Words in your ear to ponder
Creative Monday Boost: A recommendation for a listen this week
This is your Creative Monday Boost. Why? Because art and creativity are useful tools for our health. Whether it’s reading poems, writing to process health grief, painting to work through your emotions, listening to music that brings a rise of joy in your body — art can improve your embodied experience. Creativity and art can change you at the cellular and spiritual level.
Hello, dear friends!
I’m here to greet you on this Monday with a little note and practical idea for the week ahead, when you are driving or walking or folding laundry or resting on the couch.
Here’s the recommendation:
Listen to a podcast episode from On Being by Krista Tippett.
Krista is a world-class interviewer with a kind heart and deep curiosity. She has a soothing voice, a delightful, tinkling laugh, and the best questions.
Her podcast is a treasure trove of interviews.
Here is a tiny sample:
This is how she begins her interview with Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon, write, public health leader, and currently Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID. Krista says:
We are strange creatures. It’s hard for us to speak about, let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, Western medicine has gradually moved away from its understanding of death as a failure where care stops. Hospice has moved from something rare to something expected. And yet, advances in technology make it ever harder for physicians and patients to make a call to stop fighting death — often at the expense of the quality of the last time of life.
Meanwhile, there is a new longevity industry, which resists the very notion of decline, much less finitude. Fascinatingly, the simple question which transformed the surgeon Atul Gawande’s life and his practice of medicine is this: What does a good day look like? As he has come to see, standing reverently before our mortality is an exercise in more intricately inhabiting why we want to be alive.
— Krista Tippett
If you have not yet gotten into podcasts and aren’t sure how to listen, go to her website, pick an episode, and click on “Listen” to hear right on your computer or phone. No app needed. Or you can click on “Transcript” to read the full conversation, if the written word is more your style.
And if you are a podcast fan, as I am, On Being is on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and all the usual apps.
Enjoy!
Brianne
p.s. One more quote from Krista’s interview with Ada Limón, the U.S. Poet Laureate:
I remember having this experience — I was sort of very deeply alone during the early days of the pandemic when my husband’s work brought him to another state. And it was just me, the dog, and the cat, and the trees. And I was feeling very isolated. My family’s all in California. Many of us were having different experiences.
And I was having this moment where I kept being like, “Well, if I just deeply look at the world like I do, as poets do, I will feel a sense of belonging. I will trust the world and I will feel at peace.”
And this time, what came to me as I stood and looked at the trees was that — Oh, it isn’t just me looking.
It is the world and the trees and the grasses and the birds looking back.
And it felt like this is the language of reciprocity.
This means that I am in a reciprocal relationship with the natural world, not that it is my job to be the poet that goes and says, “Tree, I will describe it to you.” [audience laughs] I have a lot of poems that basically are that. [audience laughs] "
"But instead to really have this moment of, “Oh, no, it’s our work together to see one another.”