I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment
on my life.
-David Ignatow
This fall, I’ve written to you about leaves and roses and water fanning out from a garden hose across my back yard. In nature, poet David Ignatow thinks the idea is to be content with what we see, whether beautiful or scarred. It is our tendency to seek to fuss with and readjust nature. Cut flowers need to be arranged, we think. Dead leaves must be swept away. It’s hard for us to leave the world alone – especially as she presents herself in our backyard. Parks we visit need to spread signs around warning us not to touch. Can we be content to observe the mountain or the rose for their strength and elegance and not as a comment on our lives?…
Ignatow tells us he thinks he should be content just to look. This means it is his temptation to connect the meaning of the mountain to meaning in his own life, to take the presence of the mountain as some kind of personal commentary on his life. But we wonder if, standing there in its massive presence, he succeeds.
Sensitive caregivers are inclined to take the twists and turns in their patients health as commentaries on their caregiving. I have often heard nurses say, upon the death of someone in their care, "My patient died on me." As if the patient had chosen to pass away as a direct insult to the caregiver.
When we are present to a patient’s suffering, it is natural that some kind of blurring occurs in the line between patient and caregiver. This is why leaders often counsel the need for "boundaries."
I don’t know if boundary discussions are helpful or not. What seems clear is that committed caregivers share in both pain and joy. This is apparent in hospital nurseries where caregivers welcome new life and in hospices where caregivers walk with their patients to the end of their path, holding their hands until they must let go.
Fall is a time of letting go. As a human being, I can’t help but take that personally as I watch autumn commit its annual robbery, its killings in my backyard and along the road to work, its reminder of life beyond flourescent lights.
October Leaf
Even though a trace of green
veins her new gold,
I know she is about to dive,
standing there on the edge
scared as a nine-year old facing a first
big leap off the dock and into the lake;
excited as Archimedes about to hurl
himself from his bath mid-Eureka;
horrified as 17-year old seamstress Rebecca
Feibish, window-ledged on the last day
of her life in 1911, by flames
ripping the floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory where she took her last stand.
I watch the leaf plan her flight path,
test the wind, survey the angle of the sun,
sniff for the presence of birds
whose wings might interfere,
recite her penance.
She fetches a final glance at her sisters
& brothers, bunched, staring back,
planning their own leaps.
It must be hard for her
to plan the trajectory
of a journey that will be
her first, her only,
her last.
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
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