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While the social and political realities were frightening enough, my science background combined with the medical stories in my day-to-day practice forced me to pay attention to preventative health issues related to the environment. The wake-up call led by Helen Caldicott’s group Physicians for Social Responsibility stressed the insanity of focusing on vaccinations in Africa while simultaneously ignoring the threat of a nuclear winter to the health of all humankind.

A second thread began to emerge in my life. On Earth Day in 1989, I danced the Spiral Dance with hundreds of Unitarian Universalist women. Starhawk led the dance, directing us to listen to the earth. “If you listen carefully,” she said, “it just might speak to you.” I had a profound spiritual awakening in that moment of Deep Listening.

From that moment forward, the health and well-being of Mother Earth—Gaia itself—became my social responsibility.

I embraced an earth-based spiritual ethic. As my ecological/environmental awareness blossomed, with that unnamed emotion of fear beginning to churn and work itself inside me, it was this spirituality that kept me sane. I struggled with increased concerns about the cost of my lifestyle—my ecological footprint—to others. I began to wake up to what types of “soul nourishment” actually fed me. I found that more and more solace in my life came to me in natural settings. I went to fire circles instead of malls and cineplexes. I grew to prefer being deep in the woods to being in city life. I stopped watching television and began to watch the night sky and the cycles of the moon and stars.

One fact was indisputable. Something was dying. Whether what was dying was the oppressive dominating cultural ethic, the earth, or humanity itself was not clear.

Depression/Despair

When despair hit me, it hit suddenly, fast and hard.

I was a physician in a culture of caretaking, with little to no support for the caretakers. I had no community of like-minded peers with whom to share my growing concerns and fears; I had become totally isolated. Five years post 9/11, in the spring of 2005 (post-tsunami, pre-hurricane Katrina), I felt overwhelming guilt at the gluttony of American consumers, and I felt deeply disturbed by our toxic effect on our environment. I lost faith that anything that I was doing as a physician was making any difference at all to the long term health and safety of my children and that of my children’s children. I saw humanity headed for a fullblown, global ecological catastrophe, and I felt totally ineffective at making any change of substance. I did not want to witness or participate in whatever happened next. I felt so tired; I craved death, where I could be safe in the deep dark womb of Mother Earth.

I gave up, and I attempted suicide.

Acceptance

But miracles do happen, and I survived my own Dark Night of the Soul.

I did not simply live through my descent into my own terror. I came out the other side, healed in ways that are difficult to describe. I underwent a spiritual transformation.

As a consequence of my suicide attempt, I lost my professional power and position as a conventional MD. Ironically, that professional loss finally shook me loose from my last attachments to an outdated and overly consumptive lifestyle. Now I live very simply, with few possessions. A state of grace is always just a heartbeat away, as I recall and I appreciate the miracle of Being Alive. I feel it in the natural world around me, as I walk a daily circuit that takes me down country roads, past pastures with horses and houses with friendly dogs, over the rushing water of brooks, through wooded areas with birdsong in the air. I allow my day to unfold around me, rather than rushing out to meet and control it.

What I see is my own life, holographically represented in the Larger Scheme of Things. I lived the first half of my life as many Americans do—out of touch and out of balance with my heart and with Nature.

I sit, in the present moment, with priorities vastly shifted.

Life Today