There is a lot of relatively pointless confusion related to semantics in the biodiversity and biodiversity credit field. And really, nature tech in general. Let’s clear this up so we can communicate:

Three terms. One clear distinction each.

Metric

Means any core measurement. Usually, these have a bit of a scientific protocol to do it right. Like "diameter of tree at breast height" is actually THE core metric in almost all forest carbon, and everything else is calculated from there with allometric equations. But there are some standard instructions for trees (they don't grow in a perfect circle). In biodiversity, "species" might be a metric, but identifying a species is actually very different with different protocols depending on insects, trees, fish, etc.

So raw data, like game camera footage, is converted into a metric like a species observation through a fairly formal process. But what do metrics mean?

Methodology

Is an agreed upon protocol to make MEANING out of metrics. An example is here, our biodiversity methodology.

So for instance Savimbo's Indicator Species Methodology takes game camera footage of a bush dog (one of the rarest species in the Amazon) and has a formal replicable set of instructions to interpret outcomes out of that and say what area has been conserved from analyzing that metric. So how do we compare our outcomes to other people's?

Unit

Is just the final output format. A comparable abstraction.

Different ecosystems and actions need different metrics and methodologies. Analyzing oceans and freshwater systems are different. Jungle is different from desert. These are different actions, different species, and different equipment. The unit is how you compare what you did interoperably with everyone else.

It’s a standard set of expressions. Like we use “hectares” instead of “acres.” This is about how you express your final result so it can be used by electronic systems. The unit we use for area-based biodiversity action is the Interoperable Biodiversity Unit (IBU)

#StopArguingAboutStupidShit

Now people get really angry about other people’s metrics and methodologies.

For us, we don’t really care. We just ask them, because they are the experts in their fields, to EXPRESS their work in a format that can ALSO express ours. Works in electronic databases, AND is good for buyers and Indigenous Peoples to understand.

(I swear this is not ideological, but you realize how many people never left their teenage traumas about authority when you impose something as rigorous as interoperability on the world.)

This means you have to accept the core premise that humans need to work together on planet problems. And many humans have NOT accepted that premise, while still trying to work on planet problems.

Which is their choice.

Our choice is to focus on what we DO agree on. Which is here in this article.

Responsibility

There is a responsibility to being a scientist. Richard Feynman taught me that. He built the A-bomb out of pure love of reason and math, then paid a steep price when his work was misused.

We study things to be experts, and then people consult us, and we need to tell the truth — and be humble about it.

Buyers and Indigenous Peoples don’t always have the same level of responsibility to assess internal integrity of metrics and methodologies. That is most commonly the job of certifiers and ratings agencies who have the technical capacity to see when protocols, or sensors, are flawed or limited and where.

It’s really important that we use units for nature itself. Not what it’s worth to humans in $$$, but what is it worth to ALL species on the planet.

It would really help if people understood the difference between these three things BEFORE they start to argue, and used the same terms so we can actually compare our work.

We have a responsibility to do our best on this stuff, right now.

I’m really pleased that Google did this “natural forest” map. Primary forest is kind of a misnomer as forests are alive, constantly evolving and modified by Indigenous communities for millenia. But this map shows where forests are still relatively intact.

It’s such a great negotiating tool for where extraction stops. For us, basically not in natural forests, ever, case closed. Intact biota is a global treasure, and has immense value to the human species in the form of medicinal plants for diseases, ecological knowledge, and reforesting and rewilding fountains of natural propagation.

We’ve worked really hard to value natural forests at deforestation borders, with the biodiversity credit which any forest community can do, and yeilds up to $30/unit in intact ecosystems.

We understand that other people are going to choose to mine or drill. And that there is a negotiation here, and the negotiation is when people are mining OUTSIDE of natural forests. How to do it cleaner, more ethically, and with less impact. Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and GIST Impact and Dunya Analytics are all working really hard to get that under control. But for us, natural forests are a complete no-go zone.

The planet is like a cell, and like a cell, it has organelles and organs, and what keeps the planet alive is creating a semi-permeable membrane to keep disparate use zones safely separate so they don’t encroach on planetary support systems. I’ll write a bit more about this in another post because I know it needs to be explained better. But I really love the work by the PIK - Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and territories of life on where the no-go zones are, and how to protect them.

Mining causes, but isn’t the same as timber deforestation; it mostly contaminates water supplies, and the effects of poisoning them are distributed and take years to fully develop. I included some research on human health from copper mining below. Lithium has even more impact. Gold is completely unnecessary to mine at all and I’m a huge fan of Rod Holden for his work on how to keep it in the ground and mine with financial modeling instead.

Short story, that’s the rules for Savimbo and we work really hard to enforce them via whatever mechanisms we can. Including economic support for standing forests, Rights of Nature NOW law, and safe mechanisms for Indigenous leaders.

Here’s material that we use all the time.

If you guys want more material, stuff we use all the time:

• Here is a great book about hostage negotiating, Never Split the Difference. It teaches how to take a stand and win when you really can't give ground in a negotiation. It’s actually quite different negotiating tactics, and I highly recommend it for Indigenous activists and advocates.

• Here is a Rights of Nature case Indigenous women won in Peru to halt extraction on a river.

• Here is a landmark Canadian Supreme Court case where Eritrea communities got DAMAGES from Canadian mining companies from within Canada.

• Here is a report on deaths of 146 environmental defenders in our zone last year, which is why a good negotiator can make it safer for leaders to defend territory.

• Here is a clear report on the risks of copper mining to human health and ecosystems. Here is a press release on the Nature paper about 5k Indigenous children dying from an open-pit mine in Peru with clearly documented poisoned waters and downstream effects.

If you have any questions, you can check out Ask Savimbo. Been working on delivering training material in a more structured way.

“Nobody thinks you’ll graduate intern year.”

“But this is just gossip…”

“But a consensus of the experts
is what medical education
Is.”

“There are no facts at all in these assessments.”

“Yes. You haven’t made a critical error that hurt a patient.
Yet...”

“But you’re below the level of a medical student.

Your two greatest weaknesses are,
medical knowledge and
clinical competency.”

“Oh, and patients report you lack
compassion.”

“I think…
There’s a chronic underlying level of
incompetence
and every once in a while it
rises to the surface.”

“Well is there anything I have done right?”

[A staring silence.]

If you’ve ever wondered what
carved your doctor
into unfeelingness,

It was this.
Planted in their subconscious,
day by day,
like a thousand tiny splinters
festering in the
soul.

But some of us,
have
Tweezers.

And once, when you raged in a tantrum, then shuddered into wracking sobs, and fell into an awkward hug. Then came back days later, shuffling your feet, uncertain, and asked me shyly if I would clasp you again like that. Like a weighted blanket.

It felt good, you explained. I don’t think you knew why. But by then I did.

I had held you like a straitjacket until your emotions broke. No one had ever contained you like that before, so you could experience the full brunt safely and feel the release after they peaked. You missed your developmental tantrums at two. You were busy surviving.

You were pretty tough at that time. I think you were eight. Big enough to be too big. Honestly, you kind of needed a straitjacket. I know kids shouldn’t, but you were still on several psychiatric medications, your dad secretly double-dosing you with them randomly when he felt like it to turn you off. My first experience with that kind of child abuse. I’m so sorry. I stopped it when I figured it out. And I mean I really stopped it. But we hadn’t sorted it out yet.

But we did, and this story is why.

So, how to tell this story? I am telling it so one day you can find it and see yourself reflected like a jewel in my eyes. Without telling too much — telling what’s not mine to tell.

I came for all kinds of complex adult reasons of my own. But all you probably knew, and what is probably the truth, is that I came like Mary Poppins on an umbrella.

And I came for you.

They didn’t tell me anything, of course. I learned later that you had hit the former nanny in the head with a rock, and she had to go to the hospital. But given the adults I found around you, I kind of support that. Most adults wouldn’t, but you did what you had to.

You were fighting your own child’s guerrilla war.

So this day on the beach, our first day. All I had to go on were vaguely worded warnings that you could be tough. (I had been hired off an online listing, which was very irresponsible of all adults involved, including me.) But all boys are tough, and I was tough, and I needed the placement. So I took the job, and the first day, you were bundled into my car with your brother and various beach stuff, and we went to the beach.

The adults weren’t going to warn me, but they sort of tried. Some vague hints about “behavioral problems” and that you shouldn’t travel in cars. But I was the nanny, and didn’t listen any better than you did. I had been in the frozen winters of the far north for too long. So we were going to the beach and we did.

Later on, I saw you and your brother unbuckle and rage around the car, try to jerk the steering wheel from your dad on the freeway. Really dangerous stuff. But that was with your dad, and you had your reasons.

But they didn’t tell me that then. It was our second day. They just sent us off in the car. No warning. And there you were, sitting next to me, buckled up reluctantly. Clearly ready to explode with impatience. But you and I negotiated a deal for car gum, and for the music, and you liked New York by Jay Z, and I did too, so that was that.

And I looked over at you to the right of me, and it suddenly occurred to me, and I said in startled realization — because you were tapping the windowsill, and looking at the sea, and immersed in the song — “There is nothing wrong with you!!” I saw so clearly in that moment that you were a totally normal kid. And you looked at me, your gaze direct. And I think you realized for the first time in your incredibly short life that it was absolutely true.

And that was that.

But the beach. This story is about the beach. It’s about the beginning. Because we broke you out of your prison. And maybe now, if you read this as an adult, you still wonder what happened. Maybe you won’t forgive me for abandoning you. And there are all kinds of adult reasons why I had to. But there are all kinds of adult things I did when I left that changed your life forever too. And I will tell you here, in our public private, and then maybe you will know that I didn’t abandon you at all.

But I want you to know why I didn’t abandon you. Why I fought for you with all of my adult-power.

It was the crab.

We went to the beach. And you and your brother went wild. You ran and ran. You rolled in the sand. You ran into the waves, you just flew across the sandy water, and you were covered in sand from head to toe. Your sandy blond hair was sandy sandy. And you were wild with the sun and the freedom, and I just watched.

Too much time in the house? I thought. I had no idea.

I will briefly sketch your history, which I learned later, so it makes more sense. But there was a mansion, and an addicted mother, and her addicted friends. And years and years of early childhood abuse. Them high with you and your brother, and sexual abuse because she didn’t protect you. And no one to see, no one to care, and movies no child should see playing over and over in the background. And finally, they put her away.

But for you, the damage was done. You were ‘damaged’ and your dad saw it as a continual honeypot for rotating foreign nannies, and the other kind of abuse started, or maybe continued. More sophisticated medical and emotional abuse with twisted disciplines. The medicated, standardized, pathologized, doctor-teacher enabled abuse and labeling.

The endless suffering of a psychologically traumatized child “victim” who can never be anything else.

So in the car, when I said, “There is nothing wrong with you.” It might have been the first time an adult ever said that to you. But I could see in your defiant gaze in that moment that it was something you already just knew.

You were so bright, so brilliant. Even then.

So on the beach, when I finally let you out. Out-out with the sun and the sand and the endless ocean you ranranranranranran. And I didn’t know why, but I just let you run. Boys need to run, I thought. Good for ‘em.

But that wasn’t the moment that mattered. The moment that mattered came later. It was when it was time to go. You weren’t very good with any kind of discipline then. It unlocked the anger and the uncontrolled will that had been so bent and twisted by authority figures.

And it came down to the crab.

You had been collecting hermit crabs. Running in zig zags and throwing them into the water, and you had one in a blue bucket. And you wanted it. Crabs aren’t that… conscious. You wanted to take it home, and I said, “No.” And you began to shake. You weren’t very tall, only came up to my waist. But it was a real shaking. An adult shaking. Your eyes narrowed, and I saw real adult compressed fury.

“It’s mine,” you said. “If I can’t take it home, I will crush it. I will kill it. I caught it and it’s mine.”

And there it was, some eyestalks waving, totally confused in a blue bucket sloshing around in some seawater and sand. And I looked at it, and I could tell by then that it was going to be a long, tough ride home. I could see you weren’t responding like a normal kid to normal things. I didn’t see the full picture then; it took a few months to map it and untangle the psychology web you’d been snarled into. But I could see that day that I had to pick my battles, and I was sorely tempted.

I can kill a crab. I’ve killed crabs. It’s a crab. There are thousands of them. There were thousands of them at our feet right then. I mean, it was a good specimen, you had selected well — I was impressed with your hunting abilities. But I thought, is it really worth this dumbass crab? Am I really going to pick this battle?

It was my first day on the job. I wasn’t sure if it was worth it. There were all kinds of adult reasons why it wasn’t worth pissing you off — yet. I knew we were going to have it out — I just wanted to pick the place and time. Not with an uncontrolled and unpredictable child who was still practically a stranger on a public beach.

And I looked at the crab, and I looked at you, and I thought, no, we are going to have this fight right now.

“That is not your crab. That crab belongs to itself,” I said. “It lives in the ocean.”

And I looked at you and I really, really meant it.

And you lost it. I mean, you were really great at losing it back then. You had taken the standard of “disturbed child” and constructed a monument to it. You were smart as hell, and the adults had only given you one way to succeed. So you were quite the fireworks show.

It was impressive.

But I noted, because I am the oldest of nine children, that you never once dropped the plastic bucket.

So I stood there as stubborn as you were — are. A will like ours can’t be tamed. Yours hadn’t been broken, and mine never will either.

And I waited.

And when you calmed down. I said, “That crab belongs to itself, just like you belong to yourself. You don’t own the crab, and I don’t own you.”

And that plunked you like an arrow in the solar plexus. You stood there dumbstruck, and you looked at me, and I looked at you.

And you put the crab carefully on the beach. And we left, and we made it home. (Thank god for Jay Z.) And after that, we had a real alliance.

And we did the work. It took about three months. But you did it. We did it. Because we had an agreement.

You belonged to yourself.

I know your life changed after I left. I heard from others that you were doing better. There were all kinds of adult reasons I had to leave. But I didn’t leave you without protection. I put the guardrails in place. I marched you over to the best neighbor, and I had a real talk with him. And I made him promise, adult-to-adult, if you needed shelter, you could go there, no questions asked. I made sure the authorities and people around you knew what was happening. I talked to your teachers. I told your doctor that you had changed, and he was grateful. He said he knew you just needed ‘behavioral interventions,’ and he couldn’t give them to you. I said I did, and you were better, and he agreed, and he said he would stop medicating you. And from what I heard, it worked.

But I want to tell you what we know. You didn’t need behavioral interventions. You needed love.

You needed real,

blistering,

hardcore,

LOVE.

And you got it from me. And that was ALL you needed.

And now, when I work on the environment, I think about that. I think about all the broken little boys in the world and their stupid crabs in buckets. And I tell them all the same thing.

There is nothing wrong with you. And it is not your crab.

The goddamn crab belongs to itself.

I wasn’t fussed, he couldn’t do much about it, paralyzed from the neck down.

“It’s not going to work,” I told him. His lip sheened with a fine perspiration, cheeks pink. He was mid-thirties, although his body was atrophying and softening with immobility.

His second try with this method. I admired his doggedness. I would do the same in his shoes… well socks I noted. Shoes weren’t going to be necessary for him ever again.

“You’re just going to have a fever, and be miserable, and then get better anyway. You are too healthy. No judgment, but you might as well let me treat it.” He snapped something irremediably foul about my genitalia in Spanish. “Hablo Espanol,” I said. “Yo se,” he said.

An impasse.

We looked at each other, grudging respect. I used to work gang intervention in LA. This wasn’t California, but we understood each other perfectly nonetheless. Just because someone is paralyzed, doesn’t mean they are nice. In the prison wing of our hospital, I hadn’t expected nice. Or reasonable. Now he seemed curious, I wasn’t the normal white girl-doctor. I wasn’t going to cut him any slack.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

His chart said he’d been in the unit for months. In the general population, he would be prey for the other inmates, so he stayed in limbo at the hospital, but it wasn’t a quad ward. The nursing staff had no specialty training and there was no rehab medicine. The TV bolted overhead was his only entertainment, changing the channel wasn’t an option.

It was hell I thought. This was literal hell on earth.

I returned the next day. A perfunctory exam, aside from the fever his clinical status hadn’t changed in months.

“How long have you been in the bed?” I asked.

“What’s it to you? he demanded. He was irritable, the infection was exactly as I predicted.

“If I had to lie here without moving I would be suicidal too,” I said. He held my gaze, my honesty unexpected.

“Eight months,” he said.

“What would make you want to live?” I asked.

He looked away from me. “I just want to go outside and feel the sun,” he muttered softly, unexpectedly. “Or listen to music, I used to like the radio.” Then grudgingly, “I’ll take the antibiotics.”

I doubted he had been that candid in years. In unsafe environments, you never disclose true desires, people just use them to hurt you. I knew that from childhood — I suspected he did too.

Exiting by the guard station I investigated. The main prison allowed daily yard walks and prisoners had a commissary that sold radios. But the hospital ward lacked these amenities. He hadn’t been convicted so he couldn’t be transferred to the state inmate quadriplegic ward.

The guard was a young Chicano man. Perky, intelligent, and active. “Don’t let him con you,” he warned. “That said, it’s a bad case, he’s here indefinitely and it’s a miserable existence.”

I trotted to the attending in the trauma bay. A young man from an urban center back East, New York, or perhaps Boston. The smartest surgeon on our team, he’d moved here for the politics. He propped pointy cowboy boots on the desk. “Let him rot,” he said. “He killed a cop.”

“He allegedly killed a police dog when the SWAT team broke into his house unexpectedly, in return, they shot him eight times,” I said. “He hasn’t been convicted of any offense yet.”

“A police dog is still a cop and did more for society than that drug dealer,” he snapped. “You’re a bleeding heart Californian aren’t you?”

I didn’t tell him what people from Idaho said about dude-ranch cowboys wearing shiny boots. “It doesn’t matter where I’m from,” I said, “What matters is that this man is physically incarcerated by his injuries more than he could ever be legally imprisoned. We couldn’t strap a healthy man to a bed for eight months with no intellectual stimulation even with a conviction, what gives us the right to do so by inaction?”

“Why don’t you fix it,” he said. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Thank you.” I said, “I will.”

Easier said than done. I spent precious hours of leisure time navigating the prison system. Arguing for the human rights of an inmate who didn’t like me (or my genitalia) much. Months after the rotation ended, I wrote impassioned letters about human-rights abuses, the need for quadriplegics to access art and nature therapy, and how if we can’t do it in Guantanamo, we shouldn’t be able to do it in Texas.

White girl I might be, but white girls are good at one thing, even if they are from Idaho: writing bleeding-heart letters.

I saw the prisoner again before I left — the residency, medicine (it was a tough year). There was a cheap grey radio taped to the side of his bed. Tinny mariachi music wailed on the hot summer air. The TV was off and his face was beatific. Other senses can be heightened in quadriplegics. He just nodded at me stone-faced. I couldn’t stop smiling.

“He goes outside once a week now.” The guard reported. “Honestly, we like it too, we don’t get much fresh air here either.” He hesitated, this slim man, a mirror of my patient if things, choices, had gone differently. “You know, you can’t judge anyone here… when you do this job.” He said carefully, with a direct gaze. “The doctors don’t always understand. But the inmates are all just humans, it doesn’t matter how they got here.”

Compassion can be surprising — who has it, who doesn’t.

Originally published at https://www.kevinmd.com on February 8th, 2022. Reprinted with permission.

My colleagues, compatriots, and comrades were international. Some of them had been in practice for over 12 years in countries where you’re a clinician before you’re a doctor. They were so experienced and I was just… a baby doctor I said, I’m a baby doctor, my senior resident might have a different plan, let’s get you started and I’ll review with them. I always said that because I was, and I hate misrepresenting my abilities.

They need to know, patients need to know who to listen to, and especially when there is a hierarchy of doctors. They need to know who is the boss doctor. And that everyone is working together in a team.

But this boy came in, maybe a man. He was a young black man and I just… it’s not the same. I worked in gang intervention, and I worked with convict crews and ex-convicts for many years in my first career fighting wildland fire. I lived in southern Georgia, my friends are black men in the Marine core, my boyfriend at the time was a black ER doctor, and I started a post-incarcerated program at my high-tech consulting company with a black activist from Oakland for social justice. A good aim, a good ideal. Something we all want. We really do. We want to connect, and to stop being angry.

It’s tough to say anything as a white woman, but I think I can say, it’s not the same. You have to care enough to make sure that the person in front of you is getting equal treatment, and equity means sometimes scraping the blinders off your own eyes.

So this boy, he just had an ingrown hair, and it had become infected, and then he needed an abscess drained. A simple surgery but they hadn’t done a good job with the wound they had been sloppy and hadn’t made sure all the bleeding was stopped before they closed the wound. And he was bleeding, that night after the surgery, and it just didn’t stop. And the ER doc tried, and I’m sure they really did down there, in the pit we called it. He told me he did and I believed him. But they couldn’t stop it. And I was called, and I tried. I tried really hard and I couldn’t stop it.

And you’re not supposed to call the senior resident. You’re supposed to hold pressure for 20 minutes, hard, and not call. And then do it again, and again and eventually it will stop. That’s what they say. And I did. 20 long minutes with this man. Who wondered why his surgery was causing bleeding and had no other medical problems, who was a college student, and just needed to stop bleeding after a simple surgery. And I saw him there, naked black butt in a sea of white towels, blood everywhere. Spotted on the sheets and on his clothes and on the towels and the bed, and by then it was also on me.

And I looked at him, and he looked at me. And I saw all the gunshot victims who had died in Chicago last year and I thought, this is wrong. This isn’t Chicago. This man is somehow getting mistaken for someone else.

And I thought, fuck it. He is not in a shootout in downtown Chicago, he is a man thousands of miles away, who had a simple surgery, and doesn’t deserve to spend his evening in the ER begging for a simple solution. He is getting the wrong treatment. He needs a better doctor than me. And I called the senior resident on call. She was furious. She yelled at me over the phone. And I stood my ground and I insisted she come in to the hospital. I tried I said, and the ER doc tried, and he’s still bleeding. She said you didn’t try, you can’t call me for every little thing.

You didn’t try. You need to try again she said. And I said, no, you did this operation, you need to come into the hospital and help me because I don’t know what to do and I am concerned about him. And he has bled enough. And she did.

Her anger was so hot, when she arrived. She spoke to me like a subhuman, when she arrived in the middle of the emergency room in front of all the doctors and the nurses where my patient couldn’t hear. And everyone looked at their screens and their notes and pretended they didn’t hear what a bad doctor I was. But I heard it. And it hurt.

And she went into the room and thank god she stopped the bleeding. She was crisp, and kind, and cool and she stopped it under 20 minutes. She just knew more than me, and she had a lot of tricks I had never seen and they worked. And my patient was better. He stopped bleeding. He went home. And I was so relieved, so relieved. I wanted to cry with gratitude that he was taken care of.

I hope he doesn’t remember. I hope he forgot me, and that night, and how long it took. But I remember. I remember how he was treated, and that he wasn’t supposed to be important enough to wake a senior resident in the night time. And I have to remember because six months the senior resident waited until she gave me a damning enough review to make sure I would not practice medicine again. It was not the only thing I did that pissed her off, and it was not the only reason I chose to leave, but it was the real reason she never forgave me. Because I woke her up that night and insisted that she take care of her patient. I knew it when I did it, that it was going to be bad.

Sometimes you have to choose, who you want to be. And I chose. And that was love. I loved that man. I still do. And I would do it again.

You don’t have to know someone to love them.

“Be careful,” my mentor told me. “Get the nurse to show you the panic button, make sure you keep your distance during the assessment. I’m very busy, I’ll get to it as soon as I can, but it could be a while.” Psych cases often languished in busy Canadian ERs because they were triaged as less life-threatening than breathing difficulties or major traumas.

My attending of the day was a grizzled veteran of the pediatric hospital. Famous for something or another, with neat iron-grey hair and emerald scrubs that matched her eyes. Everyone bowed and scraped but I saw a kindred immediately and gave her a cheeky grin, which she grudgingly returned. I’d won her over early with some crisp, clean, assessments. Now, having proven my value, she was using me to lighten her workload. A true compliment from a staffer.

“Will do,” I said heading off immediately with a secret curiosity. I hadn’t worked with dangerous teens before.

I made friends with the appropriately burly psych nurse and entered the room cautiously.

The room was empty except for an industrial tan pleather couch with two occupants and a TV bolted too high on the wall to reach. The tableau was comically exaggerated. On the couch nearest me was the school principal, a middle-aged man with a portly belly and a carefully nondescript short-sleeved shirt. His arms were folded over his injured pride as he stared at the wall in grim masculine resolution, studiously ignoring his companion.

On the other side of the couch was my juvenile offender. Somehow unselfconsciously arrayed in mimicry of the exact same posture. Crossed arms and jutting jaw he also stared at the blank white wall in sullen silence. His legs stuck straight out from the couch, barely reaching the edge. A tiny child of no more than six years with the black spiky hair of an Indigenous youth.

I took one look at the two of them, their mirrored disgust. No reconciliations were forthcoming here.

“I’m separating the two of you,” I said with a crisp authority I really had no right to assume. I was only a visiting medical student, on my first pediatric emergency rotation. But they didn’t know that.

I asked the nurse to turn the television on for the boy and the principal followed me out, relieved to be able to recount his tale. Once ensconced in an interview room he waxed eloquent. The boy was violent, aggressive, and shouldn’t be in his school. He displayed a red mark on his arm, perhaps a small bruise, did we treat adults as well? He had been injured!

First, his duty, for the institutional record. I should take this down. Children ‘like that’ didn’t belong in the affluent and trendy neighborhood on the north end of the city, surely everyone knew. The boy should be attending school in the impoverished east-side suburb where he would be more comfortable.

The subtext was clear even to me, visiting from another city. The lower-income school had more Indigenous resources? I inquired casually…

Of course they did. They took care of foster children, and… problems. Well, they had security at least. The boy had assaulted him! The principal! All he had done was try to sit him down in the chair and the child had bitten him! Bitten him and hid under the desk. He was clearly violent. He needed to be medicated, probably… sedated, perhaps… something. Something was definitely needed.

The boy had arms the size of matchsticks I thought, while I estimated the principal was at least 250 pounds.

I remembered my mentor and her reputation held in my hands, my assumed mantle of authority, and studiously did not laugh.

Instead, I projected a cloud of sympathy. I’d learned I got better histories if people thought I agreed with them and back then I didn’t see any ethical dilemmas with it. We were both professionals, no? I just needed the facts, I’m sure we can help, I murmured, in my best soothing tone.

And the facts were these. Somehow simultaneously telling two different stories to the two of us. The story pouring from his lips evoked nearly opposite responses in my heart and his.

The boy had been raised in a closet back East. His stepfather had beat him often. But the authorities kept returning him to his mother, despite significant substance use, perhaps prostitution. Because he was raised in a closet he had never learned to speak. (“Children who can’t speak shouldn’t be at our school…”) Eventually, the stepfather had kicked the boy’s ribs through his liver, and because he nearly bled to death in the hospital ICU he had been sent to this city finally, to live with his father. His father had been trying to retrieve him, unsuccessfully, for several years.

I was unsurprised at this. I knew much about Aboriginal rights from three years working on an Indigenous wildfire crew. Twenty men, from twenty different reserves across the province, and all the stories of their wives, daughters, grandmothers, and institutionalized children woven in the air around the fire at night. An oral history of anguish and dispossession, and the living evidence of continued stewardship of the land.

A brotherhood that was somehow flexible enough to include me in its embered embrace.

The boy’s father was probably just unable to advocate for himself in the white man’s system like so many Indigenous parents of his generation. Now, unexpectedly a single-parent household he was working on a large construction project in the wealthy part of town, so the boy had been enrolled in the nearby school mid-year.

The wealthy school run by the man in front of me. (“I tried, I really did, I wanted to help…”) But the boy didn’t understand a word anyone was saying to him. He couldn’t speak at all. There were speech therapists, but the wait-list was too long. (“What are we supposed to do with him in the meantime I ask you…”) Indignation. Frustration. Spread hands.

So today’s story unfolded. His first week this. The boy hadn’t sat still in class, didn’t understand the teacher, and had been sent to the principal’s office. But when the principal tried to place him in the chair, grabbing both his arms firmly, the boy had erupted. (“He broke my photographs! The window! He bit me! And screamed! He is uncontrolled with rage!”)

Now the man in front of me shook with outrage — perhaps adrenaline. He must protect himself. His staff. His office. Surely this boy was someone else’s problem. Now it would be seen to. It had been documented!

Yes, I saw, he was my problem.

This boy was now my problem.

That’s the problem with being psychic. You see things sometimes and you know. Because you see them they are yours. And I saw the boy’s past clearly. So he was my problem.

His probable future was grim.

All of history and the system, his father’s poverty, the angry principal, his culture’s colonization with white-man’s addictions and white-man’s gangs, his own neurology and trauma… all arrayed against him at this point. A tiny scarred child in a web too massive for him to perhaps ever comprehend.

But I saw it. Psi unfolds in the mind like that, an aerial pattern, views across lifetimes, cultures, archetypes, the path souls tread.

Fate is a spider woman, weaving a delicate pattern. But she can be outmaneuvered.

“It sounds like the problem is he can’t speak,” I said hacking at the nearest strand of the web. We would start with the proper naming of things. The problem was not the boy himself.

Hesitation. “Well… yes.” Agreed the principal cautiously, “That’s part of it.”

“Do you think he thought you were going to hit him when you grabbed him?” I asked hacking at the next. “Seeing as how the last time a man grabbed him he almost died?”

“I would never!”

“Of course not. But do you think he might have panicked?”

“Well, he can’t do that again.”

“Of course not. So a speech therapist then?”

“You’ll never get it approved. They have a waitlist a mile long. It’s at least nine months.”

“But if I did?”

“If you did. I would consider it.” the man was suddenly somewhat mollified. Musing. Perhaps he wasn’t the hero of the story as he’d thought. I pressed the thought into his mind telepathically. A suggestion. Perhaps he was the ogre… Did he really want to be an ogre? Or did he want to be a champion?

A pause. Some surprise… his, not mine. We were still on the same team, but the goal had somehow unexpectedly shifted.

“Okay. Let me see what I can do for you.” I said, as though it had been his plan, then left the room, my task clear.

Now the boy. Would he join us?

The boy was my Helen Keller. I saw with the sight that doesn’t see. Before the water. Before the understanding. Locked in a world of screaming. A closed system.

Consent is everything in my world, in the apriori world I inhabit, before I inhabit a body, or the role of a medical student. It’s a free-will world, and my superpowers are constrained by your freedom. The boys as well. The principal and my mentor. I can only cut the strands of the web that I am allowed to.

The boy might be small, but he was alive, he must also agree.

How did I speak to a child who can’t speak? Could the child even be reached?

Some feral children are never reachable. The psychology textbooks are discouraging. Too much isolation, too much trauma, at the wrong developmental years, and human brains never develop properly. The wrong stimulus. They are forever cognitively bound, cannot be trusted. Must be institutionalized.

I saw the problem, but was there actually a solution?

I went back to the room. The nurse had turned the television to a hockey game. The boy was rapt. Riveted. Good, he could pay attention to something. I went into the room, but he didn’t even look at me. Refused to look away from the screen. No interaction whatsoever.

Hmmm. I remembered this from my childhood. Growing up off the grid we didn’t have television. When we went to our friend’s houses to play, we were truly hypnotized by the moving pictures — far more than our peers. Babysat by screens from a young age they could dip into and out of the digital streams, but for us, it was a cognitive tar-pit. One stray gaze and we were glued. Our friends said we wanted to watch the TV more than play with them — and they were right.

He acted like he hadn’t seen a TV before.

But I also sensed he didn’t trust me. He was huddled on the couch and I caught him watching me carefully from my peripheral vision. I reached out and read his emotions. He was still very consciously angry, indignant from the day. And I was looming over him with a clipboard.

But it wasn’t just his conscious mood that was the problem. His subconscious was much older than a child’s. A silent rage emanated around his baby body. Very red. Very old, growing in the dark in the closet over the years. Reinforced with hunger and terror. Defensive walls of molten metal.

I was the enemy, and he had an already-developed warrior’s soul.

I sat on the floor and tried waiting for his attention but he didn’t falter. Fifteen minutes is a long time for a child of that age to do anything, but he sat as still as a baby fawn in the grass. Curled and silent.

Suddenly inspiration struck. I stood and left.

Back in the pit, the central command station the nurses swarmed over a trauma in the bay. Tubes and IVs. My mentor’s jewel tones were easy to spot, she stood straight and petite barking commands in a deceptively calm voice. She was a serene as the bleeding child on the table in front of her, and the flat-lined monitor overhead. Meantime her junior colleagues and my scurrying peers manned the other eight exam rooms, and the TV overhead showed a croup-season waiting room list a mile long. My boy wasn’t even on the radar and the last thing my mentor needed was for me to investigate a bunch of croup cases to add to her caseload. I was safe to pursue my own illogical path.

I scoured the desks irritating the veteran medical receptionist. Finally, I had my prize, two plastic cups, a black felt-tipped marker, and a blank piece of paper.

Returning to the relative solace of the observation room I dropped my clipboard on the floor and started cutting the paper by folding it, soaking it in spit, and tearing it into rectangular strips. The boy’s stoicism began to crack as I ignored him. He craned his skinny neck.

I made a very small, spit-soaked disc, and colored it carefully black. Then I made two artfully folded hockey sticks and gave them racing stripes. The boy’s eyes gleamed. I felt his attention on the psi channel. He was watching me now, and only pretending to watch the TV.

Then I began to score petite, paper goals against myself into the plastic cups, winning by a mile. After establishing my clear dominance, I was definitely winning, with no goalie to defend the plastic cup. Finally, I looked up, and off-handedly offered the boy a hockey stick.

His future was suspended in the air in front of him, in the form of a slender paper hook, trailing gold dust to my second sight. (Sometimes I do that if I’m doing something important.)

He made eye contact for the first time. And took the stick with alacrity. I had myself a game. The iron door in his psyche opened.

I had initiated the war games properly. He would engage.

We spent the next twenty minutes in a hot and furious tourney. I lost badly. I was delighted. He began spewing war cries on the psi channel the first time I scored a goal. When I shouted back silently, he looked up in surprise. We spoke the same language.

I looked at him with surprise as well. I hadn’t thought his intellect was developed. But his intellect was fine. His silent thoughts were incisive, observant, and fully conversant.

Sometimes this happens. Children with no verbal capacity can be quite fluent telepathically, but with no one to listen or respond they don’t know they are broadcasting. They think it’s a private channel until your thoughts join theirs in happy communion. Like two velveteen puppies in a play fight.

This child was astonishingly bright. Psychic, not just driven onto the channel from trauma and isolation. He began playing happily. Then we exchanged a smile at a missed goal. And then instantly, love. A golden, electric current shot between us.

It’s hard to describe what that means, and in this context, it will seem too easy. Too instant. Like magic.

But it is.

Real love is magic. Instant and permanent. Spit, paper, a plastic cup, then… a lifetime, the universe. He trusted me now, he couldn’t not. But everyone trusts love. It’s an open conduit.

I had expected to score a goal or two, perhaps get a read on his mind. But now I unexpectedly held his fragile, hidden, traumatized, child’s heart in my hands. Fluttering with its four delicate valves, beating butterfly wings against my mind.

That’s the hard part. Love gives you an infinitely valuable gift in an instant. And then you must bear it forever, always, a conduit to someone’s innermost being that can never be exploited or fucked up. Because you can hurt them so much more than anyone else.

Better to be an enemy, than beloved and harmful. I had opened a door I could not close.

I had his consent. The only consent that mattered. He could love, would love if someone could reach him.

Now, my battle. The real one. I retrieved the nurse and taught him how to play paper hockey. The boy let me, cautiously trusting my telepathic recommendation of a better tournament. The nurse did not disappoint, he proved surprisingly flexible toward child incarceration. (I think he was also a hockey fan and there was no game outside the room.) I left them on the floor, the nurse’s large ass and the child’s bony one raised in the air as they knelt over their respective cups.

I found my mentor. She was sitting with her feet up on my chair looking exhausted. “I hope you have a report for me,” she said.

I gave a succinct history, stating the history of extreme physical abuse, the likelihood that the child had misinterpreted the principles actions as threatening, and my observation that the child had normal intelligence but needed speech therapy.

“I think the principal would be amenable to him returning to the school with some extra funding. Can you get him a special-needs classification? A speech therapist?” I asked.

My mentor gave me a steely assessing gaze. “I can,” she said reservedly. “I can pull some strings. You get me a physical exam?”

“I wanted your permission,” I said. “Can he leave the room?”

“You can try,” she said. “But if he freaks out he goes back in the room. If he can sit still for an assessment I’ll make the call.”

I returned to the room. My charge looked up. “He’s winning.” the nurse said ruefully. I brandished cookies and water. My charge stood up, happy to see me. I showed him the door. He obediently walked out, took the food, and followed me down the hall. He trailed crumbs with miniature slapping delinquent feet.

I showed him the table and he climbed up expertly. I looked at him and he looked at me. Touch was going to be a problem. I remember an ex-boyfriend of mine who had been severely beaten in childhood. He could hardly bear to be touched — never by surprise. I was worried the boy would react violently again if I touched him.

I reached for my stethoscope. Put it on, and listened to my own heart. It beat with a steady thump. He watched me, chewing quietly. I cleaned the earpieces with an alcohol wipe. Then handed him the earphones. He listened carefully. Looking at me quizzically. I took the end from my heart and put it on his shirt. He heard his own heart and looked at me in surprise. A sudden grin flashed across his face. I gently took the earpiece back and listened to the precise thah-thump under his skinny ribs.

After that it was easy. He played with the stethoscope and let me remove his shirt for a well-child exam. Slender white scars crisscrossed his body. Little brown cigarette burns, and some jutting ribs where they had been broken. An oddly angled long bone or two. Small scars on his head. His diminutive frame was a Frankenstein map of abuse.

The heartbreaking aspect of working with abused children is how carefree they can be. They really don’t know any better. The boy was more interested in the cookies I handed him formally as we completed each stage of the exam, and using the stethoscope to listen to my lungs the way I had listened to his, than he was in his own old injuries or my nearness.

Exam completed I took him back to the nurse. He was transformed, obedient and interactive. Even a bit friendly. I was sure this wasn’t the end of his behavioral journey, but he would present well to the child psychiatric team when they arrived. My charge was going to be his own best witness now.

I found my mentor. “The child was perfectly compliant and nondisruptive and exactly mimicked the pulmonary exam on me after I performed it.,” I said. “He’s obviously quite bright and observant, see for yourself. I suspect his behavioral problems are partly due to frustration with the inability to communicate. Perhaps even giftedness…”

I didn’t know if that was exactly true, but gifted kids are known for having behavioral problems and the kid had enough labels to last a lifetime. Might as well throw a wrench into the works and make them rule out intelligence, with some carefully worded clinical notes. I didn’t mind evening the scales with some undeserved praise.

My mentor spent the obligatory fifteen minutes with my charge required by law. She carried enough clout to decide his future with a tersely-worded sentence to her colleague, but the child-psychiatrist would be the one determining care.

I hovered anxiously in the background, projecting patience when the hellfire began to light in the boy’s eyes again. “Pleeeease trust her,” I asked him on the psi channel, and he reluctantly did.

She was brisk, incisive, and thorough. Also a bit surprised.

“He does seem quite intelligent she said. And I can’t see any obvious misbehavior… Those scars are awful. I’ve seen it before though.” her eyes were swiftly sympathetic toward me. Most med students don’t handle severe child abuse well. I didn’t say anything and she went on.

“This is a complex case you know, it won’t be as simple as an ER assessment. He needs a whole team.”

“But you can jump the queue.” I said ”For the team? For speech therapy?”

“I can get him into an expedited program,” she admitted. “The ER has a fast track. We don’t use it often, it’s only valuable because it’s not used all the time…” Then looking at my hopeful face.
“Fine, fine. I’ll make the call. It doesn’t fix everything but you’ve convinced me. It’s clear you’re passionate about this.”

It was. I was.

Love always goes both ways.

On the way out of the hospital at the end of the shift, I stopped by to say goodbye. The boy’s father had arrived.

He was younger than me. A slender man. Quiet. A little hopeless, the weight of the world newly hung on his slender shoulders. I read his thoughts. It was hard for Aboriginal men to get good construction jobs, he had been fighting his own battles to get on the well-funded government project he was working on. Long hours, the junior man working harder than everyone else, microaggressions. Then a sudden child, a bewildering grade school, white-people paperwork — not easy. He was overwhelmed, sleepless nights filled with worry for the traumatized boy who arrived cut into jigsaw pieces. A family system skeletonized from urbanized Indigenous translocation, addictions, and ancestral trauma. Crowded housing.

I saw that he had showered after work and before coming to the ER. I felt a surge of tendernesss. It was something my old crewmembers would do, cleaning up for the white doctors. So they treated you better. He wore a plaid shirt, new jeans, and clean leather workboots with new laces. He looked up with silent trepidation.

I saw that the boy and he really didn’t know each other that well yet, they had only recently met after all. They sat together on the couch. But this time the boy was on his end, looking up at him starstruck. The boy was clearly capable of bonding after all. I was not the only one with a newly-opened door to his butterfly heart. The man looked at me expectantly, emanating nonverbal respect, alert, needing to know about this child, his son.

Stories matter. They are everything sometimes.

“The doctor will be in soon to speak with you directly,” I said. “She is my boss. She will arrange things, people to help you….”

I paused, choosing my words carefully. Venturing past strict empiricism for the sake of the boy, the rewritten story. “I think your son just got confused at school today. Lots of new people, a strange setting. I don’t think he meant to cause trouble. He just needs some teachers who understand him better, he can definitely learn to talk with some patience. He’s very bright. I’m glad I met him. I think he is smarter than anyone knows and he has normal emotions for a child his age. ..Also, he’s also very good at hockey.” I smiled, the boy smiled back shyly, ducking his head.

His father looked relieved. I was holding a clipboard. I was a white doctor, and I thought his son was smart. The white people saw his son the way he did. We agreed with him. The boy was special. He gently clasped his child’s leg in reassurance. The boy snuggled under his arm and he hugged the child to his side. A cloud of silent love erupted from him, dark velvet gold, enveloping the boy. All that the child would ever need. A bubble on the end of the couch, in the empty room. The two of them sheltered from the world.

He nodded at me and they looked up at the screen again. Two dark heads with spiky hair watching the game in silent companionship. That was the last I saw of them.

Hearts and hockey sticks can be arranged, folded. Spit, a tear, a crease in the right place, and some racing stripes.

It just takes a bit of creativity and some Magic.

Probably not polite, unless you are a doctor. Then it will be evocative and informative, as intended.

You can’t choose your audience tho, your audience chooses you.

I’ve heard third-hand from writing coaches (never hired one myself) that writing is a muscle. I see where they are coming from, but they’re mostly wrong. At least, it’s not skeletal muscle, nothing as sexy as a bicep, trap, or glute.

The part of writing you understand, is the external anal sphincter. The part under semi-voluntary control.

The part of writing which you don’t understand is everything else. Which is a good thing.

Like shitting, it’s probably good most of writing is subconscious, because if you could influence it you’d likely fuck it up. It’s better to focus on getting your small part right. Hence this article.

So let’s go over the anatomy shall we?

Food is your incoming experience. Shit is your artistic output. Experience passes through you, some of it becomes you, it’s better for your shit if your experiential diet is varied. Sometimes you store up too much experience when you should be shitting it out. Some experience is quite useless and there is simply no point in using it for anything but roughage. Sometimes you are lacking micronutrients in your experience and you thin, and sicken and waste. Sometimes you’re just missing the magic biota to help you extract meaning from your experience and you bloat and pain. It’s all pretty simple really. You know this, on another level. You merely must apply your knowledge to your life. I recommend blueberries. They are a good writing snack, good for your actual digestion, they smell nice and you really should find some to enhance your artistic shit as well.

You might think you don’t have shit. And from my perspective you’re artistically constipated but don’t mistake biology, or your psyche. You’re putting some shit out somewhere. Everyone shits or they die… horribly.

You shit and shit and shit

Eventually you look in the toilet bowl and say, that is good shit!

Then you put it up on the internet for everyone else to enjoy too.