appetite

Inspired by Sarah's latest Wislawa Szymborska post and life.

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appetite

How easy to love the ones who love us back!
To crawl through the eons that separate face from face,
to fight with such intensity that your wounded
hearts only grow closer on reconciling.

How hard it is to love the ones
who do not love us back,
whose battles become permanent wedges and tight smiles.
How many of them life hands us
until to love becomes
a duty
an obligation
a responsibility.

A weary hand feeding its body
purely out of necessity
with food that lost its taste
long ago.

How this heart craves the flavor
this palate is denied.
How this mind longs for meanings
this throat wishes it could choke down.

Instead,
this shell lives in seas
of cold oatmeal and spoons clinked with haste.
The machine requires sustenance
to keep loving
without receiving
(with a secret hope
that one day
the clouds will thunder into existence
machines who love back).

-Anita
--

thank you note

I owe so much
to those I don’t love.

The relief as I agree
that someone else needs them more.

The happiness that I’m not
the wolf to their sheep.

The peace I feel with them,
the freedom –
love can neither give
nor take that.

I don’t wait for them,
as in window-to-door-and-back.
Almost as patient
as a sundial,
I understand
what love can’t.
and forgive
as love never would.

From a rendezvous to a letter
is just a few days or weeks,
not an eternity.

Trips with them always go smoothly,
concerts are heard,
cathedrals visited,
scenery is seen.

And when seven hills and rivers
come between us,
the hills and rivers
can be found on any map.

They deserve the credit
if I live in three dimensions,
in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space
with a genuine, shifting horizon.

They themselves don’t realize
how much they hold in their empty hands.

“I don’t owe them a thing,”
would be love’s answer
to this open question.

-Wislawa Szymborska

pretty sure

I'm pretty sure you exist out there, somewhere. I refuse to believe that a heart would be made to long for someone who does not exist.

I wish you'd introduce yourself soon. I'm getting tired of waiting for you, hoping I'll find you in the eyes of everyone I meet. There's little bits of you in all I see, in all the beauty of the world, in the stories I hear and the stories I tell to my own heart.

I'm looking forward to that moment when I look in your eyes and know that you see me, and that you've been looking for me too.

Until then, I guess I'll just keep my feet on the ground and my eyes to the stars, letting the bits of beauty in each moment overwhelm me.

38 years

I love that look you give him when he's telling stories about you. The way you roll your eyes and snort, telling us how someone's got to set him straight, after all. You've been married for 38 years now, with one son and more memories than you can remember anymore.

You told me that you're scared, and that you wonder if it's even worth fighting anymore. You're afraid that you'll suffer through all these treatments only to find that the cancer remains. All the pain, side effects, uncomfortable procedures--all for nothing. You're more afraid of false hope than anything, afraid of what will be left if the treatments don't work, afraid of the weight of broken dreams, afraid that your heart won't be able to take any more bad news.

But I don't want to let you give up hope. Every time I see you, I want to make you roll your eyes and set that cancer straight.

And I watch your husband tell your stories for you, reminding you each day of the fight you've always had. Every day, even when you refuse to eat or get out of bed or watch the sun go down, he's right there with you.

Yesterday we took you outside to feel the sun on your face and the wind in your hair again, for the first time in weeks. I watched you smile as I sat at your side. And I hoped for you. God, how I hoped for you.

The world's buttery sheen

Everyday, I try to find something to be grateful for.

Everyday, I try to create something to be grateful for.

My hiatus from medical school has been strange. I keep breathing in all of the third year emotions of my friends and former classmates: frustration, anger, joy, wonder, exhaustion. It's more negative than positive. Is medicine more negative than positive?

I realized today that if I had done either medicine alone or anthropology alone, I could have been better at them in that nauseating academic way. Sacrifice my soul for higher honors, spend more time in the ivory tower writing publications for 5 people to read and 10 people to skim.

For all my losses, for all my pauses, I am more human.

My sorrows have only led me to kindness, constantly trying to enact it, never knowing how, stumbling, fumbling awkwardly through my phrases and gestures.

Meanwhile, my buttery heart melts and oozes its contents all over my body.

These days, I like to breathe and wait for my thoughts to vanish.

moments

I delivered a baby girl yesterday.

My hands were the first hands to hold her in this world--the first human contact she has ever had outside the womb. It's pretty crazy when you think about it, what a privilege that is.

The other day one of my friends was reflecting on how amazing it is to get to be present for these life-changing moments in the lives of others. To get to be there for those moments that change everything, both the good and the difficult.

But then came the question: are we making the time to be for those moments in our own lives?

Resilience

When I'm in the clinic, part of me is there and part of me is wrapping my head around Arthur Kleinman. This is just a tribute to the humbling stories you get to hear in primary care.

Like the Ukranian woman who survived world war II; whose husband was sent to Siberia when she was pregnant with her first child, never to return; who endured the cold noodles, applesauce, and black coffee of the camps where others asked her how she was so pretty despite that horrible food when everyone else looked so miserable ("I am of good stock," she said); whose second husband, whom she met after coming to the US, promised her an iPad for their anniversary he didn't live to see; whose children remembered and bought her the iPad and got her drunk with joy and alcohol at a dinner overlooking the Mississippi River.

Still going strong in her late eighties, and despite her losses, she is a lively woman who refuses to be crushed by sorrow.



Today was one of the most beautiful October days I've ever felt, and I spent it in a way that a few years ago I thought I might like to. My gray skies are passing clouds, and nothing compared to the pain that these patients have suffered. But you can still drown in a drizzle.

Medicine continually reminds me it is but a drizzle; but I continue to create my own storm to drown in.

Durga

I am a warrior.
I have the strength of the elephant
you imagined I was after you took my tusks and fled.
But I need no tusks to conquer a coward.

I have the power in my bones to decapitate you with my hands alone,
I have the beauty of my skin to seduce a thousand predators,
the cunning to convert them to prey,
I have the love of an elephant's heart to forgive
the wisdom of an elephant's soul to never forget.

I abandoned your elephant on a train;
I have no need for symbols.
And the elephant I gave you
will never be more than a symbol.

A coward with ivory is
still a coward.
My tusks will not protect you as I did.

An elephant without tusks
can still crack a coconut under her foot.

Overtime

You apologize for
the blood on your pants
the fading scars on, the size of your soft white stomach
your thin hair, graying at forty, that would curl if cut short
the cancer that left you with your left breast and an unfinished reconstruction
and then the cancer that stole your right kidney

(Ironic that the left side, the sinister, was so good to you)

You apologize for having dreams
for your mother, who died even when you gave them up
for your guilt
for your pain

in short
you apologize for
existing.

I apologize for
hiding behind a cloak of professionalism that says
I am not allowed to cry with you
I am not allowed to hug you

Instead I tell you
cold water and hydrogen peroxide will get the blood out
Instead I give you
my open eyes and hope you can feel my heart in my irises
Instead I send you
into an empty world where you are not only alone but lonely
an empty world where no one apologizes
but you
and me.

--Anita

with that moon language

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a
full moon in each eye that is
always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in
this world is
dying to
hear?

-Hafiz

heart fibers

I confess
to no one in particular
that I drew Death.
I am waiting to burst forth from the ashes and flames
like a phoenix who opens her eyes
and all the world drops alive.

is Death a sunset or a sunrise?

when the cards stopped making sense I stopped drawing them
scotch taped Death on my wall.
in the candlelight
a backbend turned my ribs into phoenix wings

Anais Nin

And then the day came
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.

smiling with the heart

Today in our graduate seminar on methods in cultural anthropology, Dr. Geoff Childs invited KP Kafle, a collaborator from Nepal, who runs the non-profit Nepal Seeds. Together, they have built schools, installed potable water systems, and staffed clinics in the villages where Geoff did (and continues to do) his fieldwork, and they are continuing to work on development projects there to the point that Geoff's research and involvement in community development projects are completely intertwined.

Part of the point of today's class was addressing the question: how do we give back to the communities we work in? Anthropology can be so exploitative--go in, extract your data from the marginalized poor, get out, and live your happy upper-middle class life in the US. Geoff and KP's partnership is a great example that it doesn't have to be that way.

KP is a remarkable individual who works with REI Adventures and leads foreign trekkers through the mountains. Geoff, during his fieldwork, had asked countless groups of trekkers to send some dewormers, at the very least, on their next expeditions, to the rural area where he and the villagers lived. But as Geoff remarked, for every thousand promises in Nepal, only one is fulfilled. KP turned to be that one in a thousand--much to Geoff's surprise, he sent someone on the seven-day hike to the village with one package of dewormers for everyone, and a friendship and partnership blossomed from there.

The development success story is inspiring: someone is actually using anthropology to improve the human condition! But it also stirs up that consuming anger in me, which I need to learn to temper. Why isn't more anthropology like this? Why is our discipline so closed off to the rest of the world? Why don't we disseminate our research findings more widely? Why is our rewards system set up so that we only advance our careers if we publish an article with so much theory and jargon that only 15 other people can comprehend it? Why are we anthropologists "muy buenos para oponer pero no para proponer," in the words of a Guatemalan from the Guatemala Scholars Conference (July 2011)--why are we so good at opposing but not proposing?

I know the answers to these questions...and I posed them all in class today. And I got some mixed reactions. I know not everyone's in anthropology to save the world, and it's silly to think we can as individuals. But getting to talk with KP stirred up the fire of my barefoot and militant idealism and my moral outrage with the discipline. Where is the "primacy of the ethical," as Nancy Scheper-Hughes puts it?

Russell Bernard makes a good point about ethnographic methods: we can be objective and treat our work as a science, but we do not have to be neutral.

KP greeted me with a "Namaskar." It was so nice to be greeted in that way. And then he said something that I'll never forget: There are two kinds of smiles in the world. You can smile with your teeth, or you can smile with your heart.

Transitioning into grad school has been difficult for a variety of reasons, but mostly personal. So I start this blog in the spirit of overcoming whatever first-world problems I have (not to delegitimate them completely), with a newfound love for Arthur Kleinman's work and awe of people like KP, hoping to smile at the world with my heart.