Sometimes this website/blog that I write at here seems to me like a garden. Because what happens is I plant for a while—put things in the ground—and then I go about the business of my life and then, often in a moment when I least expect it—and most need it—the garden gives back. And then it's like that tiny thrill I get when I look out the window and see goldfinches at the feeder or, earlier this fall, a hummingbird visitor at the cardinal flower, or, last month, caterpillars in the parsley.
This month, among other things: Gorillas.
It happened like this. I wrote a piece earlier this month on the business of healing, expressing there some of the discouragement I sometimes feel about the state of affairs in health care practice of late—much of this arising from stories I hear from patients. And what happened then was that Catherine, a nurse in Fargo, North Dakota, heard the discouragement in that piece and sent on a poem called “Amazing Change.” (I looked for a link to the poem on-line and found it in this article by Robert Carroll, The Healing Power of Poetry. The poem came out of a project that paired poets with brain cancer patients as a way to help people with cancer—and perhaps the poets as well—articulate their experience through poetic language.)
Here’s the poem:
Amazing Change
We can go through amazing changes
when we are faced with knowing
we have limited time.
After one woman got brain cancer
she decided what she wanted
was to go to Africa
to see the gorillas.
She and her husband and the guides
began the long trek through the jungle
up the mountains, but the woman was
having trouble. The guides tried
to convince her to go back, but
she wouldn’t.
She struggled and struggled.
Eventually she won the guides over
and everyone was rooting for her
but there came a point when
she couldn’t go on, so
she laid down on the grass
and when she did, the gorillas
came out of the jungle
to her.
She struggled and struggled. And then the gorillas came.
The first time I read this poem I was reading quickly, and my eye skipped over the detail in the seventh line—the fact that what the woman wanted from the journey was to see the gorillas. I missed that. I was reading that she was on a journey, she was having trouble, the guides trying to convince her to go back, all of that—and then the point when she couldn’t go on—the lying down-----and then the gorillas coming to her.
There was for me something about those gorillas coming—entirely unexpected—such a sense of mystery in that—the good kind of mystery.
Then I reread the poem, more slowly, and I saw the first mention of the gorillas—oh, that was where she was trying to get to all along—and the poem fell into place more. But still now it seems to me----such mystery there. The possibility of lying down to rest----and then the gorillas coming—that sense of wonder and mystery.
(and perhaps no small part of the mystery lying somewhere in that moment of recognition, again, that all of us, like the woman in the poem, have a limited amount of time.)
Thanks, Catherine


