I suppose a report is in order:
Item #1: My first night in North Portland, I had to forage the tomato plant out front, in the dark, for my dinner. A most auspicious omen.
For not having seen the house before signing the lease, I totally lucked out in every way imaginable.
The neighborhood is quiet and peaceful and my neighbors are an interesting mix of students, hipster families and Portland old-timers. Everyone’s front yard is lush with vegetation (a lot of happy plants here in the NW) and people smile and say hi to each other. The MAX line is just a few blocks away which is perfect for me without a bike or a car. There’s a community garden nearby where I’ve made friends with a guy who’s told me to help myself to the candy-sweet orange cherry tomatoes he’s got growing there.
And just over the footbridge is this adorable little park containing what appears to be the top-half of a female effigy woven out of branches chilling out in a tree towards the back. I’ve been told one of the founders of Burning Man lives near that park, so that might be where the effigy came from. I like to visit her and shoot the shit, sometimes ask for advice. She seems like she knows something.
The house itself has gone through a series of makeovers that really make it a beautiful place to live. Colleen’s impeccable interior decorating skills and IKEA addiction have really made the place feel welcoming and homey. Also, her arsenal of cookware makes the kitchen extremely functional. Ryan’s talents with tile work and his cohort of equally talented craftsman friends have redone the floors, now beautiful hardwood, and the bathrooms, where each tile was lovingly selected for its particular personality. My morning shits are deeply meditative being surrounded by the natural aesthetics of mineral patterns in the stone. We also have a porch where Ryan’s black lab/retriever, Haley, suns herself silly.
Ryan, Haley and Colleen. It’s a beautiful community of people in this house. Though we’re busy with our own things, we still manage to come together pretty often in the mornings and evenings to enjoy each other’s company. We’re all grownups who don’t need to set up a whiteboard with chore duty check-off lists to make sure the house stays clean and pleasant. Harmonious, would be the word.
Item #2: We are superheroes in training.
The blessings keep on rolling in. The stories of the people in my incoming class for the Chinese medicine program were very much my own story. We all spoke of taking circular paths, spiraling this way and that, getting pulled in by this and being repulsed by that, before things finally “clicked.” This is a group of caring, intelligent, multi-talented, wisdom seekers with a great love for the sensual sides of life.
In Chinese medicine, we see so much possibility for the integration of all the random pieces of our lives, whether horse-riding or Celtic spirituality, ballet or a year in the woods, to be of service to the healing of others, so much possibility that this rambling road is actually leading us somewhere quite specific. But the destination remains largely unknown for most of us. But still, we came here to NCNM with full confidence that it was the right place, even if we couldn’t give the most rational of reasons for why.
My professors are equally amazing. This whole first year of my Chinese medicine education is a philosophical mind-fuck that I have knowingly signed up for. To truly understand the depths of our medicine requires a deconstruction of several deeply imprinted concepts that come part and parcel with Western industrialized civilization. These are concepts like subjectivity vs objectivity, mind and body, energy and matter. We are tackling issues of epistemology and ontology head-on, how do we know and what is really real, because these are questions that have very clear clinical implications. Applied philosophy, FTW!
In addition to the more heady classes are my self-cultivation classes. My program requires more hours of qi-gong practice than any other Chinese medicine school in the country. Not only is that going to keep us sane once second year amps up the academic intensity 10 fold, but it is also an indispensable part of becoming a high-level physician (shanggong). The masters who have cultivated their qi are able to shift the energy of a room instantly. They become so grounded in themselves that working with hundreds of seriously ill-patients does not leave them drained emotionally, and they become like an anchor for the people who come to see them, people who need an anchor. And as this medicine is primarily about diagnosing and treating “energy,” the rough translation of qi, we can only really understand what that is through our experience of it inside our own bodies. I’m also doing calligraphy and taiji, because well, you can’t really have too much self-cultivation, right?
The first week made it very clear that I made the right decision coming to NCNM. I was looking for something that would stretch me in every possible way, physically, intellectually, spiritually, and it’s all right here. I was looking for something that I could grow with for the rest of my life and one lifetime is certainly not enough to exhaust what Chinese medicine has to offer.
