthcare system around them, whose language and culture created barriers that cost them their health and sometimes their lives. I built something for them because it needed to exist. Not because it was entrepreneurial. Because it was necessary.
I built other things too — each one because I saw a gap and could not look away from it. I am not an entrepreneur. I am a builder. There is a difference. Entrepreneurs build for markets. I build because things need to exist.
The beginning — again
I retired from medicine. I crossed hemispheres. I arrived in Antioquia, Colombia — the mountains, the flowers, the people, the colour of everything — and I opened my leather journal and I started listening.
To communities. To landscapes. To the stories that needed telling.
I chose midnight blue for this magazine because I love the colour blue — and because Pamela Colman Smith's painting The Wave moved me so deeply I wanted to live inside its colour. Then I discovered that midnight blue was also the colour Frederick Douglass gave to Harriet Tubman's heroism. That Harriet Tubman came to freedom in the same city where I was born. That a sculptor named Nekisha Durrett had built a twenty-four foot monument of midnight blue tiles in Harriet's courtyard in Chicago.
I did not choose this colour for those reasons. But I am grateful the colour carried them.
I want to move through the world the way a physician learns to move through a ward — with full attention, with nothing flinched from, with the willingness to see what is actually there rather than what is comfortable. I want to look at every story, every piece of art, every building, every landscape, every woman's face — and find the thread of midnight blue running through it. The colour of the midnight sky that bore witness to Harriet Tubman's heroism. The colour of Pamela Colman Smith's wave. The colour of depth, of courage, of things that cannot be fully named but can be felt completely.
That thread is what Color Me Blue follows.
That thread is what La Brújula is.
La Brújula — The Compass — is my act of bearing witness to the women, the stories, the places, and the ideas that the world has not yet learned to see clearly.
Every issue is a hand held in the dark.
Every article is a coat laid over someone who needs it.
Every word is me, kneeling in engine oil in the south of France at seventeen, saying: I am here. I am not leaving. You are not alone.
Maggie Malone is a Canadian physician, writer, explorer, and builder living in Antioquia, Colombia. She is the founder of La Brújula — The Compass.