Writing to Feed the Gods

Finally, I could sit down at the computer and do all of the charting for my twelve hour shift.

Notes scribbled all over my report paper, now translated into coherent documentation of the care I provided my six patients on the medical telemetry unit.

Antibiotics given, wound care administered, families called, specialists coordinated with….all dutifully transcibed into the medical record.

But what I really wanted to write about? The stories Dot told me about her childhood in Vienna. The way the patient in 34B seemed to finally touch his grief as we looked at his chest x-ray together. The ground glass opacities and lingering pneumonia that finally made real inside his body the drowning feeling that had led him to the overdose he barely survived. The way the afternoon light fell across Barbara’s face and illuminated the bouquet on her bedside table, making her death vigil feel alive and natural instead of the sterile clinical hospital room her family crowded into.

I still have nightmares about end of shift documentation, realizing that I hadn’t passed a single med all day or there was a hidden patient that I never saw or tended to. I have not worked in a hospital in eleven years, and I still carry the stories, the emotions, and the toxic stress of caring so much in a place where so much is demanded.

I became a nurse because I was so full of compulsive care. My heart ached and broke a thousand times a day. I did my best to alleviate suffering and accelerate healing, finding my way to more and more difficult patient populations, demanding more and more of myself. Carrying more pain, more heartbreak, more tragedy, and learning to be steady, effective, competent, alongside the burden of tremendous suffering.

At some point, I stopped noticing light beams, and the tender touch of grief. I stopped having time for childhood stories. Where there was once a living friction between my duties and my compassion, now there were rigid walls. Clinical judgements. Professional boundaries. I became an expert compartmentalizer. I shifted from rescuer to victim. I started to see my complex patients as drug-seekers. Frequent flyers. Drains on the system. And I did the minimum to fulfill my duties, without touching my humanity or theirs.

There was a young woman in room 19. She was in heart failure from bacterial growth on her aortic valve. I assumed she was an IV drug user, the most common patient profile for young people with bacterial endocarditis. I tried to get her to confess to me that she had been using IV drugs, but she adamantly denied this. I felt self righteous and judgemental. I still wanted her to live and recover, and I still did everything I could to help her, but I felt smug. She had brought this on herself, I thought.

In reality, she had a terrible case of Lyme disease and co-infections, and had grown a biofilm on her aortic valve. She had to be transferred to another hospital for potential heart transplant.

A wall crumbled inside me. This young woman, alone and terrified, instead of receiving compassionate presence was interrogated and judged.

What had happened to me?

Who had I become?

The ensuing breakdown and burnout I experienced in the aftermath led me to herbalism, and to a career in soul care. I had locked my own soul away in a dark room so that I could fulfill what was expected of me. I shifted vocations to focus on relationship, interconnectedness, and to rediscover my deep compassion and love of beauty.

Still, within the realm of herbalism and soul care, the compulsion to rescue would occasionally dominate my practice. And I would find myself once again victimized, resentful, my soul locked away somewhere so I could serve others. And so, I would step away, find my soul again, and gently coax it back into my life.

I have come to believe that we each have a unique way of bearing our gifts into the world while retaining our soul life. We can amputate our soul and commodify our gifts, leading to all kinds of soul sicknesses. Finding the narrow way, where we remain in touch with our humanity and still able to live into our generous desires to give to the world, is a challenging pursuit. But a pursuit worth making.

And so I write. I write because my heart can overflow into my hands, the same way it did when I wiped the brow of the feverish or gently wrapped a wound. I can feel the heart glow in my pen or my keyboard, just the way I felt it at the bedside. I write because I can feel my soul alive and well, and I can honor the stories and relationships and connections that make life real. And I write to feed the gods.

The gods are alive and always evolving right alongside us. We feed them with our passion, our creativity, our love, our desires, and they feed us in return with inspiration and life force and guidance and synchronicity. When I write, I imagine I am singing a song back to the wind that was carried first by the thrush, or dancing a dance back to the earth that was first danced by the thundering raindrops. I am making into words the raw aliveness of the place and relationships that form my mind and language and imagination.

I write because I can’t not write. I can’t help it. I must. But I also write to give thanks. To connect. To give my hands a way to bear the ache in my heart. And to feed Life with beauty, in gratitude, for all it gives to us.

Thank you for reading what I write. And for helping me to feed the gods, and keep my soul alive.