Chris Adrian

Not very long after I started learning to be a Palliative Care Pediatrician, my mentor took me out for a beer. It was the first of a series of check-ins around my education, around my mental and spiritual health, and around my intellectual and emotional discernment. Mostly he was checking in on my understanding of what it was we really did, because there was some subtlety about it and I could tell he was worried that, even many months in, I didn’t really get it.

It’s more than the drugs, he told me. It’s more than the medicine. It’s like the Hospital—the Hospital with a capital H, the whole system really, understood at some point how brutal it could be to people when they showed up here at their most vulnerable. How it could really torture the people it was ostensibly trying to help and heal. How it could really dehumanize them. So it set some folks aside. It set us aside. It set aside this space to take care of people. To take a certain kind of care of them. Even though, at the same time, it couldn’t quite yet commit to not brutalizing them.

Is this making any sense? he asked me. We want to be like a leaven in the big system. We try to see people for who they really are, and watch out for them, to protect them and help them flourish during what might be the most challenging time of their lives. Is it making sense? he asked again. If my face was doing something funny, it was only because what he was describing sounded, in a way, very familiar.

Sure, I said. We’re kind of like Connie.

Who’s Connie? he asked.

A few years later, in a different but not unrelated context, my mentor at Shaman Camp took me aside after class to talk about a point of practice, because a question I had asked during class had raised concern for her that I wasn’t quite getting it.

A Power Animal, she said, is a Helping Spirit that is interested in you for reasons that are entirely benevolent. Even before you meet it, even before it announces itself to you by appearing to you at least four times during a journey to the Lower World, it may already have been looking out for you, it may already have been asking itself, in loving-kindness, what it can do for you, to the best of its ability, here in Middle World, where everything is so mixed and complicated, where our joys and griefs are often so entwined that they might seem sometimes like the same thing.

The thing about a Power Animal, she went on, is that it really doesn’t have any motivation beyond helping a person thrive and flourish in their context, however complex or complicated their context might happen to be. They look out for us, in their invisible, unaggrandizing, unjudging way.

Is this making any sense? she asked me, as if she might be about to offer me a little remedial drumming. But again the funny look on my face was a sign of recognition, not confusion.

Sure, I said. That sounds like Connie.

Who’s Connie? she asked. Is Connie one of your Power Animals? And she reminded me that Power Animals usually had names like Bear, or Owl, or Meerkat. Not Connie or Mabel or George.

And another year or so later, in a training for a method of somatic psychotherapy that tries to help people by fostering a sort of mindful and friendly diplomacy with their unconscious mind and the memories and feelings carried around in their bodies, an assistant took me and a couple of my peers aside to talk in more detail about the idea of the Magical Stranger, because she worried that we might all not be getting it.

The Magical Stranger, she said, emerges from the persona of the therapist into the bubble of trust and safety around the client, who recognizes it, in their child state of vulnerability, as a wise nonjudgmental presence, trustworthy both because of its competence—it’s been helping like this, helping all sorts of people in their child-states, for years and years and years—and because its agenda is one of naked total affection.

Is this making sense? the assistant asked us, and we all nodded. Sure, said one of my peers. It sounds like if Mr. Rogers and Hilary Clinton had a baby.

It sounds like my mother, said the other.

And I said, It sounds like Connie.

And they all asked, Who’s Connie?

What I said to all these people, when I tried to explain about Connie, was that when I was very young I landed, in a state of abject and exquisite vulnerability, at an institution that even while it was trying to give me precious gifts of artistic discernment and maturity, was also kind of trying to give me a nervous breakdown. And yet also at the same time it had manifested, as if by fiat of the very Spirit of Loving-kindness, an individual secretly commissioned to hold a particular kind of safe space for me and all my peers, somebody not necessarily so interested in and entwined with our writing, but somebody who clearly loved all our individual stories, somebody who clearly loved all our individual lives.

All my own nervous breakdowns came much later, I said. But if I had had one back then, I would have been in very good hands, with someone who knew just how to put in place an extra layer of support, how to be a nonanxious and nonjudgmental presence, someone who had already thought out a plan of care for all of us.

So when you ask me if these notions make sense to me, of a countercurrent of solicitous kindness, or a supremely capable wisdom that’s deeply interested in being good to you, I can say that it makes sense because I’ve met all these notions and tendencies and processes you’re describing. I can say that, as I learn more, and more finally, about how to really take care of people, the example of one person becomes more and more universally instructive. And that person is Connie Brothers.

It’s rather bad news, for an ordinary body, when its heart retires. So what happens to an extraordinary body like the Workshop, when its heart moves out of the building? I think everyone must all be similarly anxious and sad and hugely, hugely, grateful. I keep thinking, Everyone will just have to take care of each other now. And then I think, well of course everyone has already started to do that. It’s been going on for years already, and she’s been teaching us by example this whole time how to take care of each other. And it’s so different anyway, than when I was here as a kid. It’s almost as if someone had a beautiful vision for the place, that’s come to lovely fruition in exactly the right time.

And then I think, Thank you for showing us how to do it, Connie. And then I think, Thank you for showing me what Loving-kindness looks like.

And then I just think, Thank you, Connie.