Still and calm, In purple robes of kings, The low-lying mountains sleep at the edge of the world. The forests cover them like mantles; Day and night Rise and fall over them like the wash of waves. Asleep, they reign. Silent, they say all. Hush me, O slumbering mountains – Send me dreams. ~Harriet Monroe “The Blue Ridge”
If you find yourself half naked and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing, again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says you are the air of the now and gone, that says all you love will turn to dust, and will meet you there, do not raise your fist. Do not raise your small voice against it. And do not take cover. Instead, curl your toes into the grass, watch the cloud ascending from your lips. Walk through the garden’s dormant splendor. Say only, thank you. Thank you. ~Ross Gay “Thank You”
I live for those who love me, Whose hearts are kind and true; For the heaven that smiles above me, And awaits my spirit, too; For all human ties that bind me, For the task my God assigned me, For the bright hopes left behind me, And the good that I can do. For the cause that needs assistance, For the wrongs that need resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that I can do ~George Linnaeus Banks from “What I Live For”
Our surrounding hills circle like wagons, their strong shoulders promising steadfast protection. Above them, the palette of sky changes with the weather, as turmoil and turbulence continually stirs up our world.
There is so much good to be done: our world needs hands-on, hearts-on work for causes needing assistance – for wrongs needing resistance.
Feeding, housing, healing, caring, for those in our own neighborhoods won’t make headlines like blocking freeways and college buildings.
Rather than raising tents and fists, idle hands can serve. Rather than raising voices and drums, heads can bow in grateful prayer.
The mountains remind us: Though we are here and now, we will soon turn to dust. They ask us: How to live a life that truly makes a difference for those in need?
The great mystery of God’s love is that we are not asked to live as if we are not hurting, as if we are not broken.
In fact, we are invited to recognize our brokenness as a brokenness in which we can come in touch with the unique way that God loves us.
The great invitation is to live your brokenness under the blessing. I cannot take people’s brokenness away and people cannot take my brokenness away. But how do you live in your brokenness?
Do you live your brokenness under the blessing or under the curse? The great call of Jesus is to put your brokenness under the blessing. ~Henri Nouwenfrom a lecture at Scarritt-Bennett Center
…be a glorified human being, with wounds. God the Kintsugi master who beholds such brokenness in tender care, invites us, and asks of us, to be present in suffering and incalculable losses. … worship a Wounded Glorified Human Being, and be that ourselves. ~Makoto Fujimura from Kinsugi Grace
It is a ceramic pot meant specially for our kitchen table — handmade by a potter friend using the abstract artistry of mane hairs from our farm’s Haflinger horses burnt onto the sides. But it hit the floor and broke into many pieces, looking completely beyond repair.
It is back on our table, repaired with love and care by another friend, using nothing more than copious amounts of Elmer’s Glue. This is the glue of every child’s school desk, the glue of every mother’s junk drawer, the glue of every heart that needs mending.
Elmer’s is not the gold of the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken vessels are repaired with precious metals, creating an object even more valuable and beautiful than before, with streaks and tracks of gold highlighting their shattered history.
Yet it is now even more precious to me. Someone we love cared deeply enough to make it in the first place, and another we love cared deeply to repair it, making it even more beautiful and blessed in its brokenness, highlighting ragged pieces made whole again.
Someone made us. Someone repairs us when we fall apart. Someone blesses our brokenness with a glued-together beauty that makes us whole.
Every day, as the sun goes down, I pause, broken, remembering how often I messed up that day, in big and small ways. Cracked open, my mistakes are illuminated, weighing down my heart, impossible to forget. Yet, as I pray for mercy, there follows a peacefulness, as my errors are blotted out. My slate, one more time, is wiped clean.
Therefore do not lose heart.
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.
7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 8 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. 10 We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. 12 So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.
16 Therefore we do not lose heart. 2 Corinthinians: 6-12, 16
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Now I become myself. It’s taken Time, many years and places; I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people’s faces, Now to stand still, to be here, Feel my own weight and density!
All fuses now, falls into place From wish to action, word to silence, My work, my love, my time, my face Gathered into one intense Gesture of growing like a plant. Now there is time and Time is young. Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun! ~May Sarton from “Now I Become Myself”
My grade school took part in an educational experiment in the early 1960’s. It was one of the first schools to mainstream special needs children into “regular” classrooms. At that time, the usual approach was to put kids with disabilities in separate rooms, if not entirely separate schools.
During those years, the average class size for a grade school teacher was 32-35 kids, with no teacher’s aides, rare parent volunteers, (except for field trips and room mothers who threw the holiday parties) and no medications or special accommodations for ADHD or dyslexia. I’m not sure how teachers coped with nearly three dozen noisy disruptive kids, but somehow they managed to teach in spite of the obstacles. Adding in children with mental and physical challenges without additional adult help must have been very difficult.
So some kids got recruited to help out the kids with disabilities. It helped the teacher by creating a buddy system for the special needs kids who might need help with class work or who might have difficulty getting around.
I was assigned to Michael so our desks were side by side for the year. He was a thin little boy with cerebral palsy and hearing aids, thick glasses hooked with a wide band around the back of his head, and spastic muscles never going where he wanted them to go. He could not remain still, try as he might. He walked independently with some difficulty, mostly on his tiptoes because of his shortened leg tendons, frequently falling when he got going too quickly. His thick orthopedic shoes with leg braces would trip him up. His hands were intermittently in a grip of contracted muscles, and his face was always contorting and grimacing. He drooled a lot, so perpetually carried a Kleenex in his hand to catch the drips of spit that ran out of his mouth and dropped on his desk, threatening to spoil his coloring and writing papers.
His speech consisted of all vowels, as his tongue couldn’t quite connect with his teeth or palate to sound out the consonants, so it took some time and patience to understand what he said. He could write with great effort, gripping the pencil awkwardly in his tight palm and found he could communicate better at times on paper than by talking.
I made sure he had help to finish assignments if his muscles were too tight to write, and I learned his speech so I could interpret for the teacher. He was brave and bright, with a finer mind than most of the kids in our class. He loved a good joke and his little body would shudder as he roared his appreciation. I was always impressed at how he expressed himself and how little bitterness he had about his limitations. He was the most articulate inarticulate person I had ever met.
As Michael appeared around the corner of the grade school building every morning, he would walk quickly in his careful tip-toe cadence, arms flailing, shoes scuffing, raising up dust with each step. He would wave at me and call out my name in his indecipherable voice.
Once, as he approached, a group of kids playing tag swooped past him, purposely a little too close, spinning him off his feet like a top and onto the ground. Glasses askew, he lay momentarily still, and realizing I was needed, I ran to help him up. Despite all he endured, I never saw Michael cry, not even once, not even when he fell down hard. When he got angry or frustrated, he’d get very quiet. His muscles would tense up so much he would go into even greater spasms.
I had no tolerance for anyone who bullied him. I could see the pain in his grimacing face. Although he would give me a huge toothy smile of thanks, his eyes, as usual, said what his mouth could not. Michael knew I needed him as much as he needed me. I relished my new role as the life preserver thrown to him as he struggled to stay afloat in a sea of classroom hostility.
There were many times when I resented being teased by other students about Michael being my boyfriend. Although he would blush bright red when he heard that, Michael really had become a good friend, who just happened to be a boy.
The following academic year, he moved to another school district, so I never saw Michael again. However, I heard him on local radio six years later, reading an essay he’d written for the county Voice of Democracy contest on what it meant to be a free citizen. His essay was one of the top three award winners that year. I was amazed at how understandable his speaking voice had become.
Years later, I went on to medical school, learning from patients who lived with even far greater limitations than Michael. I realized that my initial training in compassionate care had been as I sat by his side helping him navigate 5th grade. He showed me how important it was to take the time to understand his voice and his heart when others would or could not.
I didn’t appreciate it then as I do now, but he taught me far more than I ever taught him: patience, perseverance and respect for the journey through obstacles rather than focusing just on the destination.
He helped me surpass my own less visible limitations. I was his special friend – one who just happened to be a girl.
So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up. Galatians 6:9
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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For the bark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped And pigeon-collared.
For the splitter-splatter, guttering Rain-flirt leaves.
For the snub and clot of the first green cones, Smelted emerald, chlorophyll.
For the scut and scat of cones in winter, So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle.
For the alder-wood, flame-red when torn Branch from branch.
But mostly for the swinging locks Of yellow catkins.
Plant it, plant it, Streel-head in the rain. ~Seamus Heaney “Planting the Alder”with an explanation of some of the poet’s poetic words here
I’ve worked in many medical settings, and have seen lots of illnesses and injuries over 40+ years of doctoring. Despite all that experience, I really don’t do well with badly broken bones. Basic wrists and fingers and ankles are no problem but open compound and comminuted fractures (i.e. “crushed bones”) are downright terrifying. It appears to me they can never be pieced back together. Even looking at the xrays makes me cringe. I avoided doing a surgical orthopedic rotation during my training because I knew I’d have issues with the saws and the smells involved in fixing bad fractures. And witnessing the pain is unforgettable – there are few things that hurt more.
In early spring 2008, my 87 year old mother shattered her lower femur trying to stand up after getting down on her hands and knees to retrieve a pill that had dropped to the floor and rolled under her desk. The pain was overwhelming until the paramedics managed to immobilize her leg in an air cast for transport to the ER. As long as her leg wasn’t moved, she was quite comfortable– in fact overjoyed to see me in the middle of a workday when I arrived at the hospital. She was so chatty that when she was asked by the ER doctor “how did this happen?” she launched into a long description of just how she had dropped the pill, where it had rolled, and what pill it was, what color it was, why she was taking it, etc etc. I started to get antsy, knowing how busy the Doc was and said, with just a *wee bit* of irritation, “Mom, he doesn’t need to know all that. Just tell him what happened when you tried to stand up.”
That did it.
Now it wasn’t just her leg that hurt, it was her feelings too, including her own sense of responsibility for what had happened, and her tears started to flow. The ER doc shot me a sideways glance that clearly said “now look what you’ve done” and then took my Mom’s hand tenderly, looking her straight in the eye and said, “That’s all right, these things happen despite our best intentions—you go right ahead and tell me the whole story, right from the beginning…”
So she did, completely reaffirmed and feeling absolved of her guilt that she had somehow done this to herself. Having been shown a caring and healing grace from a total stranger after her cherished physician daughter had totally blown Bedside Manners 101, she never really complained about the pain in her leg again.
Then it was my turn to feel guilty. Instead of planting the compassion she so badly needed in that moment, I guttered all her fear and pain together. It crushed her.
Her leg was quickly fixed with a rod and with physical therapy, she took a few steps with assistance. Sadly, she never again lived independently, and as happens so often with immobilized older people despite healed fractures, she died only eight months later. Bones heal but the spirit doesn’t. That spring day really was the beginning of the end for her, and in my heart, I knew that was likely to be the case. My irritation was about what I suspected was coming, and for what I knew it meant for her, but mostly for me.
What I had forgotten out of selfish self-concern and what I will not forget again: even the most horrendous pain can be relieved by compassionate grace. The crushed will stand, and walk, and thrive again with a gentle touch and a lot of love.
Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Psalm 51:8
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain. ~Emily Dickinson
Mostly, I want to be kind. And nobody, of course, is kind, or mean, for a simple reason. ~Mary Oliver from “Dogfish”
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. ~Naomi Shihab Nye from “Kindness”
Have you ever noticed how much of Christ’s life was spent in doing kind things – in merely doing kind things? … he spent a great proportion of his time simply in making people happy, in doing good turns to people.
There is only one thing greater than happiness in the world, and that is holiness; and it is not in our keeping. But what God has put in our power is the happiness of those about us, and that is largely to be secured by our being kind to them.…
I wonder why it is that we are not all kinder than we are. How much the world needs it. How easily it is done. How instantaneously it acts. How infallibly it is remembered. ~Henry Drummond from The Greatest Thing in the World
It is tender kindness I miss most these days – this world aflame with anger and violence, distrust and bitterness, resentment and suspicion and cussed stubbornness.
There seems no relief in sight; we must find a way through.
It is time to offer and accept help when needed. It is time to give and receive mercy without shame or scorn. It is time to gently lift those soft vulnerable wings back into the nest.
We are saved by kindness, by grace given freely, thrown like a lifeline to us when we are overwhelmed.
I have been gently surrounded in a nest of kindness many times by the encouragement and love from those around me. When my heart is breaking, I know their mercy and grace becomes my glue.
…the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. Matthew 25:34-36
So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. …. in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. ~Philippians 2: 1-4
Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Ephesians 4: 1-3
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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…yesterday I heard a new sound above my head a rustling, ruffling quietness in the spring air
and when I turned my face upward I saw a flock of blackbirds rounding a curve I didn’t know was there and the sound was simply all those wings, all those feathers against air, against gravity and such a beautiful winning: the whole flock taking a long, wide turn as if of one body and one mind.
How do they do that?
If we lived only in human society what a puny existence that would be
but instead we live and move and have our being here, in this curving and soaring world that is not our own so when mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives and when, even more rarely, we unite and move together toward a common good,
we can think to ourselves:
ah yes, this is how it’s meant to be. ~Julie Cadwallader Staub from “Blackbirds” from Wing Over Wing
Out of the dimming sky a speck appeared, then another, and another. It was the starlings going to roost. They gathered deep in the distance, flock sifting into flock, and strayed towards me, transparent and whirling, like smoke. They seemed to unravel as they flew, lengthening in curves, like a loosened skein. I didn’t move;they flew directly over my head for half an hour.
Each individual bird bobbed and knitted up and down in the flight at apparent random, for no known reason except that that’s how starlings fly, yet all remained perfectly spaced. The flocks each tapered at either end from a rounded middle, like an eye. Overhead I heard a sound of beaten air, like a million shook rugs, a muffled whuff. Into the woods they sifted without shifting a twig, right through the crowns of trees, intricate and rushing, like wind.
Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now, birds winging through the gaps between my cells, touching nothing, but quickening in my tissues, fleet? ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Chunky and noisy, but with stars in their black feathers, they spring from the telephone wire and instantly
they are acrobats in the freezing wind. And now, in the theater of air, they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising; they float like one stippled star that opens, becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again; and you watch and you try but you simply can’t imagine
how they do it with no articulated instruction, no pause, only the silent confirmation that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin over and over again, full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us, even in the leafless winter, even in the ashy city. I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings. ~Mary Oliver “Starlings in Winter” from Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays
Watching a winter starlings’ murmuration is a visceral experience – my heart leaps to see the looping amoebic folding and unfolding path.
Thousands of individual birds move in sync with one another to form one massive organism existing solely because each tiny component anticipates and cooperates to avoid mid-air collisions.
It could explode into chaos but it doesn’t. It could result in massive casualties but it doesn’t. They could avoid each other altogether but they don’t – they come together with a purpose and reasoning beyond our imagining.
Even the whooshing of their wing movements is exhilarating.
We humans are made up of similar cooperating component parts, deep in our tissues, programmed in our DNA. Yet we don’t exercise such unity from our designed and carefully constructed building blocks. We are frighteningly disparate and independent creatures, going our own way, bumping and crashing without care, leaving so much bodily and spiritual wreckage behind.
What has happened to our place in this curving, soaring world? To where has flown our mercy and tenderness, our compassion and caring for the position of others?
We have corporately lost our internal moral compass. Indeed, the sound of our movements is muffled weeping.
Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Matthew 6: 25-26
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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September. Second-year medical student. An early patient interview at the Massachusetts General Hospital Routine hernia repair planned, not done. Abdomen opened and closed. Filled with disease, cancer.
The patient is fifty-six, a workingman, Irish I sit with him, notice the St. Christopher medal around his neck. Can’t hurt, can it? he laughs. I have become his friend.
I bring him a coloring book picture that shows this thing, this unfamiliar organ that melted beneath our hands at dissection: Pancreas.
Leaving his room, crying, avoiding classmates, I take the back stairs. I find myself locked, coatless in the courtyard outside. ~Kelley Jean White “Pandora”
At seventeen years old, I thought I had things figured out. I had graduated near the top of my senior class, was heading off to college, and felt confident about who I was becoming. I had attended church all my life but my commitment to my faith was actually waning rather than strengthening.
In anticipation of college tuition bills, I took a summer job at a local nursing home for $1.25 an hour as a nurses’ aide. My total training was two days following a more experienced aide on her rounds of feeding, pottying, dressing and undressing, and bathing her elderly patients. Then I was assigned patients of my own and during a typical shift I carried a load of 13 patients. It didn’t take long for me to learn the rhythm of caretaking, and I enjoyed the work and my patients.
One woman in particular remains vivid in my memory 52 years later. Irene was in her 80’s with no nearby family, bedridden with a painful bone disease that had crippled her for a decade or more. She was unable to do any of her own self care but her mind remained sharp and her eyes bright. Her hearty greeting cheered me when I’d come in her room several times a shift to turn her on her egg-crate mattress bed to prevent pressure sores on her hips and shoulders.
The simple act of turning her in her bed was an ordeal beyond imagining – it always hurt her. I felt as though I was impaling her on hundreds of sharp needles.
I would prepare her for the turn by cushioning her little body with pads and pillows, but no matter how careful I was, her brittle bones would crackle and crunch like Rice Crispies cereal with every movement. Tears would flow from her eyes and she’d always call out “Oh Oh Oh Oh” during the process but then once settled in her new position, she’d look up at me and say “thank you, dear, for making that so much easier for me.”
I would nearly weep in gratitude at her graciousness when I could do so little to alleviate her suffering.
Before I’d leave the room, Irene would grab my hand and ask when I would be returning. Then she’d say “I know the Lord prepared you to take care of me” and she would murmur a prayer to herself.
As difficult as each “turning” was for both of us, I started to look forward to it. I knew she prayed not only for herself, but I knew she prayed for me as well. I felt her blessing each time I walked into her room knowing she was waiting for me. She trusted me to do my best.
One evening I came to work and was told Irene was running a high fever, and struggling to breathe. She was being given oxygen and was having difficulty taking fluids. The nurse I worked under asked that I check Irene more frequently than my usual routine.
As I approached her bed, Irene reached out and held my hand. She was still alert but very weak. She looked me in the eye and said “You know the Lord is coming for me today?” All I could say was “I know you have waited for Him a long time.” She murmured “Come back soon” and closed her eyes.
I returned to her room as often as I could and found her becoming less responsive, yet still breathing, sometimes short shallow breaths and sometimes long and deep. Near the end of my shift, as morning was dawning, when I entered the room, I knew He had come for her.
She lay silent and relaxed for the first time since I had met her. Her little body, so tight with pain only hours before, seemed at ease. It was my job to prepare her for the mortuary workers who would soon come for her. Her body still warm to touch, I washed and dried her skin and brushed her hair and wrapped her in a fresh sheet, wondering at how I could now turn her easily with no pain and no tears. I could see a trace of a smile at the corners of her mouth. I knew then the Lord had lifted her soul from her imprisonment. He had rewarded her faithful perseverance.
I rejoice in the hope of the glory of the Lord, thanks to Irene. She showed me what it means to watch for the morning when He will come. Though immobile in bed, crippled and wracked with pain, her perseverance led to loving a young teenager uncertain in her faith, and helped point me to my future profession in medicine.
Irene brought the Lord home to me when she went home to Him.
And werejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance Romans 5:2b-3
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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The darksome burn, horseback brown, His rollrock highroad roaring down, In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth Turns and twindles over the broth Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning, It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning. Degged with dew, dappled with dew, Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn. What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Inversnaid”
There is despair in untamed hearts lost in the wilderness. Wildness lies just beneath the surface; it spills over, swirls round and round, spins out of reach.
Our world feels that way right now.
How are we spared drowning in its pitch black pool? Can we thrill to beauty surrounding us without being tempted into darkness?
Christ came not to tame creation’s wildness, but to pull us gasping people from its unforgiving clutches before we sink ever deeper in despair.
We are mere weeds trying to survive this wild world, to grow, to flourish, to witness to those who are bereft. O Lord, let us be left to live long in your Light.
Let us be left.
Because of your great compassion you did not abandon them in the wilderness. By day the pillar of cloud did not fail to guide them on their path, nor the pillar of fire by night to shine on the way they were to take. You gave your good Spirit to instruct them. Nehemiah 9: 19-20
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business. ~Anne Lamott from Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers
It was my privilege to work in a profession where astonishment and revelation awaited me behind each exam room door.
During an average clinic day, I opened those doors 36 times, then close them behind me and settle in for the ten or fifteen minutes allocated per patient. I needed to peel through the layers of a problem quickly to find the core of truth about why a patient was seeking help.
Sometimes what I was looking for was right on the surface: a bad cough, a swollen ankle, a bad laceration, but also easily were their tears, their pain, their fear. Most of the time, the reason was buried deep and I needed to wade through the rashes and sore throats and headaches to find it.
Once in a while, I could actually do something tangible to help right then and there — sew up the cut, lance the boil, splint the fracture, restore hearing by removing a plug of wax from an ear canal.
Often I simply gave permission to a patient to be sick — to allow themselves time to renew, rest and trust their bodies to know what is needed to heal well.
Sometimes, I was the coach pushing them to stop living “sick” — to stop self-medicating when life is challenging, to stretch even when it hurts, to strive to overcome the overwhelm.
Always I was looking for an opening to say something a patient may consider later — how they might make different choices, how they could be bolder and braver in their self care and care for others, how every day is a thread in the larger tapestry of their one precious life.
At night I took calls and each morning woke early to get online work done, trying to avoid feeling unprepared and inadequate to the volume of tasks heaped upon the day. I know I was frequently stretched beyond my capacity, stressed by administrative pressures and obstacles I faced in providing the best care.
I understood trials my patients were facing because I had faced them too. I shared their worry, their fears and vulnerabilities because I had lived through it too.
Even now, I try to simply let it be, especially through troubled times, when I have been gifted so much over the years. So my own experience is a gift I can still share here, even in retirement.
I’ll never forget: no matter who waited behind the exam room door, they never failed to be astonishing and revelatory to me, professionally and personally.
I’m so grateful I was open for business for 42 years. I don’t see patients in an exam room any longer. This Doctor is In, writing every day, with friendly advice. Let it be so.
Peanuts comic by Charles Schulz
What is it You see What do I possess Oh how could it be I should be so blessed
I am nothing much Neither saint nor queen I am just a girl And You are everything
But if You ask Let it be so Let it be so and if You will Let it be so
I am so afraid Of this great unknown They may turn away I may be all alone
My life is so small so small a price to pay to see my savior come and take my sin away
I will bear their scorn I will wear the shame All things for the good All things in Your name
Father be my strength Shepherd hold my hand Open wide my heart to welcome who is there ~Sarah Hart
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If day after day I was caught inside this muffle and hush
I would notice how birches move with a lovely hum of spirits,
how falling snow is a privacy warm as the space for sleeping,
how radiant snow is a dream like leaving behind the body
and rising into that luminous place where sometimes you meet
the people you’ve lost. How silver branches scrawl their names
in tangled script against the white. How the curves and cheekbones
of all my loved ones appear in the polished marble of drifts. ~Kirsten Dierking “Shoveling Snow” from Northern Oracle.
These sub-zero January nights linger long, beginning early and lasting late. I find myself stuck in an insistent winter, pushing through the snowdrifts.
A wintry soul can be a cold and empty place.
I appeal to my Creator who knows my struggle. He asks me to keep my promises because He keeps His promises. His buds of hope and light and warmth still grace my bare branches.
He brings me out of the dark, into the freshness of a snowy dawn, to finish what He brought me here to do.
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