32 participants gathered today from around the world to explore the form, tone, voice and resonance of the poem “Monet Refuses the Operation,” written by German-American poet Lisel Mueller. After introductions and a 10-second silence/centering, the group heard the poem read aloud twice (once as text only and then again while looking at an image of Rouen Cathedral, by artist Claude Monet.)

Initial questions of “Who is speaking? What do we know? What do our senses tell us?” provided momentum for a discussion of identity (could be Monet…or anyone), doctor/patient intersubjectivity (what is real vs. a “doctor’s real”), vulnerability (as an aging artist), and the illusion of reality (even with fixed points of reference).  We recognized that there is comfort in the idea that it’s ok to change, that there is a beauty in aging beyond what’s a baseline “normal” toward a perhaps-better “non-normal.”  Reality, it was said, is in the eye of the individual, and this vision of the artist seems to manifest itself in the poem about Monet as well as in his painting.

Our conversation settled into an exploration of tone (humorous?), reactions (some positive, others negative), form (“line breaks are illusions of borders, of thoughts”), and conflict (impressionism vs. realism).  The artist-patient urgency in the poem (“You say/I tell you”) informed our appreciation for the poem itself as art and our commitment to it as listeners/readers: what do we as individuals bring to the poem?

Participants wrote to the prompt “Write about a time you saw things differently.” One writer described herself as having been “stuck in quicksand” not being able to budge until she recovered a memory of “color singing in my soul.”  Another began a poem in the shadow of the Mueller text: “My son, your heart . . . .”  And our readings came full circle when our last writer, mirroring the text discussion that began with a reflection on aging, took us all the way back to a childhood vision of sweets.

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 20th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

Monet Refuses the Operation by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller, "Monet Refuses the Operation" from Second Language.
Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. 

With participants from around the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and India, we jumped into a discussion of the assemblage, “The Destiny of Latitude and Longitude” by Betye Saar.  Participants began by observing what they saw in the piece, noting the shape of the cage, which for some evoked the image of a beehive and for others had very feminine resonances, of a breast or of an antebellum hooped skirt.  The sailing vessels opened up a lot of speculation, recalling the pirate ship in Peter Pan and the world of childhood imagination; at the other end of the spectrum, some saw the history of the Middle Passage, of slave ships.  The dangling piece of rope suggested bondage, the lynching noose, and, for some, a lost promise of escape.  The hands reaching out in different directions were seen as “asking for help” or “reaching out to lift up.”  The facilitators noted that the artist, Betye Saar is African American, and that this piece (from 2010) was part of a series of works all contained in cages of different shapes.  The discussion turned to the art of assemblage, the repurposing of objects, a thing known in one context that is transformed when placed in a new context.  The African-American artistic tradition of re-purposing found objects was noted.  The surprising and marvelous experience of the piece, some suggested, was in part accounted for by the beauty and charm of the objects, including the rather innocent rendering of a crescent moon,  the toy-like ships, and the small bird seeking, it seems, a way out of the cage, in such startling combination with the hints at the horrors of the Slave Trade.  One participant observed that the piece made her feel like she couldn’t breathe.   

The prompt was: Describe an object you own that says something about your or your family’s history, and the responses were wonderful and varied, fig trees, a bronzed golfball, a desk lamp, a genetic marker for twins.  There was also an interesting and unexpected common thread of references to grandparents that manifested in the writing that was shared.

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 15th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

Today’s session welcomed 31 participants from around the United States and around the world, but most of us were sharing the experience of muggy air and, in Bristol, UK, even heavy rain – with the exception of Palo Alto, California, where sunshine abounded. Lucky Palo Alto! 

After our usual 10-second centering exercise, we read silently the poem “Meeting the Light Completely” by Jane Hirshfield, and then two participants read it aloud. Although only 65 words long, the poem generated a wonderful variety of responses. One person remarked that she tends to rush through her first reading of a poem to try to get a sense of it, but her heart skipped at the line “ruin your heart.” Others noticed the way the phrase “the chipped lip / of a blue-glazed cup” tripped us up even after hearing it several times, especially compared to the smooth sounds of the opening stanza. We thought about how the poem’s form might mirror the journey of a long relationship, with periods of calm and a machine-gun-like choppiness, though we had different instincts about when those periods might come. That choppiness and suspense would be further heightened with a slow reading that emphasized the line breaks, someone said. Another participant heard echoes of the human form in the cup’s lip and the curtain, which could be a gown. The line about “A table painted with roses” made us consider what we imagine in our heads — were they actually painted on the table, or was “painted” a metaphor for how a vase was decorating the space? What do we see? We also were reminded of works outside the text, like a declaration of love in the film Moonstruck where a character asks another to “be a fool with me.” As for the title, we thought about “light” in relation to truth, and noticed how “meeting” added a sense of forward direction, while “completely” led us to being at one with the world.   

Our writing prompt, “Write about what you found,” generated vivid and varied responses that spanned the abstract/metaphorical (“a path not taken”) to the specific and cinematic (a ring lost by its owner and found by its master, a la Lord of the Rings). Echoing the somewhat-staccato Hirshfield poem, writers experimented with narrative form, nuanced details, and “bookending” sensorial imagery with reflective questions (“Can one ever find what one loses?”). Writing in layers helped define particular spaces in new ways: a table was “trapped” under a stack of books and papers; a rag picker discovered a locket in a dump. With an economy and energy of language, each writer/reader added a personal flourish to their 4-minute expression of what was found (or what was lost then found). One participant noted that as a group, we traveled this journey of reading and writing together.

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 13th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

Meeting the Light Completely  
by Jane Hirshfield

Even the long-beloved
was once
an unrecognized stranger.

Just so,
the chipped lip
of a blue-glazed cup,
blown field
of a yellow curtain,
might also,
flooding and falling,
ruin your heart.

A table painted with roses.
An empty clothesline.

Each time,
the found world surprises—
that is its nature.

And then
what is said by all lovers:
"What fools we were, not to have seen."

Poem copyright ©1994 by Jane Hirshfield, "Meeting the Light Completely,"
from Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, 
(Grayson Books, 2017).

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!

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text was the poem “Heroes” by Rita Dove, posted below.

Our prompt was to begin your writing with the line “it’s too late for apologies…”

More details on this session will be posted soon, so please 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, July 1st at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

Heroes – Rita Dove

A flower in a weedy field:
make it a poppy. You pick it.
Because it begins to wilt

you run to the nearest house
to ask for a jar of water.
The woman on the porch starts

screaming: you’ve plucked the last poppy
in her miserable garden, the one
that gave her the strength every morning

to rise! It’s too late for apologies
though you go through the motions, offering
trinkets and a juicy spot in the written history

she wouldn’t live to read, anyway.
So you strike her, she hits
her head on a white boulder

and there’s nothing to be done
but break the stone into gravel
to prop up the flower in the stolen jar

you have to take along
because you’re a fugitive now
and you can’t leave clues.

Already the story’s starting to unravel,
the villagers stirring as your heart
pounds into your throat. Why

did you pick that idiot flower?
Because it was the last one
and you knew

it was going to die.


Dove, Rita. "Heroes." Callaloo, vol. 18 no. 2, 1995, p. 231-231. 
Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cal.1995.0046.