The Nest in the Stream

by Michael Kearney MD

  Nature teaches me that connection awakens bodhichitta, which in turn awakens connection. A recurring theme in the teachings I have received from nature is that the more deeply connected I am to another, the more I care about that person; and that the more I care, the more I long to act, to do what I can to relieve that person’s suffering, and the suffering of others. The better I got to know Ben, the more I wanted to visit and spend time with him and do what I could to help him, even when this meant walking into a room thick with grief. But it did not end there. Doing what I could to help Ben did not satisfy my yearning to relieve suffering. On the contrary, it deepened that yearning, while at the same time sustaining and empowering me to move toward the next person in pain, and the next.

  So too, as I grow closer to the California towhee couple I meet by the corner every morning and as I have become more aware of the complex yet delicate ecosystem they inhabit, the more concerned I have become about their welfare. Again, it does not stop there. I notice that this increases my sensitivity to environmental concerns further afield, and the impact these changes will have for the future generations.

  I imagine myself standing at the side of the creek, watching the clear, silent water flowing through the loose and open weave of the nest. The nest in the stream teaches me how to be with my pain. It teaches me that what really matters is setting my intention, being willing to suffer my suffering, and choosing to surrender. For the sake of all beings, I can let the pain in, allow myself to feel it, and then, rather than holding onto it, I can let it go. But even then, there is a further letting go; I can let the pain go to some deeper stream that is always flowing through, some bigger story in which I am a participant and not the author. Finally, the nest in the stream teaches me more than a way of being with pain; it offers a way of being in the world.

  “So, how can I be in the world?” I ask.

  “Lightly, lightly, lightly,” the nest in the stream replies.

  A STORY ENDS

  For some days now, Ben has been right on the cusp of life and death. In a deep and comfortable sleep, his body has been gently preparing him to die. Juanita is by his side night and day. She is ready to let him go now. She has been telling him this and that his grandfather is waiting for him. Today she had left for a little while but was called back by the nurses who had noticed a change in his breathing.

  It’s late that afternoon and I am about to leave to go home. I am planning to go into the sweat lodge later this evening. I decide to go back and look in on Ben one last time. As I go into the room, Juanita is sitting at the far side of the bed holding his hand. I pull over a chair on the other side and take Ben’s left hand in mine. It’s cold. I watch his face. He is not breathing. After perhaps half a minute his chest rises with a gasp, and then another, and another. “He’s very close,” I say. “It may be just a matter of hours.” I gently squeeze Ben’s hand and silently say my goodbye. I stand. I say to Juanita, “I need to go now. I leave him with you. There’s someone just outside the door. Please call if you have any concerns or worries…It’s good that you’re here.”

  Ben is on my mind as I arrive at the fireplace. In the lodge, I wait for the third round, which is dedicated to the grandfather in the west. In this round, we especially remember those who are near the West Gate, those who are close to death and those who have already passed over. As Wolf finishes a song, there is silence. I say, “For all my relations!” He replies, “Yes, relative.”

  I pray for Ben, who is so ready, who is so close, that he may pass safely and peacefully. I pray for Juanita, who is also ready now, that she may see him leave this world in gentleness and beauty. Wolf says he is now going to sing a song he rarely sings in the lodge. It’s a song for one who, like Ben, is close to the West Gate and about to cross over.

  Alone, and without a drumbeat, Wolf begins to sing. The song is stark and strong and tender. As he sings, he pours water onto the stones. My eyes are closed tight as the breath of the stone people rises and fills the lodge. In the dark within the dark I find myself in Ben’s room, looking down on him from above. Juanita is there bent forward, head down on the bed in exhaustion, or grief, or both. Ben’s face is as it was that afternoon. His eyes are sunken and closed. He looks like a monk in prayer in an El Greco painting. Then he opens his eyes. Juanita does not seem to notice as he gets out of bed, pauses, and leaning toward her, kisses her on the back of her head. He walks around the foot of the bed to the French doors that lead to the patio. He opens them wide and steps through. In the night sky, there’s a young moon and there are stars in the oak trees. His grandfather is there too. Waiting.

  As I sit there in the break before the third and final round, I realize that I have become attached to a particular outcome. I am ready for Ben to pass. I think, “Maybe he crossed over just now, as Wolf sang his song. Maybe this is what I was seeing.” And then I think, “And maybe not…What’s happening now is between Ben and the Great Mystery.” And I find that I am able to let go a little. Ben will move on when the time is right—and, ultimately, that is not my business.

  At the end of the ceremony, after Lisa finishes a song of gratitude, Wolf says, “May the peace at the heart of these stones penetrate us, and when we leave this lodge, may we be an encouragement to others, maybe in ways we don’t even understand, and not feed the discouragement that’s out there.” He adds, “The only way to keep a blessing is to give it away.” Then he says, “All together now!”

  “For all my relations!” we cry out with one voice.

  “Raise the flap!” Wolf calls, and cold air rushes in.

  The next morning, I go in early to see Ben. Juanita is there. She has spent the night with him. She is planning to go home soon for a few hours. She has decided to give Ben more space. “He loved being on his own when he was well. Maybe that’s what he needs now too.” I say my sense is that he is right on the threshold and that he is crossing over and coming back. She says, “Yes, I sense that too.” I tell her that I have something I want to share with her. I describe how I prayed for Ben the night before at a Native American sweat lodge ceremony. I describe Wolf’s song and what I had seen happening in my mind’s eye. When I finished, she is silent for a little while. Then she says, “Yesterday afternoon we pushed Ben’s bed out onto the patio. It was so beautiful out there. There was birdsong and the sounds of running water….”

  Throughout my working life, I have had mixed feelings about my chosen profession. On many occasions, I have thought about leaving medicine to follow my passion in another direction, whether this was English literature, making movies, depth psychology, or spiritual direction. However, again and again, life circumstances have gently nudged me back into my career as a doctor. The same dynamic surfaced in the journey I have talked about here. Repeatedly I have asked myself, and with growing frustration, what all this signifies. Does it mean that I need to leave medicine to walk more deeply on the Red Road? Or become a full-time teacher of Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects? Or find a way to teach deep nature connection practices with Jon Young and his team? Again and again I seemed to hear the answer, “No, that’s not it.”

  On the second morning of Sun Dance, as I was joining in the dance with the other supporters from the edge of the arbor, a question came to mind. I had come all this way; I had come to the outer circle of the arbor, and I was standing there watching as a new dancer was being led to the buffalo robe on the ground to be “pierced up” so he could be attached to the Tree of Life. I did not feel any desire to do this. At that moment I knew with certainty that this is not something I would ever do.

  I had immediately started to doubt myself. What was happening here? Was I hitting a cultural glass wall? Was this, I asked myself, as far as I, a “paleface,” could go on the Red Road? Was this what D. H. Lawrence meant when he said, “We [Europeans] cannot cluster at the drum anymore?”1 Yet, I told myself, this did not seem to be true, firstly because of my own experience up until then
, and secondly, because when I looked into the arbor, I saw that a number of the pierced Sun Dancers were at least as white as I am. Or, I wondered, was it simply because I was too afraid to step beyond my comfort zone into the unknown? I remember feeling confused as I walked up the hill to camp that evening.

  That night I had the following dream: Radhule and I were considering buying a house in London from a young couple, a husband and wife who had one child. There were spacious open-plan rooms and big windows with lots of light. I walked up to one of the windows and looked outside. It was like the west of Ireland. There was a lake going off into the distance, with hills ascending into the mist on either side. The water on the lake was very calm. All around the house the ground was uneven and grassy, and there were old trees, mostly oaks, and rocks coming right up to the house. In the distance, I could see a city skyline. There were skyscrapers on the horizon. I realized that this was a house in the wilderness in the city! Then I noticed that the dining room had a grass floor. There was lots of light coming in and I thought, “I could grow vegetables inside as well as outside under the old oaks and among the rocks, and living here would allow us to be closer to our families!” I awoke with a sense of clarity. I knew in a way I did not understand that I had received an answer to the questions I had been asking the day before.

  As I joined the other supporters in the arbor on the final day of Sun Dance, I was filled with feelings of gratitude for Wolf and Lisa and all the teachings I had received from them, and for this beautiful ceremony of which I was so privileged to be a part. Then a wave of gratitude for my other teachers swept through me—for John Moriarty, for Joanna Macy, and for Jon Young. I saw how I had been led from one to the other of these teachers over the years in a widening spiral of instruction and understanding, and how each had included the others’ wisdom while bringing in something unique and different of their own. Once again, I knew that I had come as far as I could with each of these teachers. But now I saw it differently. It was not that I was too scared to commit to any one of these paths. I saw that “How can I leave medicine to do what I am really being called to do?” was in fact the wrong question. I saw how the teachings I had received were like the interweaving twigs and branches of the nest in the stream. I remembered the wilderness dream house in the city. And I knew that all these teachings would be in my heart as I took my next step forward.

  There is an old Irish story of a famous warrior called Bran Mac Feabhail. In John Moriarty’s account,2 we hear of how Bran had a vision one night of a silver branch that hovered, shimmering in the dark before him. He felt deeply unsettled by this and returned to his room. There he found a beautiful woman who said she came from the Otherworld. In song, she described this Otherworld and invited Bran to come and visit her there. The next day he set out with three boats. Despite Bran’s coaxing, the crew made little progress against the furious headwinds. Then Bran saw something that caused him to fall silent. Coming toward him through the storm was Manannan, the god of the sea, in a chariot drawn by four great white horses. Manannan looked Bran straight in the eye.

  “What do you see when you look out there?” he asked.

  “I see gray waves,” Bran replied.

  “Here’s what I see,” Manannan said, and he began to sing.

  His descriptions of what he saw were identical to what the beautiful woman had said about the Otherworld. As Bran listened, understanding grew in him and he broke his silence. He called to his captains to turn around the boats and head for home. As he watched the green mountains on the horizon grow larger, he realized that he had just been gifted with something priceless that he could not put into words. His thoughts were interrupted by the crunch of the boat’s prow on the pebble beach. He looked up. Standing there in front of him on the shore of Ireland was the beautiful woman. In the air beside her was the singing silver branch.

  It was only when Bran stepped off the boat onto the land and looked around that he understood where he was. He had arrived in the Otherworld, and yet it was the same world he had left early that same morning. On the outside nothing was different, and yet nothing was the same. Something fundamental had changed. He realized then what had happened. What he had been gifted with was another way of seeing—what John Moriarty calls “silver branch perception;” a way of seeing that this world, and not some other world, is paradise.

  I, like Bran, supposed that I was being called to another world. Instead, I find that at the end of this journey I have come back to the same world I thought I had left behind. In my day job, I continue to work as a palliative care doctor, doing what I can to treat my patients’ pain. And I have noticed something else. I am no longer burnt out. Where the inner ground was dry and crisp and desperately thirsty, there is now the sound of running water. My occupation, what I do in the world, is no longer an issue. This journey was not leading up to a career change after all, but to an inner dissolution; a melting way of encrusted and encrusting ways of being, and seeing, and acting.

  As a doctor, while I continue to do what I can to alleviate pain and suffering, I do so now knowing that in tending the microcosm, I am tending the macrocosm; in caring for the part, I am caring for the whole. There is no gap between doing all I can to relieve Ben’s pain, and being with him as he slowly realizes that he is not going to get better, and doing what I can to heal our ailing world.

  It’s early morning and I have come out onto the south-facing patio of our home. I have just heard from the hospice that Ben passed away at 12:30 a.m., quietly, peacefully, and on his own. Late yesterday afternoon his older brother, whom he had not seen for some time, had arrived from up north. He and Juanita and her sister had stayed with Ben through the evening and then had gone home to get some sleep.

  I close my eyes and see Ben breathing out, and out, and out. I watch him continuing to breathe out beyond the end of the exhale, letting go, letting go, letting go. He comes to a pause. I wait. And wait. This time his body does not breathe again. He has slipped away like an otter beneath the water’s surface, without so much as a ripple. In the end, his was such a gentle dying.

  There are still many stars in the sky. I imagine how each star could be an ancestor, or a future being, or one of the countless trillions of living beings alive on this planet today. The sky is full of all my relations. It’s brightening in the east. I think of how, as the dawn rises and light comes into the sky, the stars will begin to fade until eventually they are all gone and there is only the brightness of the sky.

  I too have slipped back beneath the surface of my life. In my everyday circumstances, I have returned to where I began. I think of those lines of T. S. Eliot: “And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”3 Nothing has changed and yet everything is different.

  As I stood with everyone else at the edge of the arbor on the last day of Sun Dance, an image came to me. I saw three figures. To the left was a great old oak, rooted deep, with a thick trunk and branches that were full of dark green foliage reaching out in graceful irregularity in all directions. I was standing next to it. The lower part of my body was a red-brown tree trunk and I too was rooted in the Earth. My right arm was stretched out and intertwined with a branch of the oak. My left hand was reaching upward, holding the outstretched hand of a person who was floating with legs like helium balloons up in the air.

  Perhaps connection is not something we do but a process; a state of being and a way of life. Perhaps connection is, ultimately, who we are.

  “At the end of the day, does any of this make a blind bit of difference?” the cynic in me asks.

  “I don’t know,” some other voice within replies, “but I feel it does.”

  When I got out of bed this morning, my heart ached. As I walked down the hill with the dogs, I was glad to see the towhees were there by the side of the road. A scrub jay looped in and lingered on the branch of a young oak before continuing across the road. There wer
e white blossoms with blood-red cups lying scattered on the ground. As I approached the corner, the bells of Santa Barbara Mission rang. I could smell newly laid mulch nearby. It’s as though all my senses are more awake these days.

  I know that the ache in my heart is not about me. It’s about Bill, another young patient of mine who is dying in a fog of confusion, with anguished parents who have just arrived from New Zealand. It’s about the drowned little boy Alan Kurdi lying face down on a Turkish beach, who could be my grandson Elliot. It’s about the melting icecaps and the vanishing rainforests. It’s about all my relations. It is not as though I did not have these feelings before. I did, but they were blunted and tame. Now they are unfiltered and raw.

  INTO THE DEEPER STREAM

  Some refer to synchronicities as “miracles.” Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi writes, “Gaining enlightenment is an accident. Practice makes us accident-prone.”1 We all know that we cannot make miracles happen, much as we might want to. But, as I have already said, this does not mean that there is nothing we can do to make it more likely that such events will occur.