I was sitting outside the sweat lodge after a particularly wonderful ceremony. I sat back against a log and sighed. I'm always battling academics and trying to establish the validity of these spiritual healing methods. I found myself envying the Elders who don't need to do this "validity checking", who don't even understand why I need to do this. I've spoken with them so many times about "validity checking" and been criticized so many times that I now have imaginary conversations with these Elders in my head. In these imaginary conversations, I usually pick one Elder and we take an imaginary walk together through image space so that we can talk about the importance of validating our conclusions. This time I thought I'd pick Calvin Pompano, an Elder who probably leads the hottest sweats in Manitoba. Everyone says he does this because he leads sweats at the prison and the only way to get the convicts attention is to be tougher than they are when it comes to tolerating heat.
My imaginary Calvin said to me, "Why do you bother with this research? People will do as they will do regardless of the research" Then, he was quiet. Staring down at my dirty feet I started to wonder. Why do I need to prove that our healing works ?. Why do I care about bringing these ideas to the awareness of mainstream academic medicine? And what's so bad about spreading around our ideas on medicine anyway? We have something of value, and we should share it. This is my role as Gray Coyote – to infiltrate the beast and devour him from within.
Calvin's voice came back, "Perhaps you insult our spirits when you try to share our methods."
I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to say, "I don't think so. The spirits support my project. They encourage me." But what if I'm wrong. Who am I to know? What if Calvin knows more than I do? What if Calvin is right?
The voice of my imaginary Calvin continued, " , "Maybe you are talking to Catholic saints who are not of our people. I ask you again, why do you care? People will do what they wish as they have always done. People will believe what they wish. This is as they have always done. Your efforts do not matter.”
But I thought that it does matter, at least to me. I told imaginary Calvin, “We doctors have a duty to help people to get better.” I could hear my cell phone ringing in the distance. I was on call for both psychiatry and family medicine. How could it not matter if we help people we can help ? I was trying to help people, and these people did not all believe in the most powerful healing I have to offer?
I heard Calvin going at it again in my head. “People heal when they’re ready,” he said . “This has always been the way. In every age, in every culture, when people wish to be well, they get well. It doesn’t matter what you do.”
“Yes, it does,” I wanted to protest. “We need to change this drug oriented culture. We need to find ways for people to seek other healing besides popping pills, because ultimately, that doesn’t work. It’s that search for the magic bullet,” I said. “It doesn’t work.” But I wondered why did I need to convince imaginary Calvin so badly. Do I not really believe what I say?
“It never has mattered,” the voice of Calvin said. “And it never will and you want to change that.” Whenever I imagine Calvin, I also add his two eyed dog. One eye is blue and the other is brown. I always liked watching that dog chase the other dogs in the meadow on the reserve. I wondered if we shouldn't be more like dogs and stop all this silly research like Calvin always says we should . But I found myself wanting to argue further with imaginary Calvin -- and so I did.
“Look at the cost,” I countered. “Our society can’t keep up with the search for the magic bullet. We can’t continue to finance the search for immortality. We’re running out of precious resources. Look at antidepressants. They barely work – FDA category C – and yet they cost almost $200 per month. And everyone seems to be taking them” In my imagination, I couldn't get dogs out of my head. I remembered the boxer who had gotten me through a painful part of my childhood. I thought of the two dogs playing. I wondered if we were all just a bunch of dogs playing at being important humans, like Calvin implied.
“None of this matters to me,” Calvin responded. “I’m First Nations. I don’t pay taxes. I don’t care what happens to white Canadians. They don’t care what happens to me. I do my healing. I don’t need their validation or their respect. I don’t need anything from them. It’s your weakness that you still look to them for validation, that you need their respect.” I thought maybe I'd rather be playing frisbee in the meadow on this warm July day in the sub-arctic. I remembered the joke about there being two seasons in Canada -- winter and July. Calvin would say, live for today. Be happy. Put your canoe down in the water. Still, I continued to feel compelled to argue with the Voice of Calvin in my head.
In my imagination, I saw my Calvin shaking his head sadly. I imagined him saying: “There you go, my friend. Is that what you think I do to you? You will not give up. They will not change until illness afflicts them and they see the futility of their pills. They will not change on your say so. You have no high status to offer them. We have talked. I know what brings prestige in your profession, and it is not healing the people.” I came back to the warm July sun, watching the wind blow across the meadow across from the sweat lodge.
|
Calvin or not, I knew that I wanted to understand better why some people live and some die. What makes one person listen to the spirits when the other will not? How is it that you can know in the blink of an eye that one person will live and they other will die? To what are we responding? What is the source for our snap judgments that turn out to be correct?
I saw Calvin in my mind shaking his head sadly at my compulsive need to understand things. There were butterflies in the meadow.
“My friend,” he said. “Listen to yourself. We do not know these things. Only the spirits can know these things and they tell us enough to do our work and no more. You must accept this, kola. Accept your limitations as a human being. Don’t try to know more than you can know.”
“But what about my spiritual enhancement and diabetes study?” I wanted to ask. I wanted my imaginary Calvin to think my studies were good. I wanted Calvin to admit that I might be bringing valuable resources onto the reserves to pay for ceremonies and to evaluate the effectiveness of what the healing elders do. I wanted him to think that what I was doing was positive.
“If it works in the way you think, it’s good,” sighed imaginary Calvin, “but remember that you’re making a lot of assumptions. Spirit may not work in the way you think. It might not be so simple.”
“But what would you have me do?” I asked myself. “I worry about these things, unlike you.”
“You should do what you do,” Calvin said. “That is who you are. We all must do what we do. Even the people who do not heal are doing what they do. We cannot make anyone better. They must do what they do. Some come to us and we pray for them. That is what we do. Others do not. That is what they do. Of some of those, we pray for them anyway. Others go without prayer. Yet others do not wish to have any prayer. Praying for them would make them angry. This is how it is.”
Calvin's wife, Marie, was usually sitting quietly beside him. I let her be the imaginary voice who would resolve the internal tension for the time being. I let her speak in my mind. “You two are not so different,” she said. “Walter has one way, you have another. You believe in Walter’s way, but, unlike him, you think you have to validate it, to prove it, and to convince the other doctors to do things differently. Walter is different. He lives the traditional life on the reserve. You live in town. You are more the urban shaman. What’s more: you like this research thing. Walter does not. He does not understand it, though he also knows how useless it is as a way of learning about the world, especially since the future determines the past more than the past determines the future. Now I want the two of you to get along and go cut wood and get everything ready for our sweat lodge. No more of this nonsense that doesn’t matter anyway. This afternoon we will pray. And, tomorrow, you will both be who you are and do what you do, as different or as similar as it is, or isn’t. And that’s the last we are going to say about this.”
That's how Marie would resolve these discussions when they arose, and she was doing it for me now. I knew these discussions would continue, but peaceful interludes are also very important and we were moving into one of them now.
“But I’m one of them,” I said. “I sit in that medical office. The people who are suffering come to me, like they come to you. I know that they need more than pills. I know that pills won’t solve all their problems. I know that they’ll just keep coming back and back, getting sicker and sicker, taking more pills and more pills, until they get really sick and die. I have to do something about that. It’s my job, my duty.”
“I’m sorry for you,” said Calvin. I made his tone more warm and conciliatory. I guess I didn't want to argue so much any more. I really wanted Calvin's approval more than I wanted to argue with him. I heard him saying, “You want to change the world like many young men, only you’re not so young any more. We don’t do this. We wait for people to come to us. Those who are serious seek us out. They bring us tobacco and ask for ceremony. We do what we can. The rest is up to God and the Spirits. Why even question this? Those who heal, heal. Those who don’t, don’t. It’s not up to us. It’s a great mystery that’s beyond our human understanding. We can’t know what makes some people heal and others not. We are privy to that level of information or awareness. We’re just little people, doing the best we can, every day in every way. We have little more to do than to pray to the spirits for guidance and to do what they tell us. We tell the people what the spirits want them to do, but we don’t control the people. We can’t make them do what they’re told.” After that long speech, I thought maybe I'd rather be a dog than walk the dog.
“That’s my difficulty,” I responded to my imaginary Calvin. “They keep coming back to me. I have to keep talking to them about how they’re still suffering despite the pills. And I have a duty to train new physicians. I have a duty to teach them what I know. They won’t accept my saying, ‘ do this because the elders say so.’ They want a different kind of verification – that of research. If I can show that this traditional healing approach is better than what they have learned – pill prescribing – then maybe they will take an interest in doing more than just prescribing pills. I can’t just boss them around and tell them what to think.”
|