Monthly Archives: October 2009

Forgive my absence, gentle readers. I had to step back and reshuffle the deck, as it were. My work week was long, and thick with other people’s sorrows. When your work puts you so close to the messy particulars of the human condition, you’re bound to encounter all manner of evils and fears and heartbreaks, running the spectrum from the heart-stopping to the mundane. Whether exceptional or everyday, some of those black moments stick to you like a bad smell, vague and nagging and ever-present. And frequently, you don’t even know what to do with them. They sit for a day or a month, and your spirit finds a place for them, or not. They sit on a shelf in your mind, awaiting the dust that will surely gather, or they roll like restless marbles on an uneven floor, just out of reach behind a heavy dresser.

The most difficult realization in these moments (it’s not new, though it hits like new every time) is that I can’t fix the world. I can’t really even kiss its boo-boos, put on a pretty bandaid, and send it on its way. Nothing I sew closed will cease to bleed; nothing I splint won’t break all over again tomorrow. But what I can do is this: look into the eyes of another, set aside questions of judgment, and be present with them in their darkest moment. Bearing witness. It’s a brave, powerful thing. Useless, too, in the sense that it isn’t bandaid or suture or cast. But, in these tiny moments, perhaps the most useful thing I can do.

Or so I have to tell myself.

A few days ago, I encountered a scene that would not have been out of place in the crudest of horror flicks. I gagged, for only the second time in my EMS career, at the physical condition one human being had been left in. He shouldn’t have been alive–and, at first, I wasn’t certain that he was. But when I said his name, his eyes flickered open and rolled in their sockets to look into mine.

Dante has written about what I saw there.

We were not in the business of saving this man’s life. That it was at its end was understood by all present. But I gave him what I could: some small physical comfort, a human touch , and the anemic little beam of my compassion, dampened though all these things were by glove and gown and mask and glasses.

I don’t know who he was, as a person. I don’t know if under any other circumstances I would have deemed him worthy of my tenderness (and, yes–that says far more about me than it does about him). But in that moment, the only defense I had against that kind of sisyphean misery was a tiny, fierce, impotent, brandished point of love.

We are all Doing The Best We Can.

This has been in my head for days now. Maybe another defense, some small bit of beauty to hang on to:

Whew. And it’s just like that–deep and awful butts up against grand and beautiful, and our big old world keeps spinning.

I don’t know what the temps are like where you are, but here in the high desert, Fall is officially here. The crisp bite of the air trumps what warmth the sun is still putting out, and today I couldn’t leave the house without a vest. It’s skirt and tall boot weather, put a hat in your pocket weather, smell of woodsmoke weather.

This weather, this season has always been comforting to me, more than any other. It’s the sense of transition, maybe, or the approach of the hermit season just ahead, when we pile under covers, and drink hot soup, and read for hours after the sun goes down.

Last week–on the autumn equinox itself, actually–I had the pleasure of seeing The Felice Brothers and OCMS sing out the summer, in the last outdoor show of the season. The night was cold, the beer was colder, and I think even the stars were giddy. It was newly banjo-picking weather, hay bale weather, shushushushing through fallen leaves weather. I was fiddle-drunk and head-over-heels again with my season.

This afternoon, I watched golden light on golden leaves, and shrugged off some of that smell I told you about when we began. Tonight, I’ve conceded to close one window, but the brisk air still filters in the others, and I feel its fingers brush past me as I’m chopping onions in the kitchen, an all-weather dog at my feet. Did I mention it’s Crock Pot weather? I’ve been stewing, and I’ve been stewing. I’ve said what I can about the one; the other I’ll tell you about soon.

If you’re lucky enough for Fall to have reached you, pull on some warm socks, make a cup of tea, and say howdy along with me. She’ll be gone long before I’m ready to see her go.