I started working nights a few months back and other than the whole zombie-feeling and decay of any lucid thinking, I don't feel entirely thrown off the bucket or floppy as a fish. Though, I must admit, my earnest cravings and deepest deprivation lies in missing out on the morning experience. The morning, being well rested, when the new, fresh air invades the nares, reminding the soul that today new possibilities exist to which all shortcomings and blessings can be celebrated. The pursuit of life and love in the human process is possible.
Today, I was reminded. Last night was a night from hell. I tried to prove my competency by moving 300-lb patients by myself and then having to catch them as they fell, placing patient by patient on and off the bedpan, and hoping for once, I wouldn't spill the pee or shit all over the patient as we wiggled our way around to clean up. For once, I didn't want to have to ask for help on how to perform or forget to do a simple, but essential, task. I was tired, achey, and the patience meter was shot. Nothing. I was tired of meeting the needs of these people, both large and small. Why wouldn't they just be okay for awhile? Why did I have to ask myself, "Where the hell are you, compassion? Please, arrive pronto." I was behind on everything I had to do, and wanted to escape in any way possible.
Finally, thirty minutes after I was to give report, I was helping one last patient off the bedpan who had wet her whole bed and needed to be changed, when it arrived. I glanced out the window in hopes to escape for a mere second, and there existed and shown with great glory, an intricately layered sunrise, full and promising, glistening in such intensity that I stood aback, jaw-dropped. I took the bedpan in my hand and sat on the floor of the room, repeating, "Oh my..." The room I was in was a four bed ward (major old-timey hospital) that had four beds with four different patients. As soon as I sat down, one sweet lady came over from bed 2 and said, "Honey, you okay??? What is it?" All the patients but the one bed-ridden patient got up, and made their way over to the window to see. "Whoa...." one of them droned out.
There, in that instant, we proceeded past ourselves, past our own individual achey-ness, both different and alike, our mishaps, our human hunger as well as human sorrow, and were somehow, strangely standing on holy ground. We were sharing the beautiful, vastly expansive gift of life, and we all had an understanding of the healing to our souls in that instant. Not just the sunrise, but the precious communion to which the sunrise provoked.
Maybe our faith in God and life and Jesus or whatever animates the spark of life within us, compels us to behold the thought that everything we have is a gift to be shared with others, being the sunrise or the patient's shit we both encounter as we continually give and receive. Maybe we breathe and look and feel so that our lives should be spent in loving those around us, and that every sunrise, sunset, mountaintop, a petty need or request, or late-night exchange of laughter is the greatest damn thing that could ever happen to us. Just maybe the holy ground isn't reserved for the churches or the shrines or the temples, but maybe the holy ground exists as all ground, where feet and hearts alike, find themselves at home.
"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness; touch, taste, smell your way into the holy and hidden heart of it all because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life, itself, is grace." -Frederick Buechner
