I. THE FINISH LINE
Paul Kalanithi’s message to his infant daughter, written mere weeks before his death:
“ There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.
The message is simple:
When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, that is an enormous thing.”
“Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.” -David Bowie
II. WHO WE ARE
“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering. ”
Ben Okri
A painting by six year-old artist Iris Grace Halmshaw
III. THE WRITTEN WORD
“I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.”
― Elie Wiesel, Open Heart
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“In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself.”
-Ceridwen Dovey, “Can Reading Make You Happier?”
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The poetry dispensary doesn’t fit into any framework for “ordinary relationships.” It is not therapy, though I’m a psychotherapist. It’s not friendship or teaching. Is healing happening? Art? At once, playful and deeply serious, it’s a performance and exchange. I rely on people’s willingness to share their stories. I rely on the poem to reflect what might not be articulated any other way. Though its efficacy is uncharted, I rely on it the way you rely on art to do something when you need something nothing else can do.
– Ronna Bloom, “On Prescribing Poems for the Sick, the Dying, the Grief Stricken”
A painting by six year-old artist Iris Grace Halmshaw
