5 Things From the Gross Lab

Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine. ... to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe. - Abraham Joshua Heschel

Down a long hallway and into a washroom, we stood outside of a door waiting to be let in. The only sound we could hear was a saw - somewhere between a chainsaw and the sound of a dentist's drill. Exciting, no? We were whisked through a room with deep sinks into an open room with rubberized flooring. 

Just like that, an embalmer was embalming two bodies (women) lying naked and open on tables. One woman was very small, and one was much larger. They both had limited amounts of muscle mass. The larger one had a flap of skin from about the middle of the back of her head thrown over the front of her face. And the embalmer had just finished drilling through the bone of her skull. In one swift motion, he placed the drill down, and removed a large cup shaped section of her skull revealing her brain. 

The brain was like a new-born baby; covered in dura, blood, connective tissue, and miscellaneous fluid. As he was further explaining what he was doing and generally meeting and greeting us he also started to cut away at the nerves and tissues that were connecting the brain to the skull from the inside. I shuffled my Toms from underneath the brain to avoid the trouble of having to clean #brainjuice off of them later. 

This entire time my mouth was literally open. I had to remind myself to close it just in case something went spraying during extraction - but I really couldn't close it. My entire class was a mixture of fascination, horror, and raw awe. Everything surprised us. And it was exhilarating. 

It is a rare feeling to have: awe, speechlessness, and utter gratitude for the chance to be privy to the secret of what is inside of us all the time; the mind inside grappling with the mind in hand.

WHAT?

I learned a couple of other things in the gross lab. 

1. I kind of understand now why my grandmother got her nails done every week without fail. The small woman had two nail tips that were bright red, and the rest of her nails (and toenails) were largely unkempt.  I'm not sure why, but this was a glaring feature in a room filled with no color at all. I remember a reference to the nails of Henrietta Lacks in this book. This reminded me of that. So I guess the lesson here is, at some point all of your $hit will be laid bare - if not now, it will be someday. Maybe this is a small admonition to live with that in mind? No one is perfect, but what are you willing to leave behind?

2. We all have different sized livers. Like, the difference has NOTHING to do with your body size really. It mostly has to do with the amount of filtration your body has to do.  So, the more that your liver gets used, the bigger it will be. But everything in you is YOURS, is filled with the history of YOU, is unique to YOUR joys, YOUR strife, YOUR pain, YOUR decisions. This may seem painfully obvious to some, but I have needed the reminder as Rob Bell says that, "'YOU' have never been done before." We carry around the burden (the literal WEIGHT) of what we do to our bodies whether we choose to believe it or not.  There is no template. We are in a constant state of creation. Renewal is who we are - it is the way of the world.

3.  Perfect lungs are hard to find. They don't really exist because we live in places with car exhaust, city gunk, smoke and smog. They filter for you all your life; day in, and day out they are hard at work to turn the air around us into something useful, into something that becomes us. Even if you don't smoke, you are privy to the general pollution of your surroundings - choose your air carefully.

4. You can feel so much of what is going on in the inside of you by simply feeling for it. This is a part of old-school medicine that I have always loved. Want to know how what kinds of nutritional deficiencies you have? Stick out your tongue. Clinicians don't operate this way anymore because there are legal reasons for having less subjective tests of course. Cirrhosis of the liver can be felt by palpating the liver!  And now I totally understand why! The liver should always look smooth (beautiful?) - cirrhosis as a result of ANY alcohol consumption can start to occur and you will know if and when you have this if you feel bumps on a patient where there should be smoothness. The outside of us betrays us more than we think - it's no wonder we are always trying to make this look better. But what's on the outside can never betray what's on the inside. 

5. Arteries crack. Your femoral artery is GIGANTIC. The pancreas is such a little guy. How anyone without a gall bladder digests anything is BEYOND me. Your pelvic floor is WONDERful. But the biggest surprise for me with regard to raw anatomy was that the diaphragm is a BAMF - tissue-like through its middle and rife with muscle at its outermost edges. It isn't outlandish to understand why some people can breathe in longer than others, hold a tone longer than others, or exhale more forcibly than others to brace under a barbell. That ish has to be trained because it is a HUGE sheet of NEEDS TO DO SOMETHING. Never take your breath lightly; the diaphragm separates your guts from your heart - but it is more than likely what actually connects the two - it's the muscular bridge to your soul. 

All of this means something to me right now especially because I have learned over the last 3 weeks that I really and truly can trust what my body tells me. When it says I am betraying myself, I have to believe it now. When it says to slow down, I must. When it tells me to wait a little longer, or go a little faster, I need to listen. Differentiating between the intuitive voice of my body, and the raw fear of my human-ness is difficult; but I can sense a difference now more than I ever have.  And I am trying to be as present as I can to be able to actually hear what my body has to say.

The body knows. It always knows. Even before I know. Especially before I know. Which reminds me of a quote that is pivotal to my sense of myself and has been for the last 10 years: 

“Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.” - Alfred Adler

The above from this amazing collection. 

"To truly listen is to risk being changed forever."

A short passage from Mark Nepo, Book of Awakening: 

 “We all suffer, at times, from the effort to study something instead of living it. Or from the effort to fix or advise rather than to listen and to hold. So the first duty of love is to listen. When I think of times I have truly listened in my life – to the sea’s endless lapping, or to the sighs of my loved ones when they thought no one was near – it is receiving these simple truths that has made me a better person. So often when we refuse to listen, we become obsessed with remaking the world in our own image, rather than opening the spirit within us to the spirit of what is. At the deepest level, ours is not to make ourselves heard but to be still enough to hear. To truly listen is to risk being changed forever.”

Among other things, here's what I've been listening to lately: 

A word in the heart.

Every now and again, 

you will feel a dull ache 

in your soul. 

A gentle humming

around your heart. 

A longing for something

without a name. 

If I ever told you

to obey anything, 

this would be it.

Listen to the call

of your authentic self; 

that part of you that lives 

just outside of your own skin. 

Let it have its way with you. 

I have died a hundred times

trying to ignore it. 

-mia hollow

A word in the heart

I'll say them to no one

If that keeps them safe

Buried here,

Risk-less and tame. 

If I don't speak them

They won't be

Because

We are what we do. 

Words, that's all.

Begin in my gut

Bloom from my mouth -

That's all. 

Stifled, shut up,

Burning the edges,

Searing my soul

Grit and grin. 

It won't be comfortable

It might be bitter,

Gray Silence - 

But nothing will shatter.

Walk across it

Breathe shallow

Let it be

Let it go

The light that goes out

The dusty floor

I listen for a word

There is no more.

"You are not what you have. You are not what you do. You are not what other people say about you. You are the Beloved." - Henri Nouwen

"You can't fake the core." - Cheryl Strayed

"Sometimes I'm terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts." -Edgar Allen Poe

St. John, Living Loud, and the Endurance.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I got up early to see the sun change the sky different colors. The sun was rising behind the bay we are staying in and all night I slept restlessly a little nervous for being sure that I would wake early enough to see anything the world might do. 

Annie Dillard's writing is all about finding the beauty, mystery, and intricacy of nature in an otherwise small dull thing like a muskrat, a tadpole, a creek called Tinker. And in the tropics I seriously wonder what she would say. Every piece of life here is loud, begging to be noticed, almost a shirtless lady during Carnival. 

Is there mystery in blatant beauty? Is there grace in it? Or is it too flamboyant to be just that? What if my noticing it isn't ironic enough for a world of hipsters, freaks, and geeks? Would Annie Dillard implode at the sight of some of the plants I've seen here?

I sat on the dock and watched as each minute seeped across the sky like a brushstroke; this cloud here, that one there. The waves kept time to the breeze; the breeze keeping time to my ever-resistant breath. 

Below my feet was a veritable mall of activity. Fish with broad and bold black and white stripes, thick around the belly, floated back and forth, self-aware, or so it seemed. Around them, a chorus of David-Bowie-electric-blue fish strutted by; so blue, that you could have sworn they were painted. And then a joke of a fish, with a rainbow for a body, and a straw for a snout, sauntered on by. The water is so clear the prickle of sea urchins feels almost palpable from above it. 

Birds of long, short, broad, and narrow surrounded me. A pelican cannonballed heavily into the water plumbing the shallow waters for food. Once he has got what he is searching for he keeps his beak under the water, allowing some poor being the time to contemplate its Jonah-like fate, and then clumsily raises its neck to finish the poor bugger off. This, against a lush backdrop, a window display of the kind Anthropologie would pay oodles for. 

How do you live in the loud? What happens when all of life is big, boisterous, and beautiful? Does it mute the small stuff? Is that a bad thing? Are we missing something important when all the colors are turned on? 

As I am here I am reading a book about Ernest Shackleton's incredible journey through Antarctica, which began on a ship called the Endurance, and ended, well I don't 100% know yet, but I know it ended "alive to tell the tale". The juxtaposition of all of this loud beauty with stories of stark darkness, whiteness, blankness, and rugged survival is one I'm enjoying. I read it on the beach in the sticky comfort of my sunblock and toweled chair. 

I think I enjoy it because it is simple. It's the very opposite of all this beauty, lushness, and brio in the Tropics. The men of the Endurance left for adventure, for the enticing challenge of doing something no one in all time has been able to do, not even 100 years after they were able to do it. They left for the spirit of the thing. They knew the goal: stay alive. 

The sugar cane mills and plantations around here tell different tales. All this beauty has a back-story, like a sad tale of corruption, a played out movie star with bloody hands to hide. The sugar mill is lit up at night like an old movie set. It crumbles and groans under the garish night light. That's the thing about beauty - it can get complicated to have, to want, to hold. You feel a need to own it and as soon as you do, a part of seems to bristle.  It is not as beautiful if it is not free. 

We took a sunset cruise a few days ago and it was like something out of a Flannery O'Connor story. The couple that ran the sailboat had left their business in Oregon after coming down here for their first vacation in seven years to "have no more employees" and to take advantage of the fact that "life is just too short". They had been engaged 9 years before being married.  Another couple was from Boston and had brought their two and a half month old with them to the island. They were kind, eager to be relieved of her for a moment, but also clearly tender parents, and generally happy people. They knew a psychiatrist who had been an engaged for 21 years before being married. A third couple was dressed in lace and polos and spent their time smiling and drinking further up the starboard side of the boat. 

The woman who was sailing the boat was asked what the farthest she had ever sailed was. She had sailed to Bora Bora over the Pacific in a 38 foot sailboat over the course of about 30 days with one man ("an asshole") and a cat ("helpful"). But this trip was tarnished by the memory of the man, who was violent, and a force she eventually had to leave. Can you imagine not ever speaking again to the person you sailed through the brightest stars, deepest nights, darkest fears, and bluest oceans with? That's saying something. 

Our sunset was not big or bold, it was amethyst, peaceful, and felt like rum punch with a side of Gouda, which is also what we had to snack on. There was a moment when we passed by a series of small islands, and a small sailboat between them perfectly balanced itself in a photo I would never take. But that was it. No drama - just another brush stroke. 

I can't put my finger on what I am trying to say, aside from describing the fact that these juxtapositions are happening in front of me constantly and I really do feel like they're going to lead me to some conclusion that I need to come to. I'm not sure what they are leading up to but they allow me to know this: 

1. Beauty, and love, need freedom. 

2. What is loud, is also hiding something. 

3. Pelicans are total klutzes. 

"Your One Wild and Precious Life"

The Summer Song

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver