The Little There Is To Do

A friend sent us a letter
At a loss for words of wisdom
She simply wished she could be with us
To share the day to day
Do the little things
That needed to be done:
Like when a friend was sick and dying in the hospital
She threw away the dead flowers
And moved the fresh ones closer to her

A Story from a D.C. Nurse by Kate Smith

Kate Raymond put me in touch with Kate Smith, who is a nurse and a writer.  I emailed her the following request: "Tell me a story about living and working in D.C. ... off the top of your head,  go for ten minutes, let it rip."

She wrote back: "Ten minutes off the top of my  head. Ok. I can do that:

 

Sometimes I feel bad because I don't think of my patients beyond the moments that I'm with them.  I am a paper bag and they are a torrent, a waterfall I can not contain.  I care, genuinely, standing over them, helping them undress, asking them about their childhoods and grandchildren as I pierce their flesh, the bevel of my needle always pointing up.  When I walk away, I usually don't blink.

There is one woman who never leaves me, though.  During sleepless nights I imagine her on the streets and wonder if she's safe and if her baby is still alive.  My prayers for her are simple - for a coat, for enough food, that she doesn't walk in front of bus.  She walked through the door at 18:50, I picked up her chart at 18:57.  It was a Thursday.  A man was waiting for me. I'd made chocolate mousse for dessert.  My skin was clear and the sky was pink and yellow.  I almost put down the chart.  Nobody keeps triaging through shift change.

It took her a few minutes to gather up her baby and all the plastic bags, to cross the lobby and fall into the chair in my triage room.  Chest pain, breast pain, stomach pain, itching.  The bottoms of her earlobes were split in two where someone had yanked the gold hoops down through the flesh. She'd found duct tape, pieced them together. Gold hoops back in place, a problem she'd solved herself.

That was 13 minutes, but only because I looked up the medical term for earlobe because it bothers me how much I've forgotten.  

May We Always Be Amateurs

Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces
Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

Herein are a few score short pieces by the Nobel laureate (Literature, 1996), usually no more than a page or two, although I think of them more as her writing practices, as she uses the book at hand to provoke wide-ranging exploration.  Her reading has breadth — statistics, Polish history, birds, El Cid, Vermeer, the history of clothing, the persecution of witches, handyman guides, Napoleon, deer, the Polish nobles, Ella Fitzgerald, yoga for everyone, divas, wallpapering your home, all the Cleopatras, gladiators, Catherine the Great, Hammurabi’s Code, the Three Tenors, Fermat’s Theorem — but my favorite pieces were those about other writers, like Jung, Milosz and Montaigne.  She admits, “Basically I am and wish to remain a reader, an amateur, and a fan, unburdened by the weight of ceaseless evaluation. Sometimes the book itself is my main subject; at other times it’s just a pretext for spinning out various loose associations. Anyone who calls these pieces sketches will be correct. Anyone insisting on ‘reviews’ will incur my displeasure.”

Many of these books were published in Poland, and I have no desire to read them (my “To Read List” is already impossibly long). However, she inspires me to go to Left Bank Books to browse in sections I’ve never been to before, if only to whet my curiosity as to what’s out there.

I can see how some of these pieces relate to her own poems. For example, “Chips Will Fly” is a prose riff on her poem, “The Terrorist, He’s Watching.”  Also, the following quotation reminds me of her magnificent “Miracle Fair”:  “The reader may think that I’m a thick-skulled rationalist who can’t even entertain the idea that anything strange, mysterious, and amoral could still happen on our ordinary earth. It’s just the opposite–for me there is no such thing as an ‘ordinary’ earth. The more we find out about it, the more mysterious it is, and the life it holds is a bizarre cosmic anomaly.”

Last, Szymbroska’s description of the common reader will ring true for several people I know: “I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised…. Homo Ludens with a book is free. At least as free as he is capable of being. He himself makes up the rules of the game, which are subject only to his own curiosity. He’s permitted to read intelligent books, from which he will benefit, as well as stupid ones, from which he may also learning something.”

This month I’ve been reading and rereading all of Szymborska’s books available in English translation; she’s been reminding of poetry’s power to wake us up and see more clearly  I have compiled a list of 17 of her poems that are worth rereading over the next decade.

We can follow her example of bibliophilia in Nonrequired Reading and take some time to let our friends know what we’ve been reading, how it has touched us, and why we’re glad to  have found a kindred spirit, teacher, journeyer, or disturber of the peace at just this moment.

As They Please by Te

As They Please
by Te

The trees dance.

on this crisp autumn morning
they sway
they jitterbug
as they please
they romance
as they please

and i watch as i waltz
looking longingly from
this masquerade ball
wanting nothing
but to strip off this facade
to step out of beat

but my feet won't flee
from the rhythm of
from the march to
this beat that leaves

my feet aching
my head pounding
my mind escaping

but only my mind

As I watch the trees
Dance as they please.

Ode to Frijoles (Redux)

Mark - I think you are right. I think this is better set in verse. I reread "Ode to Salt" by Pablo before revising, below.

  

My father was a good man

maybe even a great man

but he unraveled slowly

like an old wool sweater that got

snagged on the sharp edge of life,

straining ever since he landed

in Miami, a refugee from Cuba

with a coarse black mustache

who never quite fit in

never quite felt at home.

But my father could do one thing

that helped him forget where he was

and helped him remember who he was

and where he came from. He could cook

frijoles negros, Cuban-style.

Primero

first

sauté the onions

and don’t hurry them

let them turn golden

like the tropical sun.

Then

entonces

add the peppers

a little fire for the soul.

The frijoles too

must cook slowly —

three days, as many days

as Jesus was in the grave.

You’ll know when the frijoles are done

because you will not want anything else

for breakfast, lunch or dinner

when you first begin to smell

the bubbling, rich aroma

of God’s black frijoles.

You will run into the kitchen  

and you will beg me: Papi, please,

may I have the frijoles now?

And I will do exactly what my mother did

and my grandmother did, and all

the mothers and grandmothers of Cuba

as far back as anyone can remember.

I will pick you up in my arms and I will hand you

the special wooden spoon that I have used

to stir and stir and stir the frijoles

and I will say, Sí, mi querida, 

mi corazón. Yes, my darling, my love.

Take and eat. I have made this

all

for

you.

Meditation Reflection #21

(In response to entry #21 Life is Not a Means to an End from Thich Nhat Hanh's Your True Home)

Sometimes I want to just take Thay's book and words and throw it against the wall... That's not very mindful of me, is it?  It sounds impossible to live the life he speaks of here in the U.S.  I know it is possible in Plum Village, because I've been there. I've lived it and experienced it.  I was present to my life for 6 whole days: learning, making mistakes, smiling, bowing, sitting, washing dishes, and all mindfully.  And it was incredible.  But I don't know how to do that here.  I have such a hard time making happiness the way.  Instead, I search for a way to peace and happiness, and feel lost.  It's easy to say the words, read the words, and think, oh of course, that makes sense, sure wouldn't that be nice.  But it's a whole nother thing to actually figure out how to live the words.

I feel like a lot of life is spent as a means to an end.  You plan out what you want in life, and how you are going to get there.  Goals.  Goals aren't a bad thing to have are they?  Can you have in mind things you want to work towards and accomplish, while still appreciating each moment?  It seems like just accepting everything is a very passive way to live.  But Thay isn't saying to live passively, he's saying to live intentionally, and you have the power to make every moment, every action or non-action, intentional.  Can I work towards a future goal while being aware and fully alive in each step that I take to get there?

I have a difficult time saying the point of life is just to be aware that I am living.  I want to do something meaningful with my life.  If not, what's my purpose?  What's anyone's purpose?  If we all just sat around and breathed and smiled at each other, that would get so boring.  There would be nothing new or creative.  There would be no celebration.  What about art and music and dancing?  What about expressing the full range of emotions including sorrow, and outrage, and fear, and exuberance?  What's so great and desirable about just being calm, wise, practical, slow, and intentional all the time?  I think there's more to being human and the human experience than just floating on a still pond.