Last night I started re-reading Soil and Soul by Alistair McIntosh and in the first few pages I came across this passage:
'The very suffering of the world can be what repeatedly calls us back to the imperative of its healing. If we can persist and sit with the reality, not running from it, a music may eventually be heard. The fetters of destructive control loosen. Life's dance resurges.'
Of course McIntosh isn't writing about acupuncture, or any other sort of medicine, but reading this brought to mind the practice of acupuncture, of sitting in a room with a patient and looking deeply at the reality of that person in order that a way toward health and healing might be discerned. And then he uses the word 'resurges' which brings me to Resurgis and why I chose that as a name for my practice.
'Resurges' isn't a word that's in common usage and its root is from the Latin word surgere which means to rise or swell. So the meaning of resurge is to rise again. Of course there isn't a single Latin word meaning to rise again because in Latin it would depend on who was doing the rising. In Latin resurgo means 'I rise again'. I would have liked a word meaning 'we rise again' as the name of my acupuncture practice, it would give a flavour of the collaborative nature of healing, but resurgimus seemed a bit of a mouthful. So I went with resurgis which means 'you rise again'.
That's what I want for my patients, that they can rise again from beneath whatever destructive fetters hold them down and so take a fuller part in life's ongoing dance.
Bruce Bell is a fully qualified traditional acupuncturist working from clinics in Midsomer Norton and Keysham.