Q: If I’m on a hero’s journey, what elixir do I bring back to this ordinary world?
I served on various committees when I was a physician, including the Infection Control Committee and the Antibiotic Stewardship Committee. Being an Infectious Disease doctor made it logical to be recruited to these meetings. (more…)
Every successful poem is a micro-transformation, both in the reading and in the writing. As I’m sure you’re aware, April is not only blog challenge month, it’s also National Poetry Month. When I first began writing poetry seriously, back in 2004, I learned that to write poetry, I had to read poetry.
I started collecting subscriptions to daily poems arriving in my email inbox. Today I’m presenting a roundup of those subscriptions. I still subscribe to all of these. Some mornings I’m too busy to read them all, but the poems sit there waiting for me, and on a quiet weekend, I immerse myself in poetry surprises. (more…)
O is for opportunity. In my life, I’ve discovered that misfortune can sometimes lead to opportunity. A sudden reversal can lead to seeing things in a new way. If I’m willing to reflect, I can reframe the situation.
When I was deciding whether to close my practice, new competitors were a worry until I realized they were an opportunity. I stepped away from hospital work gracefully. My patients continued to get excellent care, and I got my decades-long wish to have weekends off. (more…)
When I say “new writing,” I mean writing generated on the spot to a prompt, like the writing that I do in generative writing workshops. In new writing, I get my stream of consciousness down onto the page. It flows, but it’s not usually good writing. It needs to be more concise, more vivid.
In Anne Lamott’s words, I have a “shitty first draft.” Now I can revise, combing through my material as many times as it takes to get it to sing. Is it rhythmical? Does it have memorable metaphors and images? I bring poetry into my prose. (more…)
Recently, I read a book by Javier Zamora, the memoir Solito. It’s the harrowing story of how he came to the US from El Salvador at the age of nine. His parents had already escaped from the horrors of the war, leaving Javier with his grandparents. His family paid a coyote to accompany him to the US.
It took him three tries before he was successful. After immigrating, Javier went on to earn an MFA. On the acknowledgment page of his memoir, Zamora speaks of how much therapy he had to undergo to unearth the trauma of this important story. (more…)
Let go of the outcome. It’s a paradox (kind of like writing formal poetry). I have a goal of letting go of goals. It’s a great learning process.
For instance, having a son is a blessing. He is smart, funny, sensitive, mature, and caring. Did I set out with these specific goals in mind? No, although my husband and I love the adult that our child became. (more…)
I used to precept medical trainees in Ambulatory Palliative Care clinic. Once, a Resident relayed a patient request to me. I don’t remember the details. The patient could have been asking for a medication for pain or anxiety, or they could have been requesting an unnecessary lab test or x-ray.
We had a long discussion, the Resident and I. Our response to the patient was far from a knee-jerk reaction. I ended the discussion by saying, “Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a patient is to say no.” Then we went into the patient’s exam room together to discuss the treatment plan. (more…)
The word journal comes from the Latin diurnal which means daily. I’ve already covered Dailiness under my D post, but exploring the derivation of the root -jour- brings me to enticing words. Words like adjourn (to suspend a meeting to a future day), sojourn (a temporary stay), journeyman (someone who does a day’s work), and abat-jour (a skylight, something that throws down the daylight).
As for the word journal, one of the loveliest examples of journaling comes from Suleika Jaouad, creator of The Isolation Journals. Jaouad began journaling in her twenties when she was undergoing a bone marrow transplant for leukemia. Her necessary isolation led her to use that time and space as creative solitude. (more…)
The Hospice Medical Director role gave me an excuse to bring poetry into my work as a physician. I selected a poem to begin every weekly meeting, sometimes one of my own. One day I read a poem by Mark Doty, “The Embrace,” and I looked up to see that everyone was crying. There are few places where healthcare workers can share emotions of grief and worry over patients. A hospice team meeting is one of those places. I wrote a poem about that day. (more…)
How has writing a memoir helped me heal? First, I’ve been able to turn my former self into a protagonist in a story, a flawed but hopefully likable character. I can empathize with her. I can slap my forehead and say Doh! Why is she doing this? This is a bad decision.
But I know the story has a happy ending, and these are necessary mistakes for her. She gets insight as she goes along, but not as much as I, the narrator, as the emotions settle. The narrator sees a fuller, broader picture. Insight is an iterative process, reseeing past events from a larger and larger perspective. (more…)