Faith steals upon you like dew:
some days you wake and it is there.
And like dew, it gets burned off
in the rising sun of anxieties,
ambitions, distractions.
~Christian Wiman from My Bright Abyss
My faith,
refreshed in the light of morning,
can evaporate in the dry stress of the day.
May I turn my face up
each night, asking to be washed
in the mist of God’s dew,
my anxiety settled like dust.
Love your neighbor as yourself is part of the great commandment.
The other way to say it is, ‘Love yourself as your neighbor.’ Love yourself not in some egocentric, self-serving sense but love yourself the way you would love your friend in the sense of taking care of yourself, nourishing yourself, trying to understand, comfort, strengthen yourself.
Ministers in particular, people in the caring professions in general, are famous for neglecting their selves with the result that they are apt to become in their own way as helpless and crippled as the people they are trying to care for and thus no longer selves who can be of much use to anybody.
It means pay mind to your own life, your own health and wholeness, both for your own sake and ultimately for the sake of those you love too. Take care of yourself so you can take care of them.
A bleeding heart is of no help to anybody if it bleeds to death.
~Frederick Buechner from Telling Secrets
We are reminded every time we hear safety instructions on an airplane before a flight takes off: “in the event of a sudden pressure change in the cabin, oxygen masks will appear – remember to put your own on before helping others with their masks.”
If we aren’t able to breathe ourselves, we won’t last long enough to be of assistance to anyone around us. Too often, sacrificing self-care threatens others’ well-being.
A headline appeared in my email from the American Psychiatric Association this morning: “Physicians Experience the Highest Suicide Rate of Any Profession” – there is rampant depression and burn-out among those who should know best how to recognize and respond to the danger signs — for women physicians, nearly 1 out of 5 are afflicted. Yet the work load only seems to increase, not diminish, the legal and moral responsibility weighs more heavily, and the hours available for sleep and respite shrink. In forty years of practicing medicine (my father liked to remind me “when are you going to stop ‘practicing’ and actually ‘do’ it?”), the work has never gotten easier, only harder and heavier.
I see suicidal patients all day and am immensely grateful I’ve never been suicidal, thank God, but anxiety is embedded deep in my DNA from my non-physician fretful farmer ancestors. Anxiety becomes the fuel and driver of the relentless physician journey on long lonely roads, spurring us to stay awake too many hours and travel too far when we should be closing our eyes and taking a break to breathe, just breathe.
However, we are trained to respond to anxiety from the first day in anatomy class:
“and while you, Miss Polis, are trying to think of the name of that blood vessel, your patient is exsanguinating in front of you– drip, drip, drip….”
Terror-stricken at the thought I was inadequate to the task of saving a life, it took years for me to realize the name of the vessel didn’t bloody matter as long as I knew instinctively to clamp it, compress it, or by the love of the Living God, transfuse my own blood from my bleeding heart into my patient’s.
I learned well those many years ago:
To save a life, I must preserve my own.
Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted,
and by degrees
the forms and colours of things are restored to them,
and we watch the dawn
remaking the world in its antique pattern.
~Oscar Wilde from The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence.
Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.
~Leonora Carrington from The Hearing Trumpet
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world,
and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley
Too much of my life is lived behind a gauzy veil, hiding my face and feelings so my flaws and foibles are not so obvious to the world.
Yet God lifts my veil as a groom does his bride’s; He reminds me I’m made in His image and He wants to see me wholly to make me holy.
Just as the dawn restores with light what has dwelled in darkness, God removes our shroud of hiddenness to tell us: “You, my child, are beautiful because I made you.”
photo by Per Wolfisberg this morning from north-central Montana
Two lonely cross-roads that themselves cross each other I have walked several times this winter without meeting or overtaking so much as a single person on foot or on runners. The practically unbroken condition of both for several days after a snow or a blow proves that neither is much travelled.
Judge then how surprised I was the other evening as I came down one to see a man, who to my own unfamiliar eyes and in the dusk looked for all the world like myself, coming down the other, his approach to the point where our paths must intersect being so timed that unless one of us pulled up we must inevitably collide. I felt as if I was going to meet my own image in a slanting mirror. Or say I felt as we slowly converged on the same point with the same noiseless yet laborious stride as if we were two images about to float together with the uncrossing of someone’s eyes. I verily expected to take up or absorb this other self and feel the stronger by the addition for the three-mile journey home.
But I didn’t go forward to the touch. I stood still in wonderment and let him pass by; and that, too, with the fatal omission of not trying to find out by a comparison of lives and immediate and remote interests what could have brought us by crossing paths to the same point in a wilderness at the same moment of nightfall. Some purpose I doubt not, if we could but have made out.
I like a coincidence almost as well as an incongruity.
~Robert Frost from “Selected Letters”
When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson from “Quotation and Originality”
Robert Frost enjoyed how readers misinterpreted his ironic “The Road Not Taken” poem. His point was not “the road less traveled” “made all the difference” but that the roads were in fact the same. As humans living our daily lives, we have to make decisions that take us one way or the other, not knowing and very uncertain where our choices may lead us.
Our assurance lies in understanding the Hand that guides us, should we allow Him. We may choose a path that leads us astray; God continually puts up signposts that will guide us home. Our journey may be arduous, we may get terribly lost, we may walk alone for long stretches, we may end up crushed and bleeding in the ditch.
He follows the footprints we have left behind, and we are found, rescued and brought home, no matter what, and that — not the road we chose at the beginning — is what makes all the difference.
The duties and cares of the day crowd about us when we awake each day
– if they have not already dispelled our night’s rest.
How can everything be accommodated in one day?
When will I do this, when that?
How will it all be accomplished?
Thus agitated, we are tempted to run and rush.
And so we must take the reins in hand and remind ourselves,
“Let go of your plans. The first hour of your morning belongs to God.
Tackle the day’s work that he charges you with,
and he will give you the power to accomplish it.”
~Edith Stein from Essays on Woman
Rushing headlong pell-mell tumble-bumble into the day is a specialty of mine. Once I step out the door there isn’t a single moment of quiet breathing space until I step back in the door 12 hours later. I realize this is a daily choice I make to live this way: no one forces me to see just one more patient (or four) or complete each chart before I leave or make sure I have responded to a hundred messages.
I would not rest well until the work is finished.
Therefore my hour of quiet starts very early in the day, usually before the sun rises or the birds start to twitter, when there is no every-fifteen-minute appointment schedule and the phone remains silent.
However the rising morning does not belong to me: God knows what I’ll need to get through the day. He reminds me to breathe deeply, find time to smell the tulips, and take a walk with a buddy, always remembering I’m not alone.
April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain…
~T.S.Eliot from “The Wasteland”
We do not want to think of ourselves as the dust we were and the dust we will become. We are living fully right now; we cast shadows before and behind us depending on the time of day and time of life, mere ephemeral reflections of our presence on earth.
Yet the dust we were and the dust we become is as fearful a thing as our transient shadow.
Dust so cruel~
it reminds us
of what could have been,
how life once rose miraculous
from the dead.
We are nothing but a handful of dust…
until the Creator lifts us up in the palm of His hand, and blows on us.
We breathe and pulse and weep and bleed.
We become more than mere shadow.
We are His, part of his Hand, breath of His breath.
A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.
~Ray Bradbury
If there is anything I’ve learned in over 40 years of practicing medicine, it’s that I still must “practice” my art every day. As much as we physicians emphasize the science of what we do, utilizing “evidence based” decisions, there are still days when a fair amount of educated guessing and a gut feeling is based on past experience, along with my best hunch. Many patients don’t arrive with classic cook book symptoms that fit the standardized diagnostic and treatment algorithms so the nuances of their stories require interpretation, discernment and flexibility. I appreciate a surprise once in awhile that makes me look at a patient in a new or unexpected way and teaches me something I didn’t know before. It keeps me coming back for more, to figure out the mystery and dig a little deeper.
I’ve also learned that not all medicine comes in pills or injections. This isn’t really news to anyone, but our modern society is determined to seek better living through chemistry, the more expensive and newer the better, whether prescribed or not. Chemicals have their place, but they also can cause havoc. It is startling to see medication lists topping a dozen different daily pills. Some are life-saving. Many are just plain unnecessary.
How many people sleep without the aid of pill or weed or alcohol? Fewer and fewer. Poor sleep is one of the sad consequences of our modern age of too much artificial light, too much entertainment and screen time keeping us up late, and not enough physical work to exhaust our bodies enough to match our frazzled and fatigued brains.
How many of us allow ourselves a good cry when we feel it welling up? It could be a sentimental moment–a song that brings back bittersweet memories, a commercial that touches just the right chord of feeling and connection. It may be a moment of frustration and anger when nothing seems to go right. It could be the pain of physical illness or injury or the stress of emotional turmoil. Or just maybe there is weeping when everything is absolutely perfect and there cannot be another moment just like it, so it is tough to let it go unchristened by tears of joy.
And without a doubt, the healing qualities of chocolate are unquestioned by this doctor, however it may be consumed. It can fix most everything that ails a person, at least for an hour or two.
No, it doesn’t take an M.D. degree to know the best medicine.
Just remember: sleep, weep, reap (chocolate!)
I understand: I fear being captured too.
Even if only for a moment as an image preserved forever, I know it doesn’t represent all I am, all I’ve done, all I feel, all my moments put together. The birds are, and I am, so much more than one moment.
…the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror–indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy–but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.
…Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing…
~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
It is as true for me as it is for Mole in Grahame’s wonderful story: I must stray from my comfortable little home to look and wonder at the world around and above me. Spring drives me forth with awe and longing and discontent more than any season: the light is so different and compelling, the clouds dramatic and ever-changing, the greens never more vivid, the smell of the air perfumed and enticing.
What seems so plain, so ordinary at other times of year, becomes magical and beautiful in the spring;
…maybe, just maybe, so do I.
Barnstorming 