Dystopian oasis

and the fruits of space

Last weekend I shape-shifted a dozen times while also driving 500 miles and navigating news cycles, protests, and a whimsical reflexology garden. I’ve was ‘me’ the whole time, and yet, my reflection and my wardrobe morphed to fit the demands of each hour. I slept one night in a modest hotel room and the next under the stars, introducing Tungsten to the glorious world of car camping. I wore hospital shoes, heels, runners, flip flops to and from the reflexology garden which was more taxing on my feet who spend a lot less time bare than they once did.

The mantra I borrowed from Tommy Rosen starts ‘put me in the places you want me to be’ which I find useful to make meaning of the weird and wild - the planned and the unforseen that all seem to crop up regularly in this era and feed on one another. He credits an unknown person in a long ago 12 step room with penning this phrase, or toting it along to a meeting like a piece of beach glass.

”Put me in the places you want me to be
with the people you want me to be with
doing the things you want me to do…”

My Thursday drive ended in a vineyard by the river - an odd place for someone who cares little for wine - a patio pizza date with a woman who looks and sounds nearly exactly like my only cousin (and shares her name and spelling), and a desert sunset truck stop where the fuel was cheap and the desperation thick. Dystopian oasis. An older man who seemed to shower less frequently than I file my taxes dragging his mottled mopsy dog to a dusty corner which lacked vegetation but also pavement, making it the most reasonable port for a road pee for the both of them. A woman with drapes of skin pouring over loose tank as she scrubbed a horizontal slice of her RV’s windshield back and forth. She couldn’t reach the rest, and didn’t seem to mind. Recreational vehicles are often purchased by the hopeful who dream of wide and tall views through expansive windshields, but she was clearly a road warrior whose gaze would stay low and narrow.

She, you could tell, had already seen some shit.

The next day I rose early, my bones familiar with the mid-day desert heat, and went for a wander while the sun was still low. Do you know the desert like I do? The most sacred moments exist when the sun is low and rising, or low and disappearing. Maybe the sky is always red around the rim, but you can’t see that in Denver. Running would have been good for the heart and lungs and bad for the hair, and so I kept to walking because the point of the trip was to seem professional in a room full of labor and delivery nurses. With a sweaty brow, I felt I would be less likely to be deemed a person with knowledge or wisdom to share.

My section of the half-day was about pain and trauma and how they cloud the labor environment. People who support birth in the surrounding regions drove as well, some from very small and rural communities and others an elevator ride down from L&D. The prepared speech is 45 minutes or so, and I’m invited to add my own color and lived experience. My humor and personality. I’m also given 25 minutes in which to do this, leaving me stressed and uncomfortable and awkward, but probably still funny. I was wearing the wrong thing, which didn’t help, particularly given that my hair is not quite right and my body feels strangely not mine. My reflection corroborates that something very untoward has unfolded in the years since 2020, and none of this gives me the confidence I once had.

Regardless somehow, as happens, in the midst of my presentation a participant stopped me to ask or share and brought the room squarely into the Mariana Trench. She heard something I said which scratched an itch in her brain, a scar in her soul, and wondered if perhaps the loss she experienced 33 years prior might have some residual trauma. We paused for five minutes, I uncrossed my arms, and got very still. I doula-ed in the room for the group, and dropped most of what was scripted.

It’s a thing I do - and you do, as well. The Golden Retriever knows when to sit and set down her cell phone, abandon her script, and hold sacred space.

That night I drove to a familiar canyon to dine on grocery store snack dinner and nourishing friendship, meeting for the second time a two year old I helped wrangle into this world.

I ended up teaching yoga and pregnancy to an intimate crowd, and describing a bit I’d written some time ago regarding the ways of knowing that they seemed to find useful. Perhaps you might as well?

As a collector of intellectual nuggets and sorter of bobbles, I’ve found that when people want to know things, the sorts of knowing they gravitate towards and desire shift. And more notably, (we) in the Western world often feel unsatisfied because we binge on the wrong sort.

I think of this also in the pursuit of medicine - the qualities required include ingesting and regurgitating volumes of knowledge, but also increasingly reasoning among them. Knowing, and sorting. Weighing, and checking. Which amino acid is most basic given the circumstances, but also, how will it play with others? The MCAT is filled to the brim with riddles and mazes, extraneous information that tempts one away from the base question.

Life is like this as well.

In my possibly forthcoming book, I wrote about these things using different words. But here they are as a small primer in case they feel helpful in this wild and hopefully wonderful morning where you’re reading.