Time as Tincture

The reflection of the living Light.

Timeless Sea — Pacifica on iPhone

“I am the fiery life of the essence of God. I am the flame above the beauty in the fields. I shine in the waters. I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And with the airy wind, I quicken all things vitally by an unseen, all-sustaining life.”
― Hildegard of Bingen

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Ask my husband what I want my epitaph to say. He will tell you, from early on, “She only wanted time.”

Ask me what I want for my birthday or Christmas, every single year, for as long as I can remember? A date with you. Any of you.

Ask me how it felt as a young mother to open the front door at Christmas and see two packages tossed on our porch for our young children — from a relative that consistently chose other family to spend time with? it felt empty.

Ask me now what I do with my time? and I will tell you in raw form: I protect it. Guard my heart. But if you come near — even hint at an offering of time, I will probably talk too much and turn you away — because I know you are probably in a hurry and time on the wheel is important. So spin away why don’t you. Go. Get out.

I will do myself in. I know. I know. — Everyone is in a hurry.

Ask me how it feels when someone I love texts me once a year asking me to do something for them. Something I am truly passionate about. My photography. And I go — joyfully, with my whole heart, invest my time, deliver. And nothing. Until next year. Until next time.

How does that feel? I decided not to feel that way anymore. It wasn’t easy. It weighed — but I managed to hold my time as dignity — this year. Even if for that few hours I was without the time. I looked to the text above the text — it was one year prior. This is not the definition of time well spent, I thought.

Like the patient who goes into the doctor’s office, ready to break down at the site of help. A child running to his/her mother with a scuffed knee, falling into her arms — crying for comfort. But the real doctor? your five minutes is up!! I am focused, can’t you see me? on my computer, punching in answers to questions you have no time to answer. I will then suggest you take a drug. Go! Get out! My wheels of care are churning…

Recently, I have been reading a book called “God’s Hotel” by Victoria Sweet. The heart of this book is seeing the “spiritus” (spirit) and “anima” (soul) of a human being through the eyes of a doctor, a care giver. The connection with patients that can only come from taking the time to listen and understand their story. Giving people time as key entry to healing — in a hospital named for God. So old, so unique, that this hospital, this hotel for healing, would eventually have to be pushed and shoved into repose. Deterioration of time and readiness for a world that insists we are lined up in cattle formation — guiding us from a holding pen through a series of increasingly narrow gates and chutes to a stunning area, where we are rendered unconscious before eventual death.

We walk past the inert, lifeless — in the open — behind closed doors.

Soon to become an advocate of “slow medicine,” Victoria Sweet, during her training, in a pathology clinic, witnessed an autopsy of an elderly gentleman, who she had recognized, often waved to, and interacted with on the street. Upon the steel table was a coldness. “Autopsied., his body was nothing more than a suit of clothes lying disregarded in a corner.” That one line drew me in to the steadfastness of our world as we know it today. Resolute, dutiful, unwavering. Systems among systems of efficiency that have left humans, humanity, behind.

Insufficient to cope.

Time might seem like a laziness to the efficient — but it’s the efficient who are often the laziest in my humble opinion.

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“We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.”
― Hildegard of Bingen

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The experiences along the way lead Sweet to study a German nun who became something of a healthcare guru. Her name was Hildegard of Bingen.

“a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages. She is one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony, as well as the most recorded in modern history. She has been considered by a number of scholars to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.” - < wiki >

Suffering as a child with “visions,” given to the church at eight years old, by her parents — her most notable philosophical contributions center on her spiritual conception of nature. Hildegard believed that nature—and everything and everyone within it—was a divine work of art possessing purpose and spiritual meaning. She was officially recognized as a Doctor of the Catholic Church in 2012.

“American medical historian Charles Singer, in 1913 claimed to recognize features of “scintillating scotoma” in Hildegard’s illuminations in the manuscript “Scivias.” He noted that the abbess had been experiencing periods of illness, which was most likely migraine” < wiki > Humm. Maybe. If in so much that she absorbed and felt the pain of humanity deeply.

A patron saint of musicians, writers, and ecology, Hildegard would write a letter, at the age of 77, to her secretary, Guibert of Gembloux, a Benedictine monk — explaining her experience with “the reflection of the living Light.” As a Christian, a lover of Jesus, I find this to be one of the most beautiful things I have ever read.

Discovering Hildegard, through Victoria Sweet, the Hôtel-Dieu, and where the book takes place, at San Francisco’s “Laguna Honda Hospital” — the last Almshouse in the United States, a place of end resort which functioned as both a hospital and a home for thousands of vulnerable people who had nowhere else to go — has been a blessing. A hope in the humanity that was.

Sweet chronicled Laguna Honda’s transformation from a unique, last-of-its-kind almshouse to a modern medical facility. I appreciated her critique of the politics that altered the hospital’s purpose and character.

When I saw the quote, which opens this piece, I was reminded of what I tell my grandchildren, every single time I see them or speak on the phone. I do not know where it came from — it just came out of me one day and it’s become “a thing.”

Do you know how much I love you? Answer from the children: “to the moon, the stars, the sun and back to earth.”

I love you with everything I have.

Hope and wellness. For even the incurable. The healing light of the heavenly touch.

Through us.

Slow medicine.

Time as tincture.

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Hildegard’s letter to Guibert of Gembloux :

“From my early childhood, before my bones, nerves, and veins were fully strengthened, I have always seen this vision in my soul, even to the present time when I am more than seventy years old. In this vision, my soul, as God would have it, rises up high into the vault of heaven and into the changing sky and spreads itself out among different peoples, although they are far away from me in distant lands and places. And because I see them this way in my soul, I observe them in accord with the shifting of clouds and other created things. I do not hear them with my outward ears, nor do I perceive them by the thoughts of my own heart or by any combination of my five senses, but in my soul alone, while my outward eyes are open. So I have never fallen prey to ecstasy in the visions, but I see them wide awake, day and night. And I am constantly fettered by sickness, and often in the grip of pain so intense that it threatens to kill me, but God has sustained me until now. The light which I see thus is not spatial, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud which carries the sun. I can measure neither height, nor length, nor breadth in it; and I call it “the reflection of the living Light.” And as the sun, the moon, and the stars appear in water, so writings, sermons, virtues, and certain human actions take form for me and gleam.^”