In recent months, Florence Nightingale's name and reputation have been maligned because  she has been seen as a 'colonialist' who agreed with the then prevailing racist and anti-indigenous beliefs  held during her lifetime. 

          A council estate, 1950’s, northern working-class Manchester. It was a time when everyone knew their place, knew their elders and betters, and seemed content with the worldly order of things. Life was hard, but so it was for everyone else. Also, that stuff lurking largely in the background, in the unconscious—resentment, guilt, shame, anger, fear—was muffled by the neighbourliness, the bonhomie, the general “we are all in this together”. Sometimes the mufflers didn’t work, and it all got projected outwards—scraps between lads, shouty arguments between neighbours, “not speakin’ to ‘er”, “wait till t’pub shuts t’night, I’ll sort ‘im.”

“ ...either you wanted to be his friend because he was different, interesting and exotic, or you wanted him squashed for the same reasons. ”​

Expressions, gestures between mum and dad and neighbours that I had not seen before. Looks, like I got if I was in trouble, passing between them when Streddik or his family was around. And some words, words I’d never heard before. Words so bad they were hushed, or I was sent off.

           Not long after Streddik went away, I must have been heading for 9 by then, at school we were given little books of photographs of orphan children. We were to take them home and ask family and neighbours to buy a picture for a few pence, the money to go to Dr. Barnardo’s. Even now there’s a little bit of rage there, kids like me going around to people who had nothing asking for something for those who also had nothing. I noticed nobody wanted to buy the pictures of the black babies, except my mum who bought all of those. Not, I think, because she liked them, but because she didn’t want me to have to return to school not having sold them all. And it was about then that I heard the words “black ones” too.

​          Then we got our first TV, and with my limited screen time I saw little of faces other than white. With two exceptions. There was the Black and White Minstrel Show, which even in 1958 I recall finding a ludicrous, boring musical pantomime, or maybe a film like Sanders of the River or The Jungle Book in which the whites as usual were noble empire builders and the “darkies” held to lesser roles. Yet they stick in my mind because no matter how the films distorted reality, the majesty and dignity of Paul Robeson and Sabu were not lost and hold with me to this day. However, whatever inner promptings I had then about people being beyond colour, the culture in which I was growing up was relentlessly racist.
         At junior school, the black ones were in the books like Little Black Sambo, and we were told where they lived in those places on that great map on the wall behind Miss Cowburn’s desk, where great splodges of the world were coloured red, and all owned by “us”. The black ones were behind the labels on Robinson’s Golden Shred marmalade, little gollywog (even typing that word now seems offensive) figures I collected to send off and get a badge, a badge to pin on the stuffed gollywog in my bedroom.

         Before and after Streddik, I never met anyone of colour for a long time. “They” must have been there, because I worked in Manchester after I finished school, yet if so they were invisible to me...except heard, in the music of Tamla Motown, or Stax, or on TV when we, the lads, would laugh at the “stupid’ dance moves of the Temptations while we waited for the Beatles or the Stones to appear.
            The “N” word was not the vulgar epithet of choice. No, we preferred “wog” (dare I write that?). It seemed to fit better with the wet smoky clime in which we lived, and anyway it was nicely non-specific lazy racism because it included anyone who was different and could as easily be launched at a Jamaican as a Japanese, a Spaniard as a South African. And here we were mouthing off about wogs — we ignorant — that the music we so embraced was rooted in the very people and culture we mocked. Ignorant too of this racism’s deeper roots. It wasn’t just the personal projection outwards of our individual inner insecurities, it was collective too, something that had gone on in a nation of empire that needed to justify (the guilt?) itself of both the subjugation and exploitation of others, and not take a look at the underlying neurotic inferiority that comes with the fall of empire. (The latter is still playing itself out – pace Brexit).                   
​             Empire caused suffering, but it was only the agent of it, it is what lies behind the empire, the consciousness of fear that is the prime cause. That’s the odd thing about Empire, outwardly powerful, but essentially brittle once the driving force that binds it is exposed, as Ghandi saw, and used.

​          Then a time in London and living near Notting Hill and, before I got on the train to the big city, my dad reminding me to “stick to your own”. Anyway, I soon left London, or it left me as the last gasp of the 60’s meant there were better things to do than a city job. Travelling abroad in the summer of ‘70, the only black man I met was in the same hostel - for the two brief days he was there before the owner and three of the hard cases with red-faced fury turned him out yelling “black snake” as he fled down the High Street of Gibraltar. I felt sorry for him and for a moment thought to follow and help, but surrendered to the pressure to head for the pub and celebrate the “win”, and anyway I had growing reasons to conform and not be noticed.                  Keeping my head down, being one of the lads, was a way of ensuring that my own sense of being different would not reveal itself. If someone else was getting it in the neck, my neck was safe.

           So, I continued to join in with my low-level despising, along with everyone else I met at home and work, it was much the same. Making the “other” loathed stopped the hidden interior self-loathing. Now there are all sorts of clever psychological words for it. Then it was just the way my tribe and your tribe should remain irrevocably apart, and oh the value of that—of having the defence, someone else to blame when things went wrong.
              Something or someone else to point the finger at so that anyone, anything was preferable to letting that finger point terrifyingly at ourselves. In short, it becomes just so much easier to focus attention on the “flaw” of the black skin of the “other” than face the shadows in our own hearts, in my own heart.

          Dare to admit this. I do not think it is possible to be white English, white working class English, at least of my generation and not be racist (I see in my children and grandchildren a freedom from it). Or rather, and more accurately, to have racism as part of our psyche. I don’t think any human being can be defined as a this or a that according to our roles and identities and characteristics. I think it is possible to touch a layer of consciousness, the soul if you like, in which 'I Am' is free of any labels.
​          But that is a story I have documented elsewhere in Coming Home and Heartfullness, and part of my life’s work nowadays. The discovery of and attachment to an identity can be liberating for a while, perhaps until death for many. But there is a deeper possibility of liberation, of non-attachment to any identity and freedom to dance with them. Masks worn at different balls, to be set aside when not needed or judged irredeemably unhealthy—like racist.

​          The flurry of politicians and others who say this is not a racist country are lying—to themselves and everyone else. Of course it is. It’s just that we’re very clever at keeping it subtle, under wraps, difficult to pin down. Those who say it’s non-racist need to sit still, shut up and listen—to the voices of the people of colour, of anyone who has been made to feel “othered” in countless mostly pin-pricky and not just big–slappy ways. The rest of us should keep quiet and we might learn ‘summat’. And if we speak at all it might be to fess up to our own shadows however right-on we think we are, and if we then speak further, it should only be to say we are sorry.

​          So, for starters, let me be personal for a moment; I’m sorry Chris, the black male student nurse I shared a house with. We met when you became a cadet nurse and then you got into training too. I was an arse when we were students. I came out with all the usual stupid shallow things about how black people never produced a Beethoven or a da Vinci. But then you showed me the Benin bronze and sat me down and made me listen to What’s going on and reminded me that the first to come into human consciousness were black. And I’m glad you were a crappy dancer because that eased another stereotype out the window too. I can still feel the barb of shame for the times I did not stand up and counter racist views or actions when I came to them. You never let it mar our friendship and just staying a friend (50 years on) showed forgiveness. In being a friend, you taught me more than you will ever know; there was no substitute for that encounter in changing the me-who-I- thought-I-was.

          In nursing school, I took my first lessons in freedom and it was through the primary way that any hostile ‘ism’ is sabotaged. Encounter. Encounter firstly with other people of different races and cultures may lead us to see that “they” live and breathe and have their being just like “us”. In fact, that there is no “they” or “us” at all. Encounter secondly with ourselves and all those shadow thoughts and feelings; grubbing away at their roots until exposed to the light of day, the light of awareness. Thus, flushed out, they lose their power. I do not think they ever go away; they are part of our story, hard wired into our memory banks and knee-jerk, almost autonomic, responses. But with the illumination and the healing that comes with self-love and self-regard a kind of forgiveness sets in. We come to accept all those hateful stories and — in that acceptance — they are rendered empty, bereft of any further power to captivate or be activated. Love dressed as forgiveness really does conquer all, and it starts at Home.

​          I honour the efforts at many levels to cleanse our culture of racism, but most of them are just moving the chess pieces around into different ways of organising things or legislating for things. The fundamentals of human nature have remained unchanged down the millennia. Each generation has to start again. The deep well of intolerance is still present, just capped over by structural methods.
​          What has to happen, as is the case of some individuals and groups at work to change who we are, is a deep recognition that what is wrong with the world is wrong with our communities and what is wrong with our communities is wrong with ourselves. That’s where we really have to go, a deep exploration of the very soul of what it is to be human, and white, and heal that brokenness in each of us.

          So much of the heavy lifting to raise awareness of the effects of racism has been done by black people themselves. White people can do more. More than dwelling on the shame and guilt from the behaviour and consciousness of our ancestors and ourselves in the past, or the present prejudice that lurks in our being. We can dis-empower the lies that come from our stories of our upbringing and the distortions of the world today. In seeing them, we can choose how to respond to them — healthily or unhealthily. We can’t extirpate hatred and fear from our stories, but we can be honest about their presence; what we thus see can be renounced.

Let us remember in the BLM movement that for black people (almost typed in “persons of colour” there —we are all persons of colour) the problem really isn’t yours (although you experience the fierce consequences of it), it’s ours, the white folks who never really got free 

The story of the development of the Nightingale Initiative for Global Health — often called NIGH — has recently been published in three languages — English, Portuguese and Spanish — in the trilingual open-access nursing journal called 'Revista Latino-Americana de Emphermagem.'  This story began in 1999 in London, UK at the Centennial Congress of the International Council of Nurses when three Nightingale scholars met to discuss Nightingale's 21st century legacy. As it happened,  Nightingale

Jean Watson, PhD, RN, AHN-BC, FAAN, AAN 'Living Legend'​

Launched on Florence Nightingale's 200th Birthday, May 12, 2020, this exquisite book is a peaceful refuge for contemplation, inquiry, reflection and inspiration for those who traverse the joys and sorrows of nursing.

Nightingale became the famous ‘Lady with the Lamp’ because of the widely popular poem ’Santa Filomena’ penned by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) the American poet and educator who was inspired by soldiers' letters written from the Crimean War. From Florence Nightingale, Mystic, Visionary, Healer, pp. 185-186.

Because Nightingale wanted to focus only on her work—and not on the demands of family life—she never married. But still, she much appreciated her 'marriage of a kind' with Professor Benjamin Jowett, a leading Oxford Scholar and Headmaster of their day. Their deep, supportive and inspired friendship lasted more than 30 years until his death in 1893. From Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer, pp. 329-331.

Lewis Carroll, the author of 'Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass'—whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832 - 1898)—was a close friend of Nightingale and Jowett. Wikipedia.

Nightingale’s voice remains available to us today because of the American Thomas Edison—whose assistant, Colonel George Gourard visited her in London in 1890 and created a recording using Edison’s early phonograph invention. Nightingale agreed to this recording to 'perpetuate the great work' of her life.  From Florence Nightingale, Mystic, Visionary, Healer, p. 398.

Nightingale was highly-respected by many of the British leaders of her time. During the 1870s and 1880s, she advised a series of five high-ranking Viceroys who served the British Empire as leaders in India. Lord Ripon was one of these Viceroys (from 1880-1884) and Nightingale's close friend and long-time supporter of her work. From Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer  pp. 358-361.

When Nightingale died in 1910, the young Indian Nationalist Mohandas Gandhi wrote an inspired tribute to her humanitarian example in his fledgling newspaper, the Indian Opinion. Soon thereafter, he moved to South Africa and formed a team of Indian volunteer stretcher-bearers during the Boer War, establishing his lifelong commitment to peace because of this experience and his appreciation for Nightingale’s commitment to serving wounded and dying soldiers. From Florence Nightingale Mystic, Visionary, Healer, pp. 414-415 and Wikipedia.

Nightingale was a close friend and confidant to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, advising them to consider major British Army reforms after the failures of the Crimean War. They famously wished that Nightingale could actually work at their official ‘War Office.’ From Florence Nightingale Mystic, Visionary, Healer, pp. 190-191.

At Queen Victoria’s request, Nightingale crafted the last of her major works--Sick-Nursing & Health-Nursing’—an essay  within an anthology titled ‘Woman’s Mission.’ This was part of the official British submission to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—the first such international Exhibition to officially celebrate the contributions women made to civilization and to humanity. From Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer, pp. 388-389 and Florence Nightingale Today: Healing, Leadership, Global Action, pp. 151-171.

Nightingale was one of the world’s first statisticians and used the data she collected to advance needed policy reforms throughout her career. When she collected and interpreted data about the deaths of wounded Crimean War soldiers during the Crimean War, she realized that illustrating these numbers with a 'Wedge Diagram' chart would assist Parliamentarians and other leaders to understand and care about her findings. From Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer, pp. 204-205.

Despite claims otherwise, Nightingale was an ardent champion of women’s rights in many forms. She established a woman’s right to have a career away from family obligations with her own life choices. For instance, she also encouraged women journalists—including her friend the famous writer Harriet Martineau—and became a women journalist herself. From Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer, pp. 214-216 & 277-278.

Although she was born into the Anglican faith, Nightingale was deeply familiar with the Catholic faith and respected the example of Catholic nursing sisters. In fact, when she was in her late teens, she studied hospital administration books of Catholic nursing orders in the original Italian and French texts. From Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer, pp. 115-116.

She Is Widely Loved Across the World ​

By the time of her death in 1910, more than 20 nursing schools based on her system had been established around the world. Today, she is still widely loved and appreciated across Asia—in China, India, Japan, Korea and Thailand—and throughout the British Commonwealth's 54 nations. Stamps from many of these countries remember her work. From Nightingale & Friends Encircling the Globe: Words & Works of Healing & Compassion.

Nightingale demonstrated that health is sustained when social, cultural and environmental health determinants are maintained. For instance, she identified environmental factors—fresh air, clean water and sanitation. She also worked to achieve social factors such as education for women and girls and cultural factors such as freedom of spiritual beliefs. See: UN SDGs as 17 Health Determinants.

Nightingale was keenly aware of the damage of deforestation and warned that tree-cutting would impact the climate. She particularly noted the widespread cutting of trees in many parts of India and wrote about her concerns in the then popular Fraser’s Magazine.  From Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer, pp. 271-277.

With her wide-ranging work on many related concerns, Nightingale fully anticipated current United Nations Global Goals—the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from 2000-2015 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from 2015 to 2030. In her name, today’s nurses are becoming advocates for these Goals—increasing public concern to achieve them. See: Nightingale, NIGH & the UN Goals of Sustainable Development and Connecting the Dots: For Global Health & Development.

Henri Dunant—founder of the International Red Cross—credited Nightingale with his inspiration to establish this work in 1863. Since 1907, more than 1,500 Red Cross Nightingale Medals have been awarded to distinguished nurses serving worldwide. From Florence Nightingale Mystic, Visionary, Healer, pp. 323-324.

Because she served Turkish and British soldiers during the Crimean War, Nightingale was deeply appreciated by the Turkish Sultan Abdulmecid I—then the political and spiritual leader of Islam. His respect for her has carried across the Muslim world ever since. In Turkey, she is often honoured with candle lighting ceremonies at the Florence Nightingale

“We know Nightingale best as the founder of modern secular nursing. But that is only one side of her multi-faceted life. The source of her strength, vision and guidance was a deep sense of unity with God—which is the hallmark of the mystical traditions as it is expressed in all the world’s great religious traditions. This aspect of her life has been vastly underestimated. Yet, we cannot understand her legacy without taking this into account.” Text from the Preface to Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer,  pp vii-viii. and p. 442 (Nightingale & Western Mysticism)

In the year 2010 — the Centennial of Nightingale’s death in 1910 — a Global Commemorative Service to honour Nurses was convened and webcast across the world — with thousands of nurses attending on site at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, where a stained-glass window features Florence Nightingale’s work and life. To honour Nightingale’s wider work to achieve ‘Health-Nursing,’ this gathering called for achieving  United Nations ‘Global Goals.’ Highlights of this Service are still available to enjoy @ ‘For the First Time! Nurses Advocated for Global Goals’

While the COVID 19 pandemic limited onsite celebrations of Nightingale’s 200th Birthday, her name and face were still featured in lights on London’s famous Parliament Buildings—directly illuminating across the Thames River—to the 

​When Canadian farmers—the  Hunter Brothers of Florenceville-Bristol, New Brunswick—were planning their annual corn maze, they were unsure whether or not it could even be open to visitors. But, they knew that the theme had to show appreciation for our hardworking health care workers during the 2020 Covid pandemic.  What better image than that of Florence Nightingale, their town’s namesake, to represent this profession?

Feeling why I’m here,
Looking for the answer from nowhere.
Help me understand the many faces of life,
In what I am, and in what I see.
 
“Yes, I’m not in whites or blues,
Casual as I appear in all my hues.
Am a nurse, a home care nurse,
For you and your family to care.”
 
I
You are reclined and quiet,
Eyes staring blankly, foreheads with knots.
Arms clasp around, with hands in fist,
Body barely ready to move, unable to twist.
 
“Let me be with you,
To ease the pain and sorrow, too.
Speak to me not only with words,
But with your heart, and eyes.”
 
II
Along the path another one comes,
Talking is not a problem.
Evoking feelings in many ways,
A vast display of body movements.
 
“Talking is a relief, and
Am one to listen.
Decipher the meaning,
Beyond the talking, and moving.”
 
III
Two spirits entwined,
One cannot do without the other.
Asserting to be together,
To do everything for the other.
 
“Anything I can do to keep them,
Let me think and explore.
Possibilities can abound, given
Support from all around.”

IV
Tiny feet, tiny hands,
Mother tired but happy at the end.
Discovering what to, how to,
In everything a mother should do.
 
“Glad to witness another of life’s’ miracle,
Together skillfully working to tackle,
Mother and Baby’s struggle,
To lovingly meet the challenge in bundle.”
 
V
Long years of happiness,
Surviving all challenges.
Now in bed, looking peaceful as can be,
Delicate and frail; withering with time.
 
“Lifeless you may appear,
Am here to nurture life.
See me, am here for you,
To care, help live life within you.”

​EPILOGUE 
Never ending always a beginning,
Of life I see, through years of caring.
Nurses masked the many facets of life,
Lingering around, discovering;
Unearthing miracles through caring.

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