Our prompt was: โWrite about an imaginary place of abundant riches.โ
More details will be posted on this session, so check back again!
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Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!
For this session we read an excerpt from the memoir “Stay True” by Hua Hsu, posted below.
Our prompt was: โWhen the needle skippedโฆโ
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You make a world out of the things you buy. Everything you pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny, cosmetic change that might blossom into an entirely new you. A bold shirt around which you base a new personality, an angular coffee table that might reboot your whole environment, that one enormous novel that all the fashionable English majors carry around. You buy things to communicate affiliation to a small tribe, hopeful youโll encounter the only other person in line buying the same obscure things as you. Maybe I, too, will become the kind of person who has books like Infinite Jest casually strewn on his cool, angular coffee table. Maybe Iโll become the kind of per- son who seems as if he should have that book but choose not to. I spent hours at Amoeba Music, walking back and forth in the same few sections (โRock,โ โIndieโ). There was an entire other wing devoted to jazz and something called world music; I looked forward to one day becoming the type of person who understood these genres and, by extension the world. One day, I bought a jungle 12-inch based purely on a description Iโd read in a magazine. At first, I thought the record was defective, since it was nothing but jittery drums and a bass line that kept mak- ing the needle skip, Where was the rest of the song? But then I realized it was supposed to sound this way, that this bass line was a portal to somewhere new, and I couldnโt wait to hear more. I started picking up rave flyers at coffee shops and record stores. It was electrifying to think about how much more music there was in the world left to hear.
Our prompt was: โ Write about a home without walls.โ
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (โLeave a Replyโ), 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 youโre able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (โLeave a Replyโ), 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 youโre able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
By the boulder cluster the wind struck up a dust-ghost, A brothering shade and shadow, And oh I said that I could live lively as you and have no more to die
and the ghost tore into a shackling shrub and failed like sleet, returning shapeโs interference to clearing
The dust rearranging to a new breeze I gave up the intermediate paradise and said so all things do misty arisings mistily depart, shingling down the rills and ruffles of nothing-in-between.
Ammons, A. R. โBy the Boulder Cluster the Wind.โ The Hudson Review, vol. 30, no. 3, 1977, pp. 371โ371.
Our prompt was: โWrite about the gift of knowing we are mortal.โ
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Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if youโre able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
The blank death certificate sits in front of me. No matter where a life starts, where it ventures, the Medical Certificate of Death is the concluding punctuation mark on a personโs medical narrative. I approach the completion of the death certificate with reverence. My final task in the care of a patient. A moment to pause. Reflect. Say goodbye. To honour their life within the rigid confines of a bureaucratic document. This ritual is becoming increasingly frequent. My patients have been growing older with me. Despite medicineโs advances and my best efforts, they are dying. It is their time. Iโm losing my patients. Just last month, I lost three. Lilly, my oldest patient, was an elegant matriarch. Each of her frequent visits ended with her gently touching my arm and saying, โBless you, Hiltonโ. I had cared for her husband Don before his death. Now it was Lillyโs turn. Her heart was failing. โI hope that one night I will go to sleep and wake up dead. Just like Don did.โ Her wish came true a few days ago. Whoโs going to bless me now? Len had been a child throughout Germanyโs bombing of London. I had once ruined his Christmas by sending him to hospital to have a heart pacemaker inserted. He would have died without it. He wasnโt ready for that. The pacemaker kept him going for another decade. Not always easy years. But โbetter than the alternativeโ, as he often said. Len was a poet. Each visit to me was accompanied by the gift of a poem, โFrom when the muse was upon meโ. The last time I saw him he told me he was feeling better than he had for years. Another gift. He woke up dead the following week. Joe had been a postman during the times when delivering the mail included many a garden path conversation. Even as his dementia progressed, Joe still enjoyed animated conversations. I loved how his disconnection with the present transported us to a simpler time. Until that gift too was snuffed out by dementiaโs relentless march. I finish writing the death certificate. I pause and offer gratitude for the blessings, the poems, the conversations and all the other gifts my patients have shared with me, and I walk out to greet my next patient. The waiting room is full. Many familiar faces look my way. I am troubled by a nagging thought, a persistent pestering question. Who will be next?
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (โLeave a Replyโ), 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 youโre able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
Our prompt was: โWrite about going through it.โ
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Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if youโre able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
First of all do you remember the way a bear goes through a cabin when nobody is home? He goes through the front door. I mean he really goes through it. Then he takes the cupboard off the wall and eats a can of lard.
He eats all the apples, limes, dates, bottled decaffeinated coffee, and 35 pounds of granola. The asparagus soup cans fall to the floor. Yum! He chomps up Norwegian crackers stashed for the winter. And the bouillon, salt, pepper, paprika, garlic, onions, potatoes.
โโโโโโโโHe rips the Green Tara poster from the wall. Tries the Coleman Mustard. Spillsย the ink, tracks in the flour. Goes up stairs and takes a shit. Rips open the water bed, eats the incense and drinks the perfume. Knocks over the Japanese tansu and the Persian miniature of a man on horseback watching a woman bathing.
โโโโKnocks Shelter, Whole Earth Catalouge, Planet Drum, Northern Mists, Truck Tracks, and Womenโs Sports into the oozing water bed mess. โโโโโโโโโโโโโHe goes down stairs and out the back wall. He keeps on going for a long way and finds a good cave to sleep it all off. Luckily he ate the whole medicine cabinet, including stash of LSD, Peyote, Psilocybin, Amanita, Benzedrine, Valium and aspirin.
Credit: Milosz, Czeslaw, ed. A Book of Luminous Things (1997). Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Our prompt was:ย โWrite aboutย a momentย of unexpectedย connection.โ
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (โLeave a Replyโ), 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 youโre able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
What can I tell her over breakfast when she says her son suffers from madness, and because there is no mental health, he has ended up in jail, and she is relieved, because at least he might be safe there or he might get to see the doctor. We are eating egg-white omelets; we are counting carbs. We are buttoning ourselves in our clean dresses and high-heeled shoes in order to bring home the bacon, doing what we need to do and โIt is what it is.โ Her granddaughter and daughter are living with her in the one bedroom. Nights, the daughter lounges by the pool, looking at her phone, while she teaches the child to plant seeds in a flower bed she feels bad she does not own. She tells she cried in the car coming here; she did not know me then. She thought we would be talking to each other the whole time about what we are selling, what the other might buy, but somehow we left that behind over the toast with the tiny pots of strawberry jam. Who can explain all this luxury, all this despair? Or how we all hold our secret shames so close and gloss our lips with โCinnamon Fireโ as if that were some legitimate form of protection. Cinnamon Fire! She just turned fifty. I tell her wait ten yearsโyou wonโt know more, but you will get closer to forgiving, because it is all happening on a wheel that spins so fast. Why not stop to look at the pink flowers youโve planted with your granddaughter? Why not feel your bare toes in the good wet earth? We play with the crusts on our plates. The waitress takes the coffee away. We are strangers again, each carrying our lonely fear our children wonโt find their way, wishing for them some inner logicโsacred trust of earth and self, that exists for each of us so far within, so far under the skin, we canโt even begin to say what it is made of; it merely is, poised between love and grief: the blue space we call wonder, which is merely the dew on the grass, the shadow the sun makes as it rolls over the vast skin of the Earth.
Copyright ยฉ 2023 by Sheila Black. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 28, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (โLeave a Replyโ), 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 youโre able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
I'm the underbelly, I am the claw
Never one thing no, not one thing at all
I'm a street fighter, I'm a prayer for peace
I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee
I am the truth, I am a lie
I am the ground, I am the sky
I am the silence, I am the call
Never one thing no, not one thing at all
I'm the underbelly, I am the claw
Never one thing no, not one thing at all
I'm a street fighter, I'm a prayer for peace
I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee
I am hope, I am defeat
I am broken, I am complete
I am the grace, I am the fall
Never one thing no, not one thing at all
I'm the underbelly, I am the claw
Never one thing no, not one thing at all
I'm a street fighter, I'm a prayer for peace
I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee
I am the beggar, I am the queen
I am the end, I am the means
I am the hammer, I am the wall
Never one thing no, not one thing at all
I'm the underbelly, I am the claw
Never one thing no, not one thing at all
I'm a street fighter, I'm a prayer for peace
I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee
I am a victor, I am the loss
I am a profit, I am the cost
I am the salve, I am the sting
Never, no never, no never one thing
I'm the underbelly, I am the claw
Never one thing no, not one thing at all
I'm a street fighter, I'm a prayer for peace
I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee
I am a mother, I am the child
I am the meek, I am the wild
I am the witch, I am the saint
I am alive, never one thing
I'm the underbelly, I am the claw
Never one thing no, not one thing at all
I'm a street fighter, I'm a prayer for peace
I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee
I am the lion, I am the swan
I am the bull, I am the fawn
I am a woman, I am the ring
I am my own, never one thing
I'm the underbelly, I am the claw
Never one thing no, not one thing at all
I'm a street fighter, I'm a prayer for peace
I'm a holy roller, I'm a honey bee
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Tyler Andrew Duncan
Our prompt was: โStart with ‘A community is..’โ
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (โLeave a Replyโ), 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 youโre able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
Connections in Narrative Medicine 