"There is never a good day in a hospital," the late Marian Hamm, Chief Nursing Officer at the first two hospitals I led, wrote in a poem she penned for caregivers. She was right in one way. Hospitals are the only places where every occupant (except the pregnant) is sick.

   It was the caregivers for those sick where my attention flowed. I never felt I could do enough for them.

   In high school we learned the following lines and 1802 Wordsworth poem.  They often haunt me: 

  "The world is too much with us;…/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—/Little we see in Nature that is ours;"

   Wordsworth was worried about materialism, not hospitals. But every caregiver has of felt the weight of the world.   

   Faith never seems more important than when we are sick, exhausted or fearful. I write today in the wake of deaths in my family and threats from without it.

   Where does hope reside? Wordsworth imagines this in his last lines as he surveys his life and speaks our dreams.

"…So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;…"

   What about nature? Can she be "ours" once again?

-Erie Chapman