Journal of Sacred Work

We are in a patient’s life for a season.  – Lorraine Eaton, R.N. CCRN

   As a longtime critical care nurse, Lorraine has cared for countless patients during their season of suffering. She has been with some, and their families, in their final hours. She has nursed numerous others through their recovery and back to health. Many of them, semi-conscious while she cared for them, don’t remember her after they recover. But she doesn’t mind. She doesn’t do her work for praise or to get rich. She does it because she is a lover. She cares
for people in need, giving them the skills of her hands and the gifts of her heart.
   I learned that Lorraine Eaton is careful to look after herself, resting and taking long walks through the countryside around her rural home. With Lorraine’s inspiration in mind, I took a walk on Sunday afternoon through the rolling hills around our home. I found, there, gifts unavailable in the finest shopping malls and department stores in the world. And they were all free…

   Clouds lowered the sky as I started off, intent, at the beginning, to gain some exercise. It’s difficult to take a walk these days without feeling the responsibility to stride along on the mission of better health.
   But what is it we earn with the health we have won? How do we use our precious hours of relaxation?
   It took me a full twenty minutes to slow my pace, to begin to see the gifts of a mild winter day. As
I ambled past evergreens and beneath the empty branches of sycamores, I came upon dozens of robins hopping across a little hill just ahead of my stride. You see robins in Tennessee at this time of year. You don’t see many in December up in Ohio where I spent my teenage years.
   The seasons move to a different rhythm in parts of the country where I’ve lived. Around my childhood in southern California, the weather was so consistently nice that we sometimes yearned for a little storm for contrast. At Christmastime, my Midwestern-born parents would close the curtains and invite our six-member family to imagine it was snowing outside.
   In my twelfth year, we moved to northern Ohio. I never hoped for bad weather again. Winter overstays her welcome in that part of the world. She barges through the door in November and, like an unwelcome visitor, hangs around into April, stepping on the fragile toes of spring, sometimes intruding on the celebration of May.
   Nashville, my current home, slices the seasons into their proper calendar length – three months each. Winter, here, is polite as a southern gentleman, entering on cue, making a mannerly departure at the end of February. By the first week in March, southern belles appear as blossoming Bradford Pear trees.
   I like the balance of weather in the south. Even the hot summers define the reason why this region has produced so many fine writers. You have to slow down in the south’s summer heat. And its in the slowing down that we begin to experience the gifts of beauty only seen in stillness.
   As I traveled beyond a row of naked oaks, something large rose up along the edge of my vision.
One would think that a bird as huge as a Blue Heron would make lots of noise as it breaks the grip of earth’s gravity. Flexing his enormous wings he entered the gray sky with a grace he doesn’t own on the ground. His rising was a quiet as a butterfly. I stood and watched his winged elegance as he traveled roughly the length of the Wright Brothers first flight and landed a safe distance from me, the intruder into his life.
   Above me, a half-dozen Cedar Wax Wings hopped along the limbs of a maple, their raked tufts  mimicking the sleek caps of Robin Hood and his merry band.
   I took a deep breath. What is winter’s scent? Some would say that, compared to the heady aromas that decorate spring’s air, winter doesn’t have much of a fragrance. But evergreens never smell as sweet as they do in December and the air never smells cleaner than it does in winter.
   Winter has her own whisper. Anyone who has stood silent in the middle of a snow-covered forest knows the special quiet the world has when it is covered by snow’s blanket.
   It’s Advent, I thought, as I headed toward home – a time of hope and expectation. But soon, winter will enter into its hard, middle stage a time when, in the north, it seems spring will never come.
   The words of Albert Camus rose in my memory: "In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer."
   Those who fear winter and who may even suffer the weight of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) may take heart in Camus’ words. Here in the south, my distaste for winter has finally departed. I am grateful, finally, for every season – especially those that I am able to enjoy in good health.
   Afflicted with a chronic illness and, like everyone, scarred by other life blows, I have had many seasons of suffering. And I have spent most of my adult life working in hospitals where, to quote my long time colleague and former nursing director, Marian Hamm, "there is never a good day because all the patients are sick."
   At the end of my walk, I lingered outside my front door, stared up at the sky. The clouds had begun to split apart, opening a thousand doors to a brighter evening. I found myself saying a silent thanks to Lorraine for the example she sets of resting in nature whenever she can. Working twelve-hour shifts under fluorescent lights can tire any caregiver. Lorraine has found a balance that helps her stay refreshed and enables her to be one of the finest caregivers I know.
   I began wondering about you. How are you doing giving yourself permission to rest and refresh outdoors? I worry about you because I imagine the kind of hours you keep and the rich commitment you make to meeting the needs of others.
   The voice of beauty requires that we slow our pace to hear her song. It’s hard to create fine art, or give the best care, at high speed. Velocity is the enemy of art and the opponent of presence. This is not a call to slow down in the middle of emergencies. It is a call to grace – the ability to remain loving and present even when called to work quickly to save a life. Watch the face of any great quarterbacks in the final seconds of a tight game. Leaders are called to act quickly, yet the best ones maintain a remarkable serenity while everyone else is rushing, as if attending to a sense of an eternal time within rather than the clock on the scoreboard.
   There are many gifts available to all of us all the time. They are free but not cheap. They wait for us in two places: within us in the peace that lives behind closed eyes, and outside of us, down the street, where chickadees hop branch to branch and the winter smells clean and fresh.