Oh, the luxury of ‘nothing to do’ that lends itself to meditation, reflection, reading, and thinking. Time for walks in the morning; lingering visits over a cup of tea; watching birds soar, swoop, and spiral; listening to the sounds of crows, pigeons, and myna birds who stop from time to time to drink from a small dish of water on the balcony.
FIRST DAYS IN PUNE
We are getting used to each other—the crows, pigeons, and me—we who share this balcony in the mornings, sipping tea, reading the news, and catching up on Facebook. The mornings are easy and slow. I am so grateful for this pace.
By the time this newsletter reaches you, I will likely be longing for the leisurely pace of our first days in Pune. As you read, I will be in the second week of homeopathic clinic and yoga with the day beginning around 7 a.m. and finishing at 7-8 p.m. Whew!
GOD’S HOTEL
Recently, my good friend and astute bookseller, Judy, gave me a memoir book: God’s Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet.
Knowing Judy’s ability to pick book winners long before they are ‘officially’ recognized, I set it aside to read and savour while on my trip to India. Judy’s intuition was that this story would resonate with me, and as always, she is right. Thank you, Judy! (You can find Judy at Indigo bookstore in Calgary. She is the quintessential bookseller. Ask for her next time you are in the bookstore — I KNOW she will help you find the right book for you.)
From the book’s back cover:
“San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hotel-Dieu (God’s Hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves – anyone who had fallen or, often, leapt onto hard times and needed extended medical care – ended up here. In the relatively low-tech but human-paced environment, these extraordinary patients began to transform the way Victoria Sweet understood her work, evoking an older idea of medicine, one where the body is a garden to be tended, rather than a machine to be fixed. God’s Hotel tells their stories and the story of the hospital itself, which – as efficiency experts, politicians, and architects descended, determined to turn it into a modern “health care facility” – revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for body and soul.”
HOMEOPATHY AND PARENTING: HUMAN-PACED MEDICINE
As I read Victoria Sweet’s book, I cannot help but make comparisons to homeopathy and how, as homeopaths, we are called to match the pace of those who come to see us for healing support. We can allow for time to ask, “Where does it hurt?” and then give even more time and sacred space just to listen. In many ways, homeopathy is not an efficient system of medicine, at least in terms of how efficiency and financial bottom line is measured in conventional medical systems.
I have been told by some of my patients that now you are allowed only a certain amount of time per visit to a conventional medical doctor, and if your concerns involve depression or emotional concerns, you have to book well in advance. Even then, you are allowed perhaps a half-hour visit maximum. As a homeopath, we often hear at the end of an initial consult (which can take up to 2 hours), “This has been so helpful just to tell you everything.”
Time seems to be the big commodity these days.
Medicine does not have to be either/or, but can be both/and. This could be the beauty of homeopaths and allopaths each sharing their strengths: homeopaths can model time to be and listen in and allopaths can model emergency medicine in a way that is efficient and life saving.
Victoria Sweet’s experiences at Laguna Honda Hospital are a wake-up call for all who are in the healing profession and arts, allopaths and homeopaths alike, especially when we are caught up in the busy-ness of practice. Sometimes, inefficiency is far more productive and meaningful than efficiency. How easy it is to lose our humanity and love for one another when we decide we need to get ‘efficient,’ either to make more money or to get more ‘things’ done.
This includes parents and parenting. I can recall the days when I simply ‘gave up and gave in’ to the inefficiency of the moment…all too often, efficiency was futile when it came to small kids, especially when they were sick. I traded ‘doing’ for ‘being’…and it made the world of difference to my sanity. And oddly enough, I actually got more done on the days when I simply made myself available to the present moment of a child who was sick.
We all can heed the call to live in a more human-paced environment!
AN OLDER IDEA OF MEDICINE…AND PARENTING: A GARDEN TO BE TENDED
To plant and grow a garden takes time…and patience, and intention, and thoughtfulness. Gardening requires physical exertion with the seeding, the weeding and hoeing. Then there is the watering and more weeding. The rewards, though, are spectacular and border on the magical…green, growth, and finally the fruit of the laboring with food, flowers, fragrance, and beauty.
So it is with healing. Healing takes time and patience and intention and thoughtfulness by both the one who is ailing and the one who is there to support, whether one is trained as an allopath or a homeopath. I truly believe we are all here to help one another heal and be healed, to love and be loved. This is our highest calling as healers.
And so it is with parenting, in sickness and in health. While we as parents never take those vows formally as we do with wedding vows, somewhere deep within us, we hear the calling to be with our children, in sickness and in health. And this call is rarely efficient! We learn what it means to simply be with our children in all its inefficiency, and therein, as Victoria Sweet points out, is the efficiency.
Find times in your life to be inefficient. Find times for meditation, for reflection, for watching birds, for listening, and for thinking.
