Being Present at Work
As I write this early morning, I am experiencing one of the unexpected but familiar moments of serendipity that I have become accustomed to. I opened my email to find today's update from the Daily OM. My title for this blog post is the title of their piece today: Being Present at Work.
At this moment, that title brings with it an initial sense of anger, or maybe angst is a better term. Politically and socially, the workplace is being used as a tool -- or perhaps a weapon -- to deliver a message and create a world beholden to a certain vision. I am not writing a political post, but I cannot ignore the deeply visceral and moral response I have when seeing those words and considering what is happening in some workplaces. However, those words also serve as a portal to the deeper insight I want to share, allowing me to "connect the dots."
This morning, I also read a Facebook post from a hospice nurse, Kathy, who was enrolling her loved one in hospice care. She described how the nurse sat with her loved one, listened, answered questions, and was patient and caring. Kathy used the terms "grateful…caring spirit…blessed…peaceful…expertise" to describe the nurse.
I reminded Kathy, and I share here, that over my 35 years as a hospice doc, the most common comment I heard from patients and their families was that the hospice nurses were "angels." It is a term I hear consistently no matter the circumstances, no matter the age, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or socioeconomic status of either the patient, family, or the nurse. This seems to beg the question, why?
Dying is a time of mystery, awe, and wonder. It is a liminal space. The process is filled with incipience. There is more happening in the sacred space around a dying person than the medical mind can comprehend.
Glimpses of what is happening are shared with us by the one transitioning from this world through their visioning, their use of symbolic language, and their control of the timing of their death. But perhaps something else is happening: The Lakota Sioux shaman Fools Crow said that when he attended the dying, he would become a "hollow bone". He knew that if he would make space for the Spirit to move through him and "get himself out of the way," the healing and energy needed by the person in front of him would show up. I have found that to be true in my work. Entering the sacred space of a dying person, without an agenda, I have often been gifted with the words, advice, insights, and support that the person and family needed. In a sense, I did not know what I would say until I said it.
With that in mind, perhaps hospice nurses such as Fran, Sally, Heidi, and Holly (and, actually, most of the hospice nurses I have known) have always been a "hollow bone." When they show up, despite their unique and individual human identities, and in addition to their clinical gifts and skills, they become vessels in that liminal space for the sacred to manifest. The archetypical love, goodness, compassion, and unity are represented for us and presented to us in the form of an "angel." Perhaps we humans are created in such a way that we know when we are in the presence of that which connects us to our home.
This morning, I also opened an email from Richard Groves, the Founding Director of the Sacred Art of Living Center. The details of the email are not important here, but it allowed me to remember something that happened last night. I stumbled upon a book by Henri Nouwen that my father-in-law Robert gave me in 2010. It was filled with scores of his handwritten footnotes, and reading them made me feel connected to him. He was such a spiritual seeker. In writing back to Richard, I told him of the insight seeing those notes gave me in the twilight before sleep: I felt and knew deeply that nothing is about ME or YOU, that we are manifestations and representatives of the love/goodness/sacred that supersedes all evil and suffering in this world.
So, for the hospice nurse, being present at work is transcendent and far greater than any political agenda. And the message for me, the awe and wonder, is to consider that we ALL can manifest the "angel" in us. WE just need to get out of the way.