One Turtle at a Time

So, there we were, three people, three cars blocking the road, all because of a turtle. If anyone had seen us, they'd have thought we were "touched in the head." And we were touched, but in a way we didn't anticipate. This is how it all happened.

I was on my way to school to attend to some minor business. Nothing serious, just the kind you feel better handling in person rather than over the phone or by email. When you're asking for something, "no" is less easily said face to face. Turned out, I was right and I'm glad I went.

About halfway there I noticed something small and dark crossing the road. I was almost on top of it, literally, when I realized it was a turtle and I swerved to avoid hitting it. At the rate it's going, I thought, the odds are pretty good its journey will be cut short before it reaches the other side. So I turned around, Beggar to the rescue.

I happened to notice a pickup truck do likewise and I wondered if its driver and I had the same idea. We had just pulled over as a third driver stopped, got out and helped the little guy/gal across the road onto a patch of grass. The truck driver commented, "Well, we've all done our good deed for the day."

I responded, "There's something else going on here. Want to know what it is?"

He gave me a quizzical look and I explained, "You've got a Bush sticker on your truck and I've got an Obama sticker on mine, yet here we are, brought together by our concern for a little turtle." He got the point, smiled, we said our farewells and drove away, his radio likely tuned to George Strait while I cranked up the volume on the Goo Goo Dolls.

It's a pretty good guess he and I voted somewhat differently this past November, but that no longer mattered. Maybe that's how we do this, I mused. We change the world one turtle at a time.

Reflections on Graduation, 2009

It's Saturday evening and I'm thinking about 125 new osteopathic physicians who took their medical oaths today. I interviewed with and was admitted to medical school with this Class of 2009 although circumstances required me to delay entrance until the following year. I have no regrets though, because it allowed me to become part of the most wonderful group of people I've ever known, i.e. the Class of 2010.

The Class of 2009 were our mentors. They taught us how to survive the herculean task that is medical school and maintain our sanity in the process. They offered advice and encouragement, we played and learned together. One fall evening a group of us put on a spoof of beauty contests, featuring male medical students competing on the basis of talent, scrub suits, and our skill at responding to "serious" questions. It has become an annual event and last year, yours truly was honored with the title of Mr. Congeniality. Miss Congeniality is the one all the guys should marry because, although she may not be the most lovely, she's certainly the most level-headed. I don't think all the available ladies are lined up at my door, but it was fun nevertheless.

In a few months the members of the Class of 2009 will scatter to the four winds, beginning residency programs in family medicine, psychiatry, emergency medicine, and all the other specialties. Some of them we may see frequently and others maybe never again. I attended this morning for just that reason. I wanted to see them together once more, to say thanks, and wish them well. As they walked across the stage and were given diplomas rolled up like ancient scrolls and bound with blue and gold ribbon, I couldn't help but imagine what it will be like for me and tears came unbidden.

The longer I'm a part of this process the more precious it becomes. Carlos Casteneda called it discovering where your heart lies. Joseph Campbell described it in terms of finding your bliss. However we describe it, I'm grateful to be a part of the community of healers -- there is absolutely nothing like it.

Dances with Wolves

I'm listening to the sound track to the film Dances with Wolves at the moment and thinking about Lt. John J. Dunbar, the lead character played by Kevin Costner. Dunbar is extraordinary for a number of reasons, not the least of which is his ability to get in touch with his feeling side. Let me tell you what I mean.

Early in the story, when he's arrived at Ft. Sedgewick, he sees a lone wolf and raises his rifle to shoot. Something within him resists, he lowers his weapon, and not soon after, names the wolf Two Socks. In mythic tales, it is the right of the King to name and thereby confer existence in the eyes of the King. By naming the wolf, Dunbar attributes to him personal significance and meaning. If I use an endearment while addressing a woman in a dream, even if I'm too nervous to use that name when awake and in person, it still reveals a great deal about how I feel.

As the story unfolds, Dunbar becomes increasingly drawn to the life of the Lakota Sioux who are camped nearby. Their friendliness, easy humor, and appreciation for the natural world draws him powerfully. He sees in them a way of living that is more genuine than what he has previously known and he not only comes to embrace it, he fights to defend it.

This is what I mean by feeling. It's not emotion, though it may be emotional. It's more the capacity to engage intentionally and with responsibility. Sometimes we engage inappropriately for reasons we come to regret. We don't really see it at the time but given enough time it becomes clear we've made a mistake. What motivates us to recognize it and find the courage to change is feeling. We come to realize our truest inner values lie elsewhere, maybe in another career, another place, another person.

Feeling-based decisions don't always seem rational, but they are. Dunbar knew full well what he was doing. It wasn't a whim or mid-life crisis; Dunbar was a man of soul living in a soul-less world and when he found his place, he chose it. Decisions like this aren't always appreciated by others. Friends or family may say, "That's not reasonable, it makes no sense, don't you realize what you're giving up," and this creates considerable pressure. I didn't say it would be easy.

It's been a long time since I've visited Dances with Wolves and I really don't know what brought it to mind this morning, I honestly don't. The unconscious has its own ways of speaking and apparently, it wants me to listen. If I've learned anything at all, its that I ignore its voice at my own risk. Not that anything bad is going to happen necessarily, but more like "it's my own damn fault" if things go awry. So, I think I should do some listening today.

Heritage

There is a story in my family about my great grandfather that gets recounted at least once at every reunion. It's the kind of story that makes children say, "Oh, Daddy, tell it again!" I think the reason it's come to mind today is because I'm listening to Copland's Rodeo at the moment and mine is a tale of the Old West.

My great grandfather was a fast gun. Not a gunslinger, but fast with a gun nevertheless. It was a different time. My grandfather and his brothers strapped on guns with their jeans. It was something so ordinary that no one thought a thing about it. You kind of have to put yourself in that mindset instead of looking back from the advantage of a hundred years or so.

One evening, my great grandfather was playing cards -- no one knows for sure, but it was probably poker, certainly not Bridge -- in a saloon. There was a local gambler in the game and my great grandfather accused him of cheating. A hush fell over the table and the gambler made his first and last fatal mistake: he stood and drew his gun on my great grandfather. The very fact that I'm writing this tells you the outcome.

Over the course of his life, besides having been in a real gunfight, my great grandfather drove cattle (no doubt up the famous Chisholm Trail) married my great grandmother and raised a family of five. He was a real cowboy. Not the kind associated with lawlessness in the films Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, but one you'd be pleased to have as a neighbor -- especially if you're playing cards with a cheap gambler.

His was a heritage he passed along to my grandfather, he to my father, and my father to me. We've all loved horses, known how to rope and brand cattle, learned to remove our hats in the presence of women, and seen the wonder of birth as a colt slips from its mother's womb. We've all loved the freedom of wide, open spaces, the warm embrace of family, and always, the promise of morning.

A Visitor

I was living in Boulder, Colorado, when it happened. The whole neighborhood took notice, including our local newspaper, The Daily Camera. A small female deer had wandered into a field populated by about a half dozen horses and made herself at home. Now it's not unusual for deer to do this kind of thing; last evening I posted about a deer that had finally returned to my hayfield (I hope she's the same one who visited last year, that would be so fine).

What was different about this particular deer was the fact that she stayed on, rather like a relative who visits for a weekend and doesn't leave for a month. You know the type. Subtle hints like, "Gee, Uncle Bob, we're going on vacation next week, don't you think it's time you left?" bounce off like a high velocity racket ball. Not that anyone was eager for the deer to leave, mind you. She appeared quite content, not only with the dinner offerings, but also the company and the horses treated her like one of their own.

It was an amazing thing that went on for several weeks. Then one morning, she was gone. Something must have frightened her in the night; she bolted, leaped the fence, and was struck by a hit-and-run driver. But that's not the end of the story. She was found the next morning with a neighbor's dog standing guard over her body. That's right, standing guard. The owner said her dog had taken quite an interest in the goings on in the pasture and made himself at home with the horses and deer from time to time. Unlike what you might expect, he never chased them, she said, he just "hung out." And when the deer was killed, he laid near her throughout the night, protecting her.

It's impossible to know, I suppose, what goes on in the minds of animals. Our conceptions about their cognitive abilities are in a state of flux and the old notions of purely instinctual behavior are changing. If this was a story involving humans, we would say it was about friendship. I think that's exactly what it was.

The Sunset Deer

Ordinarily I don't write in the evening or at least not to post here. I don't know exactly when I got into the habit of writing posts in the morning, it just kind of happened one day and it's stuck. But something happened tonight that I'd like to share before it's gone cold.

For the first time this year, a deer appeared in the hayfield. It was near dusk, the sunlight was filtering through the western trees near the creek bank and skimming across the field to caress the tips of the trees on the eastern forest. Long shadows stretched across the new hay interspersed with equally long shafts of light. In the midst of one, near the southern edge of the field, was a golden figure bent over the grass. From the kitchen window, it was nearly one with the sunlight and seemed a figment, a specter, something arisen from the ground.

But she was real and lazed her way from one clump to another, as though she hadn't a care in the world. I have no idea where she came from and she vanished nearly as quickly as she appeared. But I've looked for her, days on end, like a sailor searching for land, a navigator for a compass point, a lover for his beloved. And behold, with the sunset, she is here.

Have a good night.

Parallelograms

Geometry wasn't easy for me. I still remember the formulas, believe it or not, and you probably do, too. Once you learn pi times the diameter, you can always find your way around the circumference of a circle. Actually, math was never easy for me until I discovered trigonometry while doing premed studies. Trig actually made sense and it was a wonderfully validating experience.

Anyhow, back to geometry. The one figure that I liked the most was a parallelogram. Two line segments running parallel to one another, usually with legs that connected the top line to the bottom at equal, but not right, angles. They always looked to me like they were in motion. Squares, rectangles, circles -- those were either static or repetitive, but parallelograms were going somewhere.

I've noticed patterns may also parallel one another. What is taking place in one life occurs in another simultaneously, though the individuals may be unaware of it. The Austrian psychiatrist C.G. Jung used the term synchronicity to describe these seemingly unrelated elements that occur outside the realm of statistical probability. And what he meant was, things that are ascribed to chance, may not be due to chance at all. There are unseen connections, line segments that run off both sides of the paper before we see the vertical, angled legs revealing the parallelogram.

Was Jung talking about fate or destiny? I'm not certain he would describe it like that but the more apparently coincidental events pile up, the more likely it is they are not simply due to chance. He seems to suggest unconscious forces are at work and he's probably right. I just realize I'm not in Kansas anymore.

In any case, just because we can't see the connecting lines, that doesn't mean things aren't running in parallel. We just have to stick with them long enough to see how everything fits together in the end.