Tuesday, August 24, 2010

A guest in our own lives

I am back in the Upper Delaware. Back in the climate where the night breezes are cool and there is relief from the day’s heat. People ask me about the Florida summer and I tell them that I ignored the weather and that the hospital was always cool. In fact, if I had known what I know now, I would have packed more long sleeves rather than the sleeveless dresses that hung in my closet all summer.

And the experience is not without its residual effect, as I have been cleaning and putting away, since I arrived home on Friday.

It was an interesting experience to be a guest in someone’s house for all summer, where one is obliged to put away cookware and empty the dishwasher, to be mindful of a different level of orderliness than that of our own. And I found that I liked the mindfulness, I liked the neat appearance of uncluttered kitchen counters, and a scrubbed and empty sink.

And that is what I am trying to do here for the past four days. Stephen said that he had caught onto my new intention, when I explained to him that I now understood that dish drainers were for drying dishes and not necessarily an ever changing dish shelf.

Today, with cookies (Son Zac is in residence for the next five weeks, while working on a feature film, and that homemade cookie mix from at least three Christmases was crying to be used up), onion broth (I never did use those cute colored mini onions, and it was a choice between the compost heap and onion broth.), white zucchini pizza, zucchini-feta pancakes (to freeze for later use) on the To Do List, the dish washing was rather relentless. (Even though Stephen asked folks to pick the zucchini when he was away for some 10 days, driving me back from Florida, there were some that got away, and the large mini baseball sized zucchini yielded some 10 cups of grated zucchini.)

As I step more fully into a life where we grow more of our own food and live mindfully on these acres, I can see that there is a busyness that is necessary to achieve the intention. And for now, it feels like a coming home, like a coming back to myself.

Thirty-two years ago, I used to make my own bagels, sprouted wheat bread, and my own clothes. I used to have a lot of people to dinner and always cleaned my house in preparation for their arrival.

I don’t know what happened in the meantime. Some might say that I became more relaxed, that I became okay with messiness. But I am unsure that that would be the proper analysis. More apt is that I became tired and a bit overwhelmed with all that was to be done and forgot that my priority is my relationship with myself and my surroundings. For better or for worse, I think that is most easily manifest in how we keep our spaces and how me make time for our family life and relationships.

I know that I am extremely privileged to have this cooling down period to get ready for the next part of my life. But I wonder, isn’t it possible to be focused on that one thing that we want more than anything else. For me, it is a mindful life, of living and creating a calm, peaceful and mindful experience no matter what is happening.

It reminds me of the advice that I gave L. when he was faced being released from the hospital, with nowhere to go, no money, no job, family or friends, that the scope of his situation was too vast to grasp and that the only thing he could do was to find the one thing that was the most important. If he could hold onto that, the rest would fall into place.

For him, it was a powerful addiction that he needed to resist. For me, it’s more simple: I need to treat myself and my surroundings with the same amount of respect that I would if I were a guest.

In one sense, we are all guests on this precious earth. And our lives are actually one holiday, or holy day, after another.

Sunday, August 01, 2010

Hope and recovery?

My day at the hospital starts with morning report, where the night chaplain explains what has happened the night before. I was intrigued when I saw the name of one of my patients on his list, and shocked when he said that he had coded and died.

When I had entered the patient’s room some 12 hours before, he was eating his breakfast and had offered me oatmeal and applesauce. I teased that he wasn’t offering to share his eggs. His wife, perched cross-legged on the bed, joyfully announced that he had had his best night yet. We talked about when they would return to their home.

The night chaplain had said it had been a tense three hours as the patient suddenly become unresponsive and could not be revived. His daughter had been with him, and was feeling remorse that she had sent her mother to the nearly motel, where they had been staying. Totally distraught, she could not drive the family car to pick her mother up, and the chaplain had to arrange for a taxis to bring the grieving wife to the bedside. The family had been in the hospital for 12 days and they and I had been celebrating this man’s apparent recovery from pancreatic surgery as a miracle. No one expected that he was cured, but it was expected that months had been added to his life.

“God led us to this place,” his wife has told me, following the successful surgery.

And all I can think of now is how do you recall a miracle. How can you celebrate survival from the surgeons’ scalpel only to code an die on the way to recovery? How does one find meaning in that?

Ironically, I had been thinking about death on the way into work that morning and come to the conclusion that life and death were a continuum, and that whatever happened would be okay in the end. I think now of my patient’s teenaged son the day before his father faced surgery. Teary and worried, he cried with the thought that he could lose his dad. I can only imagine his anguish tonight.

I had visited with the family some five or six times, generally playing my harp and singing, which calmed and relieved the patient's anxiety and pain. One day, when that I had entered the room, the son was lying in the bed as his dad was in the chair. I remember how happy he was with my confusion. I only wish I had had him walk me out of the room that day. It was an opportunity to check in with how he was doing. But I hadn’t taken it and was seemingly content with the family telling me how much they appreciated my visits and how much the patient loved the music that I offered.

I wonder now whether I was really doing good ministry, or whether I simply wanted to indulge the vision that we were all part of a miracle and that there was always hope and recovery.

We were all in collusion on that one, and I wonder where we go from here.