It is August – that most pregnant time of year. This moment is always so full– so full with the unfolding of the previous 8 months. And so full of mystery – what will unfold for the remainder of this year’s contribution to our earthly solar spiral?

Summertime has always had a heavy hold over me. The light of June is too much, although it awakens dormant energy within me and that is a wonder. But the late nights leave me feeling wired, never fully rested, somewhat on edge. I prefer to go to sleep in the pitch dark and wake up still in that pitch, held by a quiet womb that expects nothing. August, suspended halfway between the solstice and the equinox, starts to reopen that womb.

So now it is evening in this 8th month, in this 18th week of Ordinary Time. I sit with my family on top of a bluff watching the sun set over the ocean. My daughter sits with her legs crossed, back sticky with resin from the tree she is resting on, drawing the sunset with colored pencils, smudging the colors in impressive blends I didn’t know she knew how to do. We are the only ones on this bluff, having walked down an unmarked path ¾ of a mile long to get to this most secret of beaches. The water softly pools between rocky outcrops, the ferns encircle the base of
the Doug Firs like upside-down laurel wreaths, and the salal berries dangle like they’re hanging on for dear life. All the while, underneath us the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate inches ever closer, shifting the sand beneath our feet.

My mind travels down the coastline many hundreds of miles, to where that tiny hospice sits nestled into the surf’s southern tentacles. One year ago, I visited it, this tiny hospice run by religious sisters. I wanted to see and touch another way of doing things, another way of end-of-life care outside of insurance algorithms and the proceduralism endemic to a sterile health care system. For a brief moment, I did get to see and touch it. I saw people washed and bathed and fed and clothed and also accompanied in their death in a wholly, Holy different way. I saw them tended to by sisters wrapped in habits who crossed themselves as they passed the chapel between patient rooms, who said the same prayers at the same time everyday no matter what was happening. It was like seeing into another galaxy.

My visit changed me, but not in the dramatic alteration I had hoped for. I had dreamt that following such an experience, I would be hired by Partners in Health or some such similar NGO and get to live with my family away from US imperialism. Or that perhaps I would be able to find the connections and support to start a similar lay-led hospice. In short, I thought it would teach me how to escape. But that is not what happened.

I returned to my same role as a staff RN within the same medical center. I returned to my life as a parent in an imperial, increasingly authoritarian country. My broken self in this broken health care system in this broken country.

But just like Juan de Fuca’s fingers beneath us, the sisters subtly changed my very foundation. After my visit, I was able to remember in my body the vocational call I have to nursing and the honor and blessing that is, no matter what system I find myself in. Between my patient and myself, the sisters’ spirit began to guide me back into a bidirectional and transformational healing that I had forgotten about for so many years. I do believe ever so strongly now that my patients heal me in more ways than I can ever heal them. It is I who am the hemorrhagic woman
and they who are the Christ figures – of this, I am sure. And what we engage in together is sacred.

I suppose I came away with clarity. Although not the clarity I had hoped for, a freeing clarity nonetheless. Knowing these sisters are there, reciting their psalms, tending to the sick, and washing the dead is a cosmic comfort giving me hope and anchor. When I am hanging a bag of chemo and I happen to glance out the window, I know that the same sun warms their hearts, too, and that we are connected in our healing spirits in this Body of Christ.

With these thoughts my mind returns to the present, to the no-small-miracle of another sunset. My daughter shifts so that she’s resting against me instead of on her sap-soaked tree. Me, one half of her human nurse log. This beautiful child within whom life blooms and blooms. I sense Juan’s movements below us, liberating us into our smallness, reminding us of the revelatory marvel that we exist at all.