The thing that’s been making our world go round

Wrapping a 4 day conference here in Washington, DC,  our Nation’s Capitol. It seems fitting to have a reunion of sorts in the birthing place of the US as we know it but of course, something else lurks beneath all this…

That parallels something along the lines of what I heard an experienced colleague share, we are practicing “band aid medicine.” 

Like the concrete streets that cover up Mother Earth and has taken us far from our roots is the money that goes around spinning us into a tizzy for its own sake and pulling us far from our passions and that which needs our love and care - earth, family, friends - and we ask why is our country in an epidemic of depression/anxiety. We answer it with yet another advertised medication, some need-to-be-consumed self help product, everything other than what we all could use - time to connect without the need to be dictated by a job, constrained by hours and money - but the machine we built up is too big to fail?

We need not some curriculum to learn gratitude but to genuinely be raised by the depth of that wisdom, gratitude and reciprocity, by acknowledging the animacy of the medicine and nature around us, not to cover it up, push it to middle America, phase it into some unseen unheard “interstitium”(another nod to a fellow family physician colleague who I do don’t know personally but was so inspired by).

I guess the question for me in this moment, is how, how do I move my practice from what I’ve spent a good 11 years learning but don’t think is quite right to engaging in a life and purpose I can’t quite define? 

Even here we must acknowledge that the grass is not always greener in some ideal version of the past or future; that in the midst of this concrete are some incredible acts of faith and courage and easy roads to walk on. This land, does not belong to us, it was a gift and we must acknowledge that gift with our gratitude. 

Inspiration: braiding sweetgrass by robin wall kimmerer, my fmx/aafp colleagues, a touch of Malcolm gladwell who said this “why do we turn a needed interaction into a transaction.”