An Ounce of Prevention

International Nurses Day is celebrated on Florence Nightingale’s birthday, May 12. This year’s theme is Delivering Quality, Serving Communities: Nurses Leading Care Innovations. There’s a care innovation I’d like to see: I’d like to see nurses learn about, teach about The Last Epidemic: the public health consequences of nuclear weapons. And then I’d like to see us- see nurses, see nursing- perform real primary prevention and remove this contaminant, this unnecessary evil, from our world-wide community.

I want that learning and that work to be creative, to have joy in it- acknowledging, finally, the weight of nuclear weapons on our individual and collective consciousness is heavy work, what Joanna Rogers Macy calls “Despair-work”. She also calls it “The work that reconnects”.  It has brought me to create this journal, to reconnect with nursing, with creativity.

In her blog Creativity in Healthcare Marti Hand celebrates International Nurses Day. Marti is a registered nurse and an artist. She knows first-hand how despair wears on nurses, on the communities we serve, and how creative acts restore us.

In honor of International Nurse Day, out  of my own despair-work, and in the pure joy of creativity, I hereby launch this, my contribution to creating the nuclear weapons-free world I dream of.

For me, the essence of nursing is threefold: an ethic of care, a practice of meticulous data collection, and an application of grace. Nurses buy time. That’s what I aim to do- to buy time in which to remove nuclear weapons, their risk, cost, and impact, from this world I love so dearly, so the work of community can be done.

I welcome your company while I do in this work. Join my Cause on Facebook, contribute your own stories of peace-activism, of nursing, of creativity, of buying time; donate to ICAN, The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Together, WE can.

Blessings on your head.