outdoors

Last Saturday, I went on a retreat organized by one of the professors here, an internist who teaches the patient-centered interviewing curriculum. He wears a long braid, glasses, and sandals, which makes him easy to parody in our Second Year Show, but also makes his warmth and openness sincere. Like the pastures of the abbey where the retreat took place, he shares with and accepts from anyone. To get there, I drove an hour through woods on both sides. The theme of the day is Ora et Labora, or prayer and work. The idea is to make one like the other, or an indistinct continuation. To work at prayer, to make work more mindful. I'm not at all religious, but medical school people and experiences have really made me value both mindfulness of the present and a sense of things outside of the immediate. Physical labor is beautiful when it's a choice. Clearing the landscape, in this case a grassy field freshly green and lush with smell and color, is pretty naturally therapeutic. Part of doing that required gathering branches lined with thorns, and I learned how damn annoying tenacity can be, when imbued in compactness. The thorns penetrate clothing, and cling to areas on, behind, around you as you try to maneuver them. It was frustrating work, tedious, forcefully thoughtful. That made it a good experience, to tuck away for future writings and perspectives, but honestly I liked loading heavy firewood onto trucks better. The nuns are hardy, of course, and on the assembly line of log holders, they would toss the logs to me. An older man would bend over, pick them up, and unable to hold them long enough for someone else to take them, set them back down, a bit closer to the next person in the assembly line. We took a break with the best hummus I've ever eaten (homemade; could have eaten it plain with a spoon). The evening prayers took place in a wooded church, that smelled and looked like fresh unpainted wood. The wood was interrupted by continuous glass panels, for effortless sunlight. The day was shared by a group of people in different phases of their careers, all still incredibly open with their points of view and their feelings, all still incredibly kind, welcoming, warm.

This past Sunday, we had our first rock-climbing venture outdoors, in a little park off the side of the road, 40 minutes east of here. It was very different from indoor climbing, to not have a route to follow, but indoor climbing has given us an intuitive sense of where to place our hands and feet. I also felt something similar to what I felt hiking on glaciers in New Zealand--a feeling of how dynamic, organic the environment is. It sprinkled and showered on and off while we were climbing, and the wet changed the rocks, made the same climbs different. When I was up on one particular climb that we all tried, and failed with extreme frustration, the sun came out and warmed the rope, the face of the rock, and my own face. Elements evolve with seconds, and nothing can be experienced the same outside those slivers. The woods were lightly greened with trees, which made for bright contrast to gray clouds, with jarring breaks of sun.

M and I talk a lot about sacrifices made for medicine, how the intellectual can take away from the environment. I understand and have felt the danger and consequences of that. But I also feel strongly about how medicine, and the people to whom I've connected through it, make stronger, more poignant, more full, the tie between outside and internal. I think the openness medicine pushes you to give, if you want to enjoy it and value it, begins to apply to everything. And this opening can create a path between all that you do, so that things meld, the strength in one supporting vulnerabilities in the other, much like working on land to connect labor with prayer, or climbing a rock to connect routes with freedom.