You are a bird. Your wings are compassion and wisdom.
I was naked under the sheet, warmed by the heater at the end of the table. The sheets in other places like hotels, and even here, always seem nicer, thicker, more in charge of themselves, than my sheets. It’s almost as if other sheets know something that mine just don’t know.
There is a bottled wall of Chinese herbs in this room, the yellow room, the one straight back when you enter. Light music is playing, sunlight warms a window shaped space on the floor, and reflects off of some of the glass from the bottles. Since my glasses are off now, I can only see shapes of squarish glass, rows and rows of them. I try to imagine what is in them, but I fall short because there are so many of them, and my knowledge of herbs is so insignificant in comparison. There is a small knock on the door, a warning or a question, and she comes in. It is the first time I’ve seen her since my heart attack, and she simply holds my hand and looks down at me. “Patti, what are we going to do with you?” Hers is a gaze that doesn’t avert or leave, but stays, unabashedly direct.
What comes out in these sessions is acupuncture, yes. There are needles and points of access to my liver blood deficiencies and my “wind,” in Chinese medicine terms. But it is more than that, like having a therapist who sees into things and through them, quietly and consistently and emphatically as she moves around the table opening needles in a way that sounds like she is opening individually wrapped tea bags.
“I see an image of a duck when I see you,” she said. “On the surface, you are gliding and regal, but your legs are working furiously under the surface to keep you going.”
Oh, I could see the truth in that so immediately that hot tears leapt to my eyes, uninvited and unannounced. “Yes,” I said, “I suppose that’s part of it.”
“You feel great compassion for others,” she said, and I agreed that this is true. “But compassion is only one wing of the bird,” she continued. “And if you have only one wing, you are flapping around in circles. The other wing is wisdom. You must have both wings.”
Having compassion without wisdom. I knew immediately what she meant. Giving away my last $500 to someone who needed groceries for their children. Feeling too deep a sense of compassion for Felix, and not enough boundaries; caring for other people, but not for myself. I know it well. Far too well.
“I’ve heard this called ‘idiot compassion,'” I said to her.
“No, I wouldn’t call it idiot compassion,” she said. “It is compassion without balance of wisdom, as wings must balance. When they don’t, the bird cannot fly, but goes in circles.”
“You cannot keep living like this,” she said as she looked at me intently. “I have been thinking of ways I can help you, but first let me ask how you would like me to help you?”
“I don’t even know what is possible,” I said, quietly. She slipped a tiny silver bell inside my palm so I could call out to her should I need her as the needles worked their magic, and she left the room. The sunlight played on the ceiling. I felt my heart beating in my chest, still there.
Across the closest busy street to where I lay, prone, under a sheet, is my psychiatrist’s office. When I mentioned my panic response to falling asleep that is keeping me awake nights, Hannah attributed it to my liver blood and prescribed we do certain points, and he attributed it to a panic borne of the fear of dying from this recent heart attack, and prescribed Ativan. Somewhere between those two poles probably lies the answer to my sleeplessness, even after so many months of forced sleeplessness last year. Perhaps sleeplessness adds to one wing falling lame. Maybe sleeplessness adds up, accumulates, like moss on trees or drops of water on stalactites that only drip off one slow drip at a time, the rest of the formation round and potent, like a full tick.
