Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text for this session was “The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” by Tracy K. Smith, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about your soundtrack.”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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 March 8th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
BY TRACY K. SMITH

The first track still almost swings. High hat and snare, even
A few bars of sax the stratosphere will singe-out soon enough.

Synthesized strings. Then something like cellophane
Breaking in as if snagged to a shoe. Crinkle and drag. White noise,

Black noise. What must be voices bob up, then drop, like metal shavings
In molasses. So much for us. So much for the flags we bored

Into planets dry as chalk, for the tin cans we filled with fire
And rode like cowboys into all we tried to tame. Listen:

The dark we've only ever imagined now audible, thrumming,
Marbled with static like gristly meat. A chorus of engines churns.

Silence taunts: a dare. Everything that disappears
Disappears as if returning somewhere.

Tracy K. Smith, "The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" 
from Life on Mars. Copyright © 2011 by Tracy K. Smith.

Thirty-two participants gathered tonight, hailing from Argentina, CA, NJ, NY, ME, OR, PA, Portugal, TX, and WA. We watched a video of “Found/Tonight” (a mash-up from two B-way musicals Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen), then took a minute to read the text with the lyrics.

One person commented on the dedication of the song being “For the Children.” A new grandfather said that resonated for him, because “much of what we do is for those coming long after us.” There was attention given to the lyrics “look up” and “reach out” and that “those who want to be found” need to believe another will be there.

One participant observed “This is what we do here in Narrative Medicine. We find each other.” Another commented that the music we had just listened to sounds like an anthem and reminds her of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” and, perhaps, the fight within the musical Les Miserable.

Another person thought of a Biblical verse, remembered as “He who loses his life will find it.” Two participants said that the listening was not comforting and/or reminded them of those who are alone due to COVID-19. The shields in the singing music booths took on new meanings in the context of the plexiglass we’ve been seeing go up to enforce social distancing in a COVID-19 world. One other participant said “the song transcends time and people.”

Another shared about hugging her grandchild, which she had not done in a long time, and realized how much she has missed doing that. Another person responded, saying that our texts, in this space, are like hugs.

Most people related the medley to COVID-19 and, as one said, “the fight of this last year.” A participant said it made her think of the healthcare workers “whose every shift this past year was a fight” and wanted to thank them. Another chatted in, in response, that she had contracted COVID at her hospital and appreciated the recognition and expression of gratitude.

We wrote for 4 minutes to the prompt: Write about your part in the fight.

The first reader aligned himself with Don Quijote jousting with windmills as he fights the good fight with systems that he “cannot let taint our beautiful profession” as he continues to train young physicians and care for patients. He invites others to “keep telling the stories” as he battles for writing and health justice. 

The second reader began by calling her actions “small” and then told of rescuing a dog, the many ways she keeps her mother connected to the outside world, in these days of Covid-19. She teaches and mentors students, and particularly students in their last year of medical school.  She said her part is “to give something positive to focus on.” Those of us listening reflected to the reader that we did not hear the numerous things she does as “small,” but rather as a celebration of the “many roles we play” in the many worlds we inhabit. To prove this point even further, a participant shared a quote by Mother Teresa: “It is not the magnitude of our actions, but the amount of love that is put into them that matters.”

Our next readers shared questions about whether “fight is even a metaphor I feel my own” or about “what is the fight”. We saw empathy as “incubating in warriors” and hope “shedding” along the way, reimagining the “shedding” of the virus we’ve heard so much about over the past year. One reader’s part in the fight was putting together seemingly fragmented pieces of hope, while another reader’s was to acknowledge the road we’ve traveled so far and celebrate the pioneering women who indeed have “won the fight” of their lifetimes.

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 March 3rd at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Found/Tonight - Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ben Platt

We may not yet have reached our glory
But I will gladly join the fight
And when our children tell their story
They'll tell the story of tonight
They'll tell the story of tonight
Tonight

Have you ever felt like nobody was there?
Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere?
Have you ever felt like you could disappear?
Like you could fall, and no one would hear?

Well, let that lonely feeling wash away
All we see is light
'Cause maybe there's a reason to believe you'll be okay
For forever
'Cause when you don't feel strong enough to stand
You can reach, reach out your hand

And oh
Raise a glass to freedom
Something they can never take away
Oh
No matter what they tell you
Someone will coming running
To take you home
Raise a glass to all of us
Tomorrow there'll be more of us
Telling the story of tonight
Out of the shadows

The morning is breaking (they'll tell the story of tonight)
And all is new
All is new
All is new
It's only a matter of
Time

Even when the dark comes crashing through
When you need a friend to carry you
When you're broken on the ground
You will be found
So let the sun come streaming in
'Cause you'll reach up and you'll rise again
If you only look around
You will be found

And when our children tell their story
You will be found
They'll tell the story of tonight
Whoa
No matter what they tell you
Tomorrow there'll be more of us
Telling the story of tonight
The story of tonight

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text for this session was the poem Pink Hydrangea by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Walter Arndt, paired with the painting “Pink Hydrangea” by Ephraim Rubenstein. Both posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a color-filled moment.”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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 March 1st at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Pink Hydrangea
by Rainer Maria Rilke
( translation: Walter Arndt )

Who thought such pink could be? Who knew it there
Accumulating in each blushing cluster?
Like gilded things which by and by unluster
They gently grow unred as if from wear.

That one should give such rosiness out free!
Does it stay theirs still, smiling where it went?
Are angels there to take it tenderly like a scent?

Or, it may be, they only let it go
That it might never learn of overblowing.
Beneath this pink there lurked a greenness, though,
Which listened and now fades away, all knowing.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text for this session was “The Mississippi River Empties Into the Gulf” by Lucille Clifton, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about standing on the edge.“

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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 February 24th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

The Mississippi River Empties Into The Gulf 
and the gulf enters the sea and so forth,
 none of them emptying anything,
 all of them carrying yesterday
 forever on their white tipped backs,
 all of them dragging forward tomorrow.
 it is the great circulation
 of the earth's body, like the blood
 of the gods, this river in which the past
 is always flowing. every water
 is the same water coming round.
 everyday someone is standing on the edge
 of this river, staring into time,
 whispering mistakenly:
 only here. only now. 

-Lucille Clifton

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we watched a performance of “Over the Rainbow” by Eva Cassidy, posted below.

Our prompt was to begin your writing with the word: “Somewhere…“

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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 February 22nd at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text was an excerpt from The Overstory by Richard Powers, posted below.

Our prompt was: Describe a time you traveled everywhere, just by holding still.

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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 February 15th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

From The Overstory by Richard Powers

First there was nothing. Then there was everything.

Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages.

A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark pressed hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.

It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

The woman does exactly that. Signals rain down around her like seeds.

Talk runs far afield tonight. The bends in the alders speak of long-ago disasters. Spikes of pale chinquapin flowers shake down their pollen; soon they will turn into spiny fruits. Poplars repeat the wind’s gossip. Persimmons and walnuts set out their bribes and rowans their blood-red clusters. Ancient oaks wave prophecies of future weather. The several hundred kinds of hawthorn laugh at the single name they’re forced to share. Laurels insist that even death is nothing to lose sleep over.

Something in the air’s scent commands the woman: Close your eyes and think of willow. The weeping you see will be wrong. Picture an acacia thorn. Nothing in your thought will be sharp enough. What hovers right above you? What floats over your head right now – now?

Trees even farther away join in: All the ways you imagine us – bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted space, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal – are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above.

That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.

A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.

The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear.

27 participants, at least 3 new, Zoomed in from snow country: IL, ME, MI, NJ, NY, PA, and Canada. We are not sure how it was in Ireland and the UK but know it was warmer in TX.

All gathered around the poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, a poem of waking on cold Sunday mornings. Many people in the group related to the “weather” of fathers who were silent or serious or absent. Much of our discussion centered around what the poetic speaker referred to as “What I did not know” (with its Shakespearean resonance) and the changed perspective/understanding of parents when children become adults, perhaps become parents themselves, and know “love’s austere ‘offices”: work, responsibility, and silent preoccupations. And perhaps know, too, the young’s lack of gratitude or misunderstanding of these sometimes lonely offices.

By reading the poem aloud we were able to hear the assonance as part of the narrative: the harshness of hard “c” and “k” and “ch” in cold, cracked, chronic and the softness of “s” in Sunday, dress, and shoes.

Attention was paid to the possessive pronoun “my” modifying “father” signaling that the poem’s speaker was writing of personal experiences in a house that not only creaked in the cold but also was heated with “chronic angers.” 

In the poem we heard the swerve from fear in childhood to sorrow and regret for the speaker’s own silence or indifferent tone as he did not hear the love expressed, if not in words, in actions.

The suggested prompt was “Begin writing with the words: What I did not know…” 

Three people read their 4-minute writing. One told of meeting his father’s friend, at the funeral home, and how the man remembered the father as funny and fun–playing jokes on fellow workers–a father far different than the man’s son remembered. Two people wrote of changes in body and health, interests and attitude, which allowed then to see and act differently in middle age. All three readings incorporated the writers’ changed viewpoints from past to present.    

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 February 10th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

 Those Winter Sundays 
 By Robert Hayden
 
 Sundays too my father got up early
 and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
 then with cracked hands that ached
 from labor in the weekday weather made
 banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
 
 I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
 When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
 and slowly I would rise and dress,
 fearing the chronic angers of that house,
 
 Speaking indifferently to him,
 who had driven out the cold
 and polished my good shoes as well.
 What did I know, what did I know
 of love’s austere and lonely offices? 

Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” 
from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, 
edited by Frederick Glaysher. 
Copyright ©1966 by Robert Hayden.