A Nomad Santa Reflection
Years ago, during clinical training, I was a hospital chaplain. I was invited to observe an autopsy.
It was quiet in the room — cold, sterile, respectful. The kind of silence that carries weight.
The pathologist worked methodically. I was the only observer that day, but he still narrated the procedure, speaking as though to a group — maybe out of habit, maybe out of ritual. A group of one.
When he opened the chest cavity and exposed the lungs, he paused and pointed.
“You see these black spots?” he asked.
“Smoking,” I said.
“Right,” he nodded. “That’s what a couple of decades will do.”
Then he pointed again — this time to another set of blemishes. Brown, not black.
“And these?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He gave a half-smile. “That’s thirty years of breathing Phoenix air.”
And in that moment, I remembered something David Letterman once said:
“I don’t trust air I can’t see.”
It was meant as a joke, but standing in that room, it didn’t feel so far off.
We think of what we do to our bodies — the choices, the habits. But sometimes it’s what’s done to us by the world around us. The air we breathe. The places we live. The invisible things we take in without noticing until much later.
That day, I walked out of the lab with something more than clinical knowledge. I walked out with a deeper awareness of what it means to live — and what we leave behind in the lungs of our stories.
It’s a small world—and we’re all neighbors. Even down to the air we share.