Come Celebrate
homage to Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton was the poet laureate of Maryland from 1979 -1985, years that overlapped for me with junior high and high school. She was the first Real Poet who was also a real person — not just a name in an anthology or a photo on a book cover — that I ever encountered. Her public readings in Baltimore were my introduction to poetry readings. Luckily for me, her poetry was luminous, compassionate and accessible.
There’s an aspect of community acupuncture that I think is important that’s also hard to put into words, and when I was trying (again) last week I thought of one of her poems:
I think to be happy as a community acupuncturist, you have to be able to praise and celebrate survival. I understand why people want to take survival for granted (along with lots of other things) but as a community acupuncturist, you will meet so many patients who can’t, for so many different reasons, that it’s wise to take direction from Lucille Clifton and learn to rejoice in it.
I’ve always had a hard time with the rhetoric in the acupuncture profession about how the role of an acupuncturist is to be an enlightened healer who transforms patients’ lives. It made me uneasy when I was in school but it was WCA that taught me how unqualified I was for that type of authority. Transforming terrible circumstances into meaning and grace was what my patients were doing. (See also: Last Stop on the Try Anything Train.) I was in no position to give advice to them on how to live; the only appropriate response was to shut up and take notes.
Sometimes acupuncture can be part of a process in which people take whatever awful hand they’ve been dealt and create good lives for themselves anyway. Getting to witness that process up close is a privilege. Practicing community acupuncture is a lot like being invited to a celebration of (apparently) ordinary people’s capacity for dignity, courage and humor in the face of suffering.
Then there’s the small business aspect of survival. Many small business owners I know feel like there’s at least one thing trying to kill their business on any given day. Recently I had a conversation with Dilip, one of POCA Tech’s Board members, about the generally dreadful state of healthcare in this country and how we’re trying to make our little alternate universe. “Of course WCA isn’t perfect,” I said. “Of course,” he replied, “but the thing about WCA is, it exists. People can come up with 500 different perfect versions of it, ways that it should be better or do more, but those versions of it don’t exist. This one does. Under the circumstances, it’s kind of a miracle.”
Okay, this post is turning out to be a stealth edition of Liberation Acupuncture Part Three. Whoops, sorry! (Here’s Part One and Part Two). According to Ignacio Martin-Baro, one of the most important intuitive truths about liberation studies is that the promotion of life is our primary task. Liberation Acupuncture must be life-affirming in order to be valid. (All of Lucille Clifton’s poetry is both life-affirming and liberatory and you should read it — or just listen to her read one poem, you’ll be glad you did.)
A community acupuncture practice is made out of starshine and clay. So much clay: so many chart notes to complete, so much laundry and bookkeeping to do, all the repetitive tasks and the mundane chief complaints. But all that unsparkly stuff creates the container for the moments when you’re taking out somebody’s needles and they open their eyes and say, I feel like MYSELF again. Or you’re at the front desk and a new patient starts crying when they realize they can afford to get treatment. Or you’re chatting with a regular and they mention offhandedly that when they first came to the clinic their doctor had given them a year to live and that was three years ago now and yeah, they’re pretty sure it’s the acupuncture. Come celebrate.