Illness – Anna Citrino—Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage

Falling Into Wonder

August 7, 2016February 4, 2019 annacitrino

to my aunt blanche
who rolled from grass to driveway
into the street one sunday morning.

Aunt Blanche in Lucille Clifton’s “Praise Song” reminds me of the many times I’ve told myself I’m going to do (or not do) something, only to metaphorically fall off the lawn regarding commitments I had made to myself. Clifton’s poem presents the reader with Aunt Blanche standing in the yard with her family, experiencing the day together. It’s a Sunday, a day of relaxation, and a time to gather with family. Things seem to be going fine until, boom, down goes Aunt Blanche, slipping off the yard and into the street! Clifton explains that Aunt Blanche had a basketball body, indicating her aunt likely hasn’t practiced the habit of healthy eating, or she probably wouldn’t be as round as a basketball. In spite of her love of food, or even perhaps because of it, Aunt Blanche is a resilient woman: basketballs bounce, and this is exactly what Aunt Blanche does; she bounces up from the street, and out of danger’s way.

It’s interesting to note that Aunt Blanche’s family doesn’t run into the street to rescue her. Clifton explains that as a ten year old observing her aunt’s fall, she “understood/ little or nothing of what it meant,” but she had faith in her aunt to get up from the humbling event. “Praise to the faith with which she rose,” writes Clifton, describing her belief in her Aunt’s ability to return to the family. Thankfully, Aunt Blanche has enough wits about her to recognize she was in danger, and works to get her self out of the possibility of further harm from oncoming cars. Drivers, too, see the situation Aunt Blanche is in, and respond by moving out of the way, so as to not harm her. Then, similar to the father who waited for the Prodigal Son to return home, Aunt Blanche’s family, too, waits for her with open arms as she climbs out of the street and rejoins them on the grass: an occasion for praise. The horror that might have happened didn’t. Aunt Blanche sighs a bit, showing her dismay at her own behavior, but doesn’t stay in the road carrying on about how silly she was. Neither does she blame anything or anyone in her situation. She simply gets herself out of danger’s way, and walks back to her family, a place she knows she is safe, a place she belongs. When we fall, rather than judging or blaming, we all want to know there’ll be open arms waiting for us when we rejoin others. As Clifton indicates, such an attitude of acceptance is “like God.”

People are social beings who need to feel they belong and are respected by those in their group. What stories do we tell ourselves about those experiences where we fall that allows us to bounce back up like Aunt Blanche, dust ourselves off, forgive ourselves, and walk back onto the lawn and continue conversation with others because we understand that in the bigger picture of things, falling is part of the learning process? How might societies as a whole create ways of reacting to those who have fallen so that they can be drawn into the arms of others?

Poet and physician Rafaelo Campo, describes one of those ways in his poem, “What I Would Give.” Many of us carry a fear of falling ill, and Campo’s poem describes the fear people carry when they come to see him for medical help. The poem specifically mentions fears regarding lungs and melanoma, but these are merely examples of the myriad fears we carry with us from day to day: fears that our bodies won’t hold up under the activities we plan to undertake, fears about appearance, fears we won’t complete our work on time or meet people’s expectations, fears about how a new change we are making will affect our family or relationships, so many fears. Campo describes in his poem that what he wants to offer people, though, is “not the usual prescription with/ its hubris of the power to restore,/ to cure.” Perhaps because Campo is not only a doctor but also a poet, he understands that wellness is more expansive than physical wellness alone. It’s also connected to our emotional and social wellbeing, and how these are intertwined with our relationship to the physical environment.

Not all illnesses, aches or pain lead to recovery. If a person has arthritis, for example, she doesn’t get better. The disease progresses. When I see a person walking with a cane, I think of how challenging it is for that person to live with pain and ongoing suffering. Campo’s vision of healing moves beyond the elimination of pain to a wider plane. Even if we can’t be cured, his poem infers, we can be well. How that is possible, Campo suggests, is by opening ourselves to wonder.

I’d like to give them my astonishment
at sudden rainfall like the whole world weeping,
and how ridiculously gently it
slicked down my hair; I’d like to give them that,
the joy I felt while staring in your eyes
as you learned epidemiology
(the science of disease in populations),
the night around our bed like timelessness,
like comfort, like what I would give to them.

These lines show the wisdom of purposefully looking beyond disease and suffering to affirm the gifts abounding around us—to notice what is perhaps commonplace in life, yet amazing: rain falling gently on hair, or joy lighting the eyes of a loved one in the discovery of something new. Campo draws our attention to the idea that wholeness doesn’t have to mean a perfectly attuned body and mind. Healing is a part of a bigger dynamic of how we relate to both the natural world and to those around us. Seeing our connection to the physical world, and delighting in relationships with those around us can enable us to move beyond isolated suffering, and into seeing ourselves as part of the greater whole. It is this “seeing” that makes us whole again, even in our incompleteness. This is the larger healing Campo wants to give. Strength to deal with the pain (and the etymology of “comfort” is to intensify strengthening) comes from finding a way to stay in love with life even amidst struggle and pain. When we let ourselves reconnect to an awareness of life’s enormous gift, we lose ourselves into timelessness. In the process, we find a larger self. Even in the midst of danger, we feel safe, so that even “the night around our bed,” whether a bed of illness leading to death, or the bed of simple sleep, is a place of “comfort.” We can be at home with what is.

All illnesses, discomforts, failures, and “falls,” are opportunities to practice reframing suffering and pain within a wider perspective. Suffering and pain can engender compassion and gratitude, but we have to cultivate those qualities. Some people at an early age are faced with challenges or disabilities requiring them to grapple with how to live with great hardship. To be at home with whatever life gives us is extremely difficult. This is a journey that requires practice, likely years of practice, perhaps a lifetime. When you are ill, you recognize what a gift it is to be well, to be able to walk, to see, to breathe. I lived in a city with air quality so poor that it’s rare to see a cloud or blue sky, as I did for nine years in Delhi, taping the front door each night to reduce the smell of smoke. To see a blue sky filled with clouds large as mountains, for me, is truly a wonder, not a commonplace fact. Practicing gratitude in times of ongoing suffering or pain enables us to recognize we are connected to something bigger than our grief and our pain, and allows us the opportunity to identify with others around the world who suffer too.

Thoreau, in his experiment in living simply at Walden Pond, said he “went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” I want to live deeply. When I work, I give myself to that work fully, but I must remind myself to guard my energy, and practice purposefully widening my view—attending my ear and heart to the possibilities that allow connections to the natural world to surface. I need to practice making room for both work and wonder. “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living,” writes the Jewish scholar, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and like Heschel, I want to walk in wonder.

Uncategorized

Being Brought Low

July 25, 2016July 25, 2016 annacitrino

Living in India for nine years, you see difficult things—sights and experiences there are few words to adequately describe, that must be experienced to be grasped, and even then, can barely be comprehended. When you see the multitudes of families who’ve lived on the streets for their entire lives, breathing in street fumes and traffic, you understand how it is that India has the highest rate of death from respiratory illnesses of anywhere in the world, and why it is children who lack food, education and opportunity beg at street corners. People maim themselves in order to make more money begging. One quarter of India’s population has no access to water. In developed countries, toilets require water. In India, the majority have no toilet. According to Bloomberg’s website, 638 million people defecate in the open, a habit that creates serious health concerns and adds to the continued grime and stench people live in. Most of us prefer to live in a world where we feel safe and have at least a modicum of control over what happens to us. In India, millions don’t often have that choice. How can such disparity continue decade after decade? The German poet, Rilke, writes,

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

Those standing in the circle of wealth fence in the world with safety and warmth. We use our wealth and opportunity to make plans, create dreams, and carry them out. Perhaps you’ve read stories like Elie Weisel’s Night, depicting the experiences of those who suffered in concentration camps in WWII. If you’re like most people, you don’t want to suffer. Myths, stories, sacred texts, and the seasons themselves tell us that loss comes before renewal. Nevertheless, at some point—through illness, loss, through confrontation with old age or death, we’ll all be brought low.

Before moving to India, though I recognized I had a lot to learn, I thought of myself as a basically good person. I aimed to live conscientiously—to be kind and fair. I tried to avoid wasting resources, and aimed to follow the Golden Rule. The quantity of India’s need is overwhelming, however. Living there, I realized that all my “goodness” was not enough to meet India’s Everest of needs. Responding to the need I saw everywhere around me was beyond bearing. I continuously looked at that mountain’s heavy weight, and it made me think about God’s depth, God’s mercy. I did my work—teaching young students how to read and write, how to examine the world and wonder and describe how it might be different, hoping by some miraculous trickle down method, the students would someday, as adults, find professions that would enable them to address and meet the poor’s needs who lived in places like Delhi. While working in India, I did a few things beyond the classroom to address the needs of others around me. I led some teacher training workshops at the Tibetan Children’s Village School, for example. India’s poor continued to struggle, however, my efforts a tiny seed in the Sahara of need.

Physical poverty isn’t the only kind of poverty, however. Edward Hirsch’s poem, “Lay Back the Darkness,” describes suffering just as difficult to bear—that of a son observing his elderly father who has lost his mental faculties. The father shuffles between rooms, lost. Once, the father “could charm everything.” Now he stands amongst the shadows “on an obscure mission through the hallway,” unable to “remember what he meant to say.” The son, in anguish, cries out, “Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream/ and ease his restless passage.” This is not loss brought on by economic disparity or government corruption. Physical decline is a common, natural experience as life changes form when a person ages and moves toward death. The son in the poem loves his father, and remembers who his father once was, though that presence no longer inhabits his father’s body. Existence is ever evolving energy, shifting from one form to another. If, however, we’re more than our positions in society, our accomplishments and personality, our bodies, what are we? What is the soul? What is it we do when we love and give ourselves to a relationship? Dylan Thomas wrote, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age.” I was raised to believe in God, to be able to give certain answers about who or what God is—the maker of heaven and earth, for example, and the God inside the Biblical stories. Maybe the force Thomas speaks of is God. Maybe to connect to God is to learn, as did the prophets, to attune ourselves to the energy that moves through not only ourselves, but through all that is.

Maybe, however, God is wider than that description. Riding down a freeway, gazing at the ever-flowing streams of cars, or sitting in a room conversing with friends I’ve not seen in years, I sense the marvel of human existence, and wonder at its meaning.

What God really is, is mystery. Hirsch’s poem is a prayer, to “lay back the darkness,” to bring illumination. At the end of the poem, Hirsch describes his father, who in his final days has become

but a boy standing on the edge of a forest
listening to the distant cry of wolves,
to wild dogs,
to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops.

Prayer doesn’t need words. Prayer is standing humbly in silence before the vastness of all that is, and listening. This the father does. Genesis describes God creating all that is out of the void’s chaos. Hirsch depicts the father entering, again, the place of chaos, moving back to the void from which all things arose, a child, once more at the beginning of a journey. Life emerges from emptiness.

Confrontation with questions we have no answers for—with illness, suffering, or needs greater than can ever be met, is to stand at the edge of a forest listening to the distant cry of wolves—is to step into mystery. We need to put ourselves alongside such suffering. It is a necessary darkness. Rilke ends his poem about darkness, I earlier quoted from by saying, “I have faith in nights.” Suffering helps us learn to live. When we experience separation from others, from ourselves, or can’t find what we need in life to be whole, we suffer. We long for wholeness, as did Adam and Eve after they ate from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We long to be changed, even though we don’t know how or by what means. Rumi speaks of this in his poem, “Love Dogs,”

The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union,

Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.

My mother had Alzheimer’s, my father dementia. If I don’t end up wandering the halls in old age, I will still be brought low. All die. I don’t have answers for many things, but I can hear the love dogs moaning in my soul. What can I do, but open my arms and say, “Here I am.”

Uncategorized

Things of Consequence

June 21, 2012August 8, 2012 annacitrino

“As long as you don’t lose your mind, all outer strife is inconsequential.” Teresa of Avila

One advantage of having a broken wrist and bronchitis at the same time is that since you know you can’t do much, you can more easily accept that you will be taking the days slowly. You can give yourself over to your body’s natural rhythms, rising with the sun’s blossoming light, and waiting until after the fireflies begin to blink in the meadow before going to bed. Meals and the after dinner walk down the driveway are focal points of the day. This all seems fairly good. You tell yourself you are learning to live with a different rhythm and not to worry about accomplishing things. Here at the farm cottage outside of Assisi, I wake each day to an enormous oak that expands its arms across the meadow. Its work as a tree is to sink down roots and grow. Little by little. It takes all the time it needs to become what it is meant to become and is not worried about getting anywhere fast. The birds sing their songs above its head, the sun shines in the grassy field where the tree sits. Shadows rise and fall across its face but the oak simply continues to do what oak trees do, lift its arms and breathe. Somehow, I think it’s easier for a tree to go slowly and live deliberately than it is for a person, but I’m practicing.

oak tree outside my cottage window at Casa Rosa, Assisi, Italy

Two days ago when I had to go to the hospital for a follow-up X-ray of my fractured wrist, I was curious about whether the idea of slow living would extend to the world of medicine or not. The answer is yes. People at the hospital both here in Assisi where I got the X-ray, and at Perugia where the doctors read the X-ray were cordial and helpful, but it all took a long time–most the day, in fact. First there was paperwork and then waiting to do, and then more paperwork and more waiting. No one seemed in any particular hurry to get the X- ray copy done quickly. It would be ready whenever it would be ready, and it was assumed you could wait. This portion alone took an hour. Then we were sent to the cashier where we waited in line again, after which we then had to go to another city for a doctor to read the X-ray. The hospital facilities looked significantly better, however, than the hospitals in the south. The World Health Organization rates Italy’s health care as very good. Is it better to go to doctors who don’t seem pressed for time, who work at a slower pace? Maybe this would enable them to make more considered decisions. On the other hand, maybe they are less motivated to do a good job because their reputation is not as important in a system where the government pays you the same amount of money regardless of how many patients you see or the quality of your reputation. I don’t think I have enough information to make that judgment. I am using the health care my workplace in New Delhi has provided me in order to receive help, but I am also very thankful I could go to a hospital and get help here. So many people tout the advantages of slow living as a less stressful way of life, making us healthier in general. It leads me to wonder what people from the medical profession would have to say about “slow” medicine? What would their definition of it be and would they advocate for it?

Illness is a place, a world of its own. Its borders aren’t always clearly marked, but you know when you are there. The world of illness functions by different rules and works at a different pace. It’s a fuzzy sort of place where things appear slightly out of focus but you are too tired to care. You think more slowly, and odd activities that you normally wouldn’t do seem strangely attractive to you, like sleeping most the day, or drinking liters of water or juice. Strangers ask how you feel and offer to help you that normally would never occur to them. But that’s the point. You aren’t in your normal world. You are experiencing the world of illness, and though that world is rather limiting, the limitations are all for a greater good–to help you become whole again. Now that I’ve had the cast on my arm for more than a week, I can say that I have some idea of what it would be like to have an exoskeleton. There might be some advantages to an exoskeleton, such as not getting sunburned easily, and you can prop your arm on the edge of a table and pivot it up and down without pinching your skin, but I can report unequivocally that I still prefer the bones under the skin. Though illness has a way of distorting and changing reality, it also has a way of retuning reality so that you can see more of what really matters most to you.

Admittedly, there have been times in the last week when everything felt like it was moving all too slowly and I might have termed my experience as confining, not merely slow. I was stuck inside for lack of being able to breathe well when in my mind I wanted to go on long walks and explore the world. All year while living in Delhi I’ve been thinking of how narrow my life is–all lived within a radius of a few hundred yards for months on end. Sometimes I think of those people who sit in toll booths on the freeway, and wonder how they bear it. How do they feel day after day doing the same thing? How do they make meaning in their lives when so many hours a day are spent doing something routine and mindless? I’ve been longing for a change of scenery and for space, for new images, and here I am in Italy, a definite change, and yet, as a result of being ill, I’ve spent a lot of time sitting around in the same space. I could stay at home in California and enjoy the scenery of my yard there immensely. I did not have to come to Italy for that.

Or did I? I don’t know whether it’s a result of being ill and seeing things differently or if it is a result of enough trips to Italy now that I understand it on a different level, or if it because I have slowed my life down enough that I finally see what it is I really want, but what I see clearly now is that where I most want to be is at my home in California. Italy is beautiful, it’s true–the rolling hills of patchwork agriculture across the country, the ancient hilltop cities with their thousand year old churches made of stone. For several years now Michael and I have looked at property in Italy online, and have considered buying. But now I realize that I don’t want to live in a stone house with tiny windows off of a narrow stone street with no raw earth to walk on or ancient trees spreading their arms in my back yard. I need wild places. I need a garden. I need the redwoods. The ancient churches and cities of Italy have their stories to tell, and those stories have added to mine. Sitting here with the window open to the world in this little cottage in the hills where St. Francis walked and worked listening to the breeze rustle the trees and the birds sing, my sweet husband’s hand on my foot as I write, I know where I really want to be is at my home in Soquel.

This doesn’t mean I don’t ever want to travel any more. There are still places I want to see–Croatia, more of Greece, St. Petersburg, Prague, Morocco. And I also know it will take a few more years of living in the narrow situation of life in Delhi before I can afford to return home to CA, unless I can find some way to create an income there. But every life has its confinements, its narrow places that make it what it is. I’ve experienced a lot of ways of living over the past twenty one years of living and traveling in foreign countries but I want to live and make my home in Soquel where we are creating Gratitude Gardens. Look for further progress on the garden over the next few years.