Crossing The Road

by Veneta Masson

I am standing on a rise at the far end of Dayspring Silent Retreat Center in Germantown, Maryland. Behind me is a narrow strip of woods and the curve of Neelsville Church Road which marks the property line. Since I first started coming here over twenty-five years ago, development has pressed in on Dayspring. What once seemed pristine and remote from metropolitan Washington, D.C. has become an oasis in the urban desert. From where I stand, I see daisy fields rolled out like a white blanket at my feet, evergreen borders and the Lake of the Saints, a rest stop for migratory water birds. In the far distance I can make out the porch of the retreat lodge, lined with wooden rocking chairs. In stark contrast, across the road, I see the closely-spaced houses and yards of a fast-growing suburb. Decks, grills, swing sets and plastic pools camouflage the busy, productive and often stressed lives expedited by the SUVs parked in the driveways.

In one of the flashes of insight that I’ve learned to expect while on retreat, I realize that what I see spread out before me represents two worlds, the instrumental world where the business of everyday gets done, and the expressive world of Dayspring, set apart for the renewal of body and soul. One swath off bisected by a country road, supports both. My life is like this land, I thought.

Hands-on primary health care is what I’d done for most of my thirty-five years as a nurse. Then, one day in June of 1998, I took a big step. I granted myself a sabbatical year in which to reflect on my career and put together the book that had started forming itself in my head. My younger sister’s recent death was a painful reminder that life is uncertain. It convinced me not to put off the important things, like passing on what I thought of as my legacy to the next generation of nurses. Before I knew it, one book had become two and so had the year I’d given myself. To my great wonderment, six [seven in 2005] years later I remain “on sabbatical.”

The country needs nurses with my skills and clinical experience. How do I justify my retreat from the front lines of health care? It had been hard enough to leave long-time patients like thirty-eight year-old Darlene, wheelchair-bound from polio since childhood and lazy as a summer day when it came to treating her diabetes and hypertension, but confident that I would always be there when she needed me. When I finally screwed up the courage to tell her that I was leaving the small, inner-city clinic I’d helped to start so many years ago, her first, frantic question was, “But who’ll take care of me now?” How many times since then have I asked myself whether it is indeed possible to be called away from work that still seems so important.

Then, one Sunday afternoon after church, lunching at Tony Cheng’s Mongolian Grill in Washington D.C.’s Chinatown, I had a second epiphany. The stir fry, as always, was spicy-hot and delicious, but even as I ate it I was looking forward to the end of the meal and the ceremonial arrival of the fortune cookies. I am devoted to fortune cookies. They satisfy my appetite for news of my destiny, just like books that fall open to a particular page on which I discover a personal message. Granted, I’ve had my share of duds, the so-called fortunes that tell me I have a pleasing personality or that I am never too old to learn. I know the good ones immediately. “Don’t be afraid to take that big step.” they’ll say or “A golden egg of opportunity falls into your lap this month.” These I save and paste into my journal to reconsider in light of future events. I suppose you could say that, by discriminating between the keepers and the duds, I choose my fortune, but I think I’ve simply learned to recognize it when I see it. Take the one I got that Sunday at Tony Cheng’s: “Your nurturing instincts will expand to include many people.”

Pondering the prophecy in that fortune cookie, I have come to understand that, like nursing itself, my writing is healing art. The “many people” my nurturing instincts are expanding to include are nurses and caregivers. What I offer is soul food – stories and poems out of my own experience that I hope may help sustain us through long hard days and heal us in troubling times. The view from a hillside and the message from a fortune cookie showed me that, while call may result in a dramatic change in the direction your life takes, that change may start as simply and subtly as a meander across a narrow country road.

Veneta Masson is the author of Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill (poems from the nursing life) and Ninth Street Notebook—Voice of a Nurse in the City (lessons, stories and reflections from the real world of health care). An earlier version of this essay appeared in the journal Nursing Education Perspectives.

1.  What scene or object comes to mind as you wonder about God’s call for you?

2.  What story or poem speaks to you of call?