On Monday July 6, 2020 28 participants, including a handful of newcomers, came together from all across  the USA, as well as Canada, New Zealand, UK, and India.

The text we read together was “Bring Me the Sunflower So I Can Transplant It” by Eugenio Montale. After listening to two different voices read the poem aloud in English, we experienced the original text in Italian, listening for differences in sounds, word choices, and musicality. We were moved to examine the translation and the complexity of the process. For example, what changes for a reader when a sunflower is said to “show all day to the blue reflection of the sky the anxiety of its golden face” and what happens when the flower is seen to “lift the craving of its golden face to the mirroring blue”?

In our close reading, we paid attention to “plant” and “transplant”, which we observed are both nouns and verbs. In doing so, we looked at the “special language of place”, as highlighted by one of our participants: the art of planting and transplanting involves a dialogue among the plant in question, its roots, the new and the old soil, and the hands that are placing a living thing in the earth. One person read the text as implying: people, as well as flowers, put down roots.

Discussions open up when participants share their different reader-responses. It is always incredibly humbling for us to remember that there are as many interpretations as there are participants in the room. In particular, we focused on the “I” and “you” in the poem, and the varied shades the word “bring” can have. This evening, one participant heard the poem’s “I” as making a “demand of the you” and explained that seeing, in the Italian version, the familiar form “tu” caused her to sense a power imbalance between the one “who commands to bring a sunflower” and the one “who will do the work of planting”. Another participant focused on contrasts in the poem—beauty and darkness appearing in proximity – and the interpretation of “bring me” more as a “gentle plea” than a command. Another person shared that the poem made her think of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers (which we readily projected alongside paintings by Klimt and Van Gogh).  The poem’s mention of “anxiety”, she said, brought her back to Van Gogh’s struggles with anxiety, and the parallels between his love of light and Montale’s “sunflower sent mad with light.”

After the group was prompted to write for 4 minutes, beginning with the words “Bring me…” three readers read their work. Listeners reflected back the beauty, generosity, grace, and gratitude expressed in the writing. The first piece of writing expressed a man’s deep yearning for his children living thousands of miles away. “Bring me” was repeated three times in ways that resonated with many in the group as we continue to find ourselves—due to the coronavirus—isolated and separated from those we love. The second text was an invitation for an open exchange between a giver and a receiver: an exchange of lies, secrets, wrongdoings “that have not been told before”. In this piece there was not only an offering to listen but also a confession of one’s own failings. The ending suggested that an outcome of such an exchange might be that both could feel “lighter”. A fellow participant highlighted how the writing described “what we love in a good conversation”: openness, desire for dialogue, a determination to openly share what we tend to hide. The third reader asked to be brought the light and color of a sunflower in order to share with the universe.

In these times, when current events and fear of contagion lead us to reconsider terms of sharing, touching, passing on, we thoroughly enjoyed sharing this time with our participants, and – in the words of one of our participants – “sharing the contagion of what transpires in our community”. We left each other with the image of “a smiling sunflower”, “grace and reminders of what is important” and “rich metaphors of transformation and optimism”. We hope this new week brings you all a similar richness of colors, experiences, and community sharing.

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Wednesday, July 8th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

Bring me the sunflower so I can transplant it – Eugenio Montale

Bring me the sunflower so I can transplant it
here in my own field burned by salt-spray,
so it can show all day to the blue reflection of the sky
the anxiety of its golden face.

Darker things yearn for a clarity,
bodies fade and exhaust themselves in a flood
of colors, as colors do in music. To vanish,
therefore, is the best of all good luck.

Bring me the plant that leads us
where blond transparencies rise up
and life evaporates like an essence;
bring me the sunflower sent mad with light. 

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Together we closely looked at the painting Historias de Nuestros Condominios (Stories of our Condos) by Ignacio Iturria, posted below. After a brief moment of silence, during which we centered ourselves in preparation for our close viewing exercise, we all turned our focus to the painting. One participant noted how viewing the painting was like reading a book: each of the “characters” in the windows opened into a story, the painting uniting them all, allowing us to move from one narrative to the other. This participant even noted that there is a dividing line down the center of the painting, like the split between pages of a book. Another viewer was struck by the way the painting’s composition creates patterns of repetition and variation that organize all of the characters who exist in the structure. Many participants found the “mood” of the painting to be “devastating,” or “sad,” with one participant noting that they felt “sucked into a vortex of suffering” and another describing it as a “scene of destruction.” Participants also commented on the “texture” of the painting, one viewer sharing that it looked like “unfinished cement.” Another viewer was struck by the “scratches” in the paint, which almost convey the sense of a giant controlling the scene, reminding them of Foucault’s panopticon. This same viewer went on to share that the 4th wall had been removed–that there was a “element of voyeurism” in viewing the painting.

Following our close viewing of the painting, we responded to the prompt, “Write about a neighbor,” which evoked a wide array of narratives. One person recalled being welcomed to a new neighborhood with a plate of cookies that were delivered by the grandmother of a patient from nine years earlier, and we felt the surprise of reconnection. We also noticed a move from the distanced clinical language of diagnosis at the beginning to the sensory warmth of the baked goods at the end, while the nine years between the two encounters remained a black hole for us and for the clinician. Another writer also began with a woman’s physical ailment – in this case, gangrene – and then shifted to the action of daughters pinching and pruning before returning to the mother, now looking out to the sky. One participant noticed how a sad story had still managed to evoke nice memories for him personally. A third writer wrote about her neighbors Luminance and Silence, and the parallel growth in the back yard and in the mind. We remarked on the pairing of the visual (Luminance) and the aural (Silence), and how we can compare thoughts to congealed sunlight. Our last writer had a different take on silence, considering the path or paths to salvation. We were reminded of how of late the media have been telling so many stories of immigrants, but we will never know the outcome of those stories; the comment recalled an observation on the first response, about those patients whose outcomes remain a mystery to the clinicians who treat them.

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday, July 6th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!