musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Oh wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here.


There are times when it’s all too much -or perhaps, all too little. Here I am close to the end of my season, and to borrow from Macbeth, ‘My way of life is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf.’ So what is left? What remains of what I wore in the heat of youth? Of Hope, I am overdrawn; of wealth, it is all but spent. Even dreams are now just mist as the days tighten their drawstrings around me.

Sometimes, though, I have to wonder about the things which still remain. Could that wonder itself be important? Is it an answer rather than a question? I ask why I am here -why me of all people; how, in all the emptiness of space, is there an I to ask these questions? But more importantly, perhaps, why I am so special that I am even capable of wondering?

Will those questions continue to echo through the void even when I’m not here, and no one is left to inform the I to whom the whispered response was finally addressed? Or is that another wonder: that the why is never answered in the time allotted -like finally figuring out the plot only after the play itself is just a memory?

I was walking with my coffee on the dizzy array of steps outside the Vancouver Art Gallery this summer. To tell the truth I was lonely and felt the need to immerse myself, if only for a few minutes, in voices other than my own. Four young women were talking quietly as they sat beside one of the railings leading down the steps from the Gallery Bistro. They seemed to be discussing the contents of a particular book which two of them had open on their laps and the others had closed on the steps beside them.

Curious, I wandered over and sat a polite distance from them. The cover of the book they were attending was familiar with its off-white colour contrasting with what looked to be a photograph of a green braid of grass lying across the middle. Actually, I knew the book well: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. It was a book that had made a great impression on me, and judging by their excited faces, seemed to be having a similar effect on them.

The gathering was evidently a book club taking advantage of the warm weather close to a reliable source of coffee and snacks. I hadn’t been to a book club in years, and I wondered what a group of young people would say about Braiding Sweetgrass. The author is a botanist who, as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, was trying to reconcile her scientific training with that of her Indigenous heritage; trying to make us see that plants are themselves like books which can inform us if we care enough to read them -or to ask them…

It was difficult to sit close enough to hear the group and yet far enough that I didn’t seem to be encroaching on their space; I settled where I hoped was an acceptable compromise, and was rewarded by hearing a discussion of the Three Sisters -one of my favourite parts of the book: you plant three particular types of seeds relatively close to each other -corn, bean, and squash- and as they grow, they actually help each other.

“I was really impressed with the idea of the Three Sisters,” one of the young women who wore her long darkish hair in a braid said, smiling at her recollection. “I mean Nature really is a community isn’t it -not just a collection of strangers.”

“Yes, like there’s no boss in a garden -or in a forest, for that matter, Josie…” her redheaded friend added, nodding her head so emphatically that it threatened to dislodge her oversized straw sunhat.

“I like the idea that the corn emerges first and establishes a thick stem and the bean then appears from the ground and winds itself around the corn stalk to hold itself up to the sun…” A brown skinned girl in a white sun-dress said enthusiastically.

“And the bean has already borrowed some Rhizobium bacteria from the soil to fix nitrogen in its roots…” a heavy-set member of the quartet dressed in a stunning cream coloured blouse and loose azure shorts piped in excitedly.

“And the nitrogen helps the others to grow as well, Andy!” -Josie again. They were all clearly excited.

Andy’s smile blossomed. “But the part I like is the pumpkin seed; rather than showing off, it pushes out of the earth and extends along the ground. Its leaves shelter the soil at the base of the corn and beans from other plants, and also keeps moisture in it for them.” Then she blushed. “Despite not calling attention to itself, it still plays a vital role…”

“Awhh, Andy, you always pull for the underdog, don’t you?” The woman in the white sundress put her arm around Andy in a one-armed hug.

A big smile surfaced on my face, and I nodded encouragingly. I just couldn’t disguise my interest in the book. Josie glanced at me and nudged the redhead to do the same. “Have you read the book, sir?” Josie asked in a loud voice.

I nodded with a smile. “It’s one of my all time favourite books… I’m sorry, to be eavesdropping.” Then I shook my head with a chuckle. “Actually, I’m just sorry I was caught; I was enjoying your comments.”

They all smiled at this, and Josie invited me to sit with them. “The Three Sisters tale is one of the special parts of the book… It shows how we all do better when we cooperate,” she added when I moved over and joined them.

I was so intrigued by their enjoyment of Braiding Sweetgrass, that I just had to reminisce. “Do you remember that chapter – ‘Sitting in a Circle’ I think it was called- where Kimmerer takes her students to the wilderness field station for her extended ethnobotany class? And over the course of their explorations their enthusiasm grows when they realize that it’s the plants, and not so much the instructor that are teaching them about Nature; that plants, as well as them, have agency…”

The group were silently nodding as I mentioned that episode, the smiles growing on their faces as they remembered the change in the attitude of Kimmerer’s class. The members of the little book club on the stairs were all young, and it was obvious that they lived in a different world than me; they still believed that the world around them would teach them things. They still possessed something the passing years had not yet persuaded them to winnow: they were only a small part of the whole.

It occurred to me that the chaff we elders attempt to discard may actually be the wonder I have been searching for. I could see it written in their eyes…

It’s interesting where answers sit and hope that we will notice, isn’t it…?

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gozzter

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