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6/6/20
Black Lives Matter. Period.
Some thoughts on the last few weeks. I’ll make the writing short and the recommendations long as my thoughts aren’t needed here; we need to listen to the voices of people of color.
Trauma needs a witness, and I witness first with my feelings. 1. Horrified, enraged, despairing, sad, grieving. About the murder of black and brown bodies, recently including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and far too many more. About Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper (no relation) in Central Park. 2. Tentatively hopeful, and amazed, watching the peaceful protests spread throughout the world. 3. And then outraged and angry and yes, terrified about both the police brutality and violence out of the White House. As a human and as a mental health professional, it makes me sick.
Physical safety, recognition of full humanity, and mental health are all inextricably linked.
Individual mental health and cultural, communal wellness are also inextricably linked.
Not one of us will truly experience genuine mental wellness until our beloved sisters and brothers of color are valued, heard, and fully recognized as human.
Join me to #amplifymelanatedvoices. The day is long past for white people to de-center ourselves in the conversation about racism and start centering the voices of diverse people of color. And we must start taking responsibility for our own learning rather than asking people of color to educate us.
Here are some of the people I learn from, in no particular order, and some curated resources below. Please join me and learn to be more educated, anti-racist and empathic.
- Austin Channing Brown http://austinchanning.com/
- Book, I’m Still Here (Black Dignity in a World Made For Whiteness)
- I follow her on Insta @austinchanning
- Ibram X. Kendi https://www.ibramxkendi.com/
- Author, books: Stamped From The Beginning, How To Be An Anti-Racist
- I follow him on
- IG @ibramxk
- Twitter @DrIbram
- Layla Saad http://laylafsaad.com/
- Book, Me & White Supremacy
- Host, Good Ancestor Podcast
- I follow her on IG @laylafsaad
- Rachel Cargle https://www.rachelcargle.com/
- Course: The Great Unlearn
- IG @rachel.cargle
- Twitter @RachelCargle
- The Loveland Foundation https://thelovelandfoundation.org/ From the website: “Black women and girls deserve access to healing, and that healing will impact generations. (Founded by Rachel Cargle, this organization provides financial assistance for therapy for communities of color with specific attention to black women and girls. You can donate to the fund for providing healing through therapy to people of color.)
- Franchesca Ramsey, https://www.franchesca.net/
- MTV Decoded host, you can see all her videos here: https://www.youtube.com/user/chescaleigh
- IG @chescaleigh
- Luvvie Ajayi Jones https://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/
- Book, I’m Judging You: The Do Better Manual
- Culture critic, activist, blogger extraordinaire.
- IG @luvvie
- Patrisse Cullors-Brignac
- Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter
- IG @osopepatrisse
- Author with co-founder asha bandele of When They Call You a Terrorist
- Ta-Nehisi Coates https://ta-nehisicoates.com/
- Atlantic Magazine national correspondent and author, books: Between The World and Me, We Were 8 Years In Power, The Water Dancer
- IG @tanehisipcoates
- Twitter @taNehisiCoates8
- Audre Lorde
- Poet, author
- Intersectional thinker, self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” who dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and homophobia.
- Book, Sister Outsider
- A Detailed List of Anti-Racism Resources
- 75 Things White People Can Do For Racial Justice
https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-white-people-can-do-for-racial-justice-f2d18b0e0234
This is hardly an exhaustive list. We are rich with teachers, and need only to look to find them. By all means, suggest others!
Thank you for the courage and vulnerability it takes to look at racism and work to become anti-racist. Let’s keep listening deeply and making space for — and amplifying — voices of color. We’re all in this together.
Lisa
5/11/20
Ithaka…and a turn in the journey.
“Dearly beloved, we have gathered here today
to get through this thing called Life.” — Prince
I’m shifting gears from the 3-a-week blogs on poems/pods/books. I’ll keep sharing what I’m leaning into going forward….just not in this same 3x/week form.
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed some of the poems, books, and podcasts! For me, the rhythm of looking for words that inspired me provided a steadying direction, a light in the darkness, and a fresh exposure to things I previously didn’t take time for consistently. If it benefited you as well, in some small way, as we navigated the past 7 weeks in this crazy new reality we’ve landed in — that makes me happy.
I’ll leave you with a favorite poem, Ithaka, by Constantine Cavafy.
Apparently, this poem was one of Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s favorites too. I think of the journey of her life — with all it’s highs, lows, tragedy, perseverance and influence. What a life to navigate. What a journey.
We’re all — like Ulysses in Homer’s Odyssey — on a scary, wonderful, character defining journey. The journey, of course, is life. COVID-19 is now part of our life. Not for the entire journey, most of us, but for a piece of it.
We’ve spent so many, many years focused on the destination. Our entire Western culture is all about destinations. Always in a rush. Rarely, I think, do we learn the lessons of life in all the hustle and bustle of living, let alone savor the journey we’re on.
And along comes C-19 and insists–demands–we slow down. In the slow down, what will we learn? What have we learned? What do we yet have a chance to see differently?
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t minimize the pain and suffering and death surrounding this pandemic. And I’m not advocating any spiritual bypass. At the same time, this giant curve ball has finally interrupted our inevitable fast march into the same future we’d been staring down for years, one with certain tragedy, and one that felt almost impossible to interrupt.
In what ways has the curve ball helped you appreciate this thing called life, rather than wish it over faster? Or get to your destination quicker?
Ithaka
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
I’ll see you soon.
In the meantime — be well, wash your hands, and stay connected!
Lisa
P.S. You can read Ithaka in a lovely collection of poetry, She Walks In Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems. It’s edited by Caroline Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy’s daughter.
5/8/20
Book Rec Friday 5/8/20
I think I should rename this regular Friday post: Memoir Recommendation Friday.
Here’s another one: More Myself: A Journey, by Alicia Keys.
Singer and songwriter Alicia Keys takes us through her life from childhood until now, but it’s not the story we know from her public life.
Part autobiography and part biography, More Myself is told through not just her voice, but also through a diverse group of people close to her — her mother, her long-estranged biological father, teachers, an ex-boyfriend, mentors and music executives, Bono, Jay-Z, activists, coworkers, and her husband, Swizz Beatz.
The result is a 360 degree portrait of a girl born in Hell’s Kitchen, discovering her talent at a very young age, giving herself over to music, rising to success, but navigating the difficult and private journey all women and men must take to live authentically.
Keys’ public persona — a tough, sweet, tomboyish, soaringly talented composer and singer who writes anthems of female empowerment — belied the parallel story of a woman prone to people-pleasing, staggering under the armor of perfectionism, and for a long time, estranged from her true voice, and from knowing her true worth.
Alicia’s interview was the April 7 episode of Brené Brown’s new podcast, Unlocking Us, and I loved Brené’s synopsis of the book:
“I thought I was gonna read this and know more about you. What I didn’t know was that I was gonna read this and know more about me. This is a master class in courage and vulnerability.
“From the time you were little, you walked us through your armoring up process. I watched you assemble that armor around your heart, around your life. And then I watched it weigh you down, and then I watched you take it off. And to bear witness to that, in a book, was remarkable.”
More Myself is remarkable as a mirror and as a guide. There are so many take-aways. Too many to enumerate, but I’ll hold one scene up. Keys reached a breaking point in her super stardom life in 2006, and left for a trip alone to Egypt, to recover, planning to spend time just with her music. Instead, she found herself on a boat, floating down the Nile, with full on laryngitis, completely unable to do anything but listen.
“Most of us take about sixteen breaths per minute. That means we typically breathe 960 times an hour, or around 23,000 times a day. During my 2 glorious weeks of silence, I had more than 322,000 opportunities to breathe my way into a new existence. One exhale at a time, I let go of the urge to twist myself into a pretzel, trying to live up to others’ expectations. I let go of the belief that, if I stepped away, nothing would be there when I returned. And in place of that notion, I inhaled liberation. I inhaled the boundlessness and brilliance that once guided the Egyptians in crafting monuments of greatness.
That’s what fourteen days of solitude can bring: space to breathe. Time to reflect. A chance to reimagine what your life can look like.”
We’re in our own time of solitude, of separation, of listening, of breathing, of stepping away from what we once took for granted and felt inevitable.
I wonder what really is inevitable. I wonder what you’re breathing in, what you are unwinding from. I wonder what liberation, brilliance, greatness we can envision to take its place. I wonder what new lives we collectively and individually will create, on the other side of C-19.
Keep listening, and dreaming a new world.
Be well, wash your hands, and stay connected!
Lisa
5/6/20
Podcast Wednesday 5/6/20
The Goop Podcast Special Episode, Interview with Terry Real
“Why We Need to Take Our Partners On”, April 22, 2020
I don’t even know where to start with this podcast, because it is so full of truth bombs and great nuggets that if I were to list all of them, I’d be transcribing the entire episode.
This episode is part of a Goop series aimed to spread awareness and helpful information about how we can best manage during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Couples in particular are spending a lot more time together. Why not use this time to develop relationship skills? The increased togetherness (and seeing each other in new roles) is a real opportunity to break old patterns. Intimacy and connection are what give us well-being. We can use this time that we’re in lockdown to get better at it. And we can get better. Relationships are built on skills, not luck. (And not even on love, because although it’s very helpful, it only goes so far).
Terry Real is a renowned marriage therapist and founder of the Relational Life Institute. You can learn more about him here. He’s the author of The New Rules of Marriage and I Don’t Want to Talk About It (The Secret Legacy of Male Depression). Terry believes in and teaches what he calls “fierce intimacy.” He’s a thought leader on what makes relationships work. I’ve learned a ton from him. Also, this episode will make you laugh!
Here are 4 things I loved from this interview:
#1
Healthy self esteem comes from the inside out. But our culture teaches us the opposite: that it comes from the outside in.
Outside-in self esteem comes in 3 flavors.
- Attribute based esteem: I’m worth what I’m worth because of what I have. (All advertising preys on this.)
- Performance based esteem: My worth is in what I do, not who I am. (Particularly strong for men.)
- Other based esteem: I’m worthy because you think I’m worthy. (Common for women.)
#2
Normal Marital Hatred is a thing. (And everyone who is married knows what this means.) It’s a temporary state, and it’s nothing to be scared of. The key is to remember: your relationship isn’t going to be all sunshine and unicorns all the time. The key is a 3-step dance of harmony, disharmony, and repair. Relationships are an endless cycle of this. But we don’t teach people how normal the disharmony is or how to repair. That’s where a relationship therapist comes in (and the reason I love working with couples, because you can learn this).
Harmony—–>Disharmony——>Repair. Learn how to do it!
#3
WAIT is an acronym for Why Am I Talking?
Related to: Who is talking right now? And to whom am I talking? Is it the adult, mature, frontal lobe, mindful, heartful self? Or the triggered, immature self? Slow down (wait), get centered, think, and remember that you love this person even if they seem villainous in this moment.
#4
Your relationship is your personal biosphere. Getting good at communication, at repair is in your own personal best interest. The 5 “Losing Strategies” that pollute your biosphere are:
- Proving you’re right
- Controlling your partner
- Unbridled self expression
- Retaliation
- Withdrawal
Terry has a lot to say about all this, and it’s hopeful and energizing.
Again, L O V E — so intoxicating and wonderful at the start of a relationship — can only take you so far. Without real relationship skills, we start to pollute the very biosphere we live and love in..and unless we learn how to do intimacy, repairs, and good communication, we take love down with it, which is a tragic and unnecessary loss.
I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did — and for those of you sheltering in place with a partner, I hope it gives you some food for thought on using this time well!
Be well, wash your hands — and stay connected ~
Lisa
5/4/20
Poetry Monday, 5/4/2020
This Monday’s poem is Stay by Jan Richardson.
Richardson is an artist, a poet, and an ordained minister. I just discovered she grew up not far from where I live, Gainesville, Florida. Her family has lived here for generations, and she continues to live in Florida, informed by the rural landscape, relationships and rich sense of place this state offers. I find her poetry filled with truth and hope, not shying away from grief, pain, loss, but still comforting and grounding. Her book Circle of Grace is on my nightstand.
Stay, by Jan Richardson
I know how your mind
rushes ahead
trying to fathom
what could follow this.
What will you do,
where will you go,
how will you live?
You will want
to outrun the grief.
You will want
to keep turning toward
the horizon,
watching for what was lost
to come back,
to return to you
and never leave again.
For now
hear me when I say
all you need to do
is to still yourself
is to turn toward one another
is to stay.
Wait
and see what comes
to fill
the gaping hole
in your chest.
Wait with your hands open
to receive what could never come
except to what is empty
and hollow.
You cannot know it now,
cannot even imagine
what lies ahead,
but I tell you
the day is coming
when breath will
fill your lungs
as it never has before
and with your own ears
you will hear words
coming to you new
and startling.
You will dream dreams
and you will see the world
ablaze with blessing.
Wait for it.
Still yourself.
Stay.
The words that resonated with me were “wait with your hands open to receive what could never come except to what is empty and hollow.”
I thought about how Universe abhors a void, and will always fill it.
But for it to be filled, we must be comfortable with loss, temporary emptiness.
Yet how often can we tolerate emptiness? Our culture practically screams at us from every platform to fill it, fill it, fill it. Distract, hustle, be productive, rush, improve, redo, remake, tap dance faster.
What an act of rebellion, to just…
Wait.
Stay.
Listen.
Open.
The other words that called out to me were “the day is coming when breath will fill your lungs as it never has before.”
I hear this literally and symbolically. COVID attacks the lungs. To lose breath is terrifying, as anyone with asthma, or a panic disorder, can attest. In traditional Chinese medicine, lungs are associated with grief. The grief our world is experiencing now is hard to fully comprehend. Like all therapists who study and treat PTSD, I know that the post-pandemic PTSD fallout, in particular for our heroic first responders, will swamp our resources in a new way. We therapists are preparing best we can. Our society needs to invest more resources in mental health, but that’s an essay for another day.
So — that’s where I go mentally, when thinking of the physicality, the anatomy of this pandemic.
When I think of it symbolically, I think about change. I think about the memo we all got mandating us to dance as fast as we can through life. And I think of the opportunity cost of that, and, the opportunity this pandemic pause gives us. An opportunity to rethink that.
Whose needs are we serving, when we rush and produce and perform and perfect like it’s our religion?
Is there a better way?
How can we take a collective deep, full breath for once, and really come alive to what our lives are meant for?
Will we stop long enough to dream a new world?
Those are my thoughts as I read this poem.
What about you?
Be well, wash your hands, and stay connected —
Lisa
5/1/20
Book Rec Friday 5/1/2020
“Group therapy was the most extraordinary experience I’ve ever participated in.”
— Paul Solotaroff, Author of Group: Six People In Search Of A Life
Therapy is mysterious, with both its promise of and requirement for privacy and confidentiality. If you’ve done good work in therapy, you know how powerful it is. But it’s hard to get across to the uninitiated what an irreplaceable force for change therapy can be.
This is doubly true, IMO, of group therapy. And I know you might wonder: How can sitting in a room with a group of people — people who are also suffering and in need of change — possibly be a help to someone wanting to change their life?
Group: Six People In Search Of A Life by Paul Solotaroff is the rare nonfiction book that peels the lid off the cloistered space that is the therapy office and lets us participate in the incredible drama that group therapy is. Shows how it works. Why it works.
People doing real work in group are raw, honest, and either fighting for their true selves, or fighting to maintain the only thing they’ve known: the comfortable pain they’re so familiar with.
Part of the fight is around the “false story” they were handed when they entered life and became a player in the drama of their family story. Along the way, group helps them confront the false self and replace it with an authentic, uncovered, discovered true story. In this way, group members author their own lives.
Solotaroff is a journalist and former patient of the therapist whose real group he profiles. He credits group therapy with changing the trajectory of his life, propelling him to come to terms with the loss of his 20s and 30s to debilitating anxiety. From shaky beginnings, he crafted an adult life, discovering who he was underneath his symptoms.
Years after leaving his own therapy, he approached his former therapist with a proposal to write a book about group therapy. After some negotiations (no, he could not write about his own group), they came to a plan allowing him to observe and document a newly formed, shorter term group.
The group — 6 high-achieving, impressive, verbal and self-destructive New Yorkers — was set to work against a ticking clock (the group’s proscribed treatment period of 10 months). This group of 6 included: a model turned fashion editor, a Broadway producer, a successful commercial song writer, a human rights activist, a Wall Street multimillionaire and a senior executive. All in a mess of deep pain.
For each of these 6, their backs were against the wall. Each had arrived at a “do or die” juncture in their lives: they had to face and re-author their lives in order to avoid financial ruin, overdose, humiliating defeat, even death. Their group story — and individual stories — are a powerful page turner in Solotariff’s hands.
The maverick therapist “Charles Lathon” (all names have been changed) doles out powerful prescriptions for living a full, adult, self-authored life. He believes that from an early age, we have a false self, one meant to accommodate our families needs more than our own.
“Good parents, of whom there are shockingly few in the world, have the grace and confidence to listen to their children, to allow them, within limits, to author themselves. Bad parents, on the other hand, do all the talking, dictating to the child who he or she is from the minute they’re out of the womb.
And then, there are parents who say nothing to their kids, who pay them the insult of ignoring them altogether. Given either of those kinds of signals, kids form ideas of themselves that have nothing to do with who they are.”
A few words, like “I’m stupid” “I’m ugly” “I’m weak” or “No one loves me” become a mantra in the child’s mind, the dogma of the false self. As a therapist and human and parent, I agree with Lathon’s words:
“Our job here is to listen to that text, to pay close attention to the dogma of the false self. Because in the back of your head, just out of earshot, those three or five words have been running your life, jerking you between shame and outrage.”
The pressure of the group — watching other group members suffer, confront and resolve pain, take risks and make changes, witness and provide accountability checks to each other, offer in-vivo experiences of self compassion — just works. It dislodges the stuck and inspires new, previously unimagined growth. It’s unlike anything else in life.
I love this book and have read it a couple times, considering it from my own perspective as a group therapy client (I was in a group for 7 years in my mid 20s-early 30s) — and as a Certified Group Therapist who runs groups in private practice now.
I’m considering it again now as I reflect on life during COVID.
As we continue to consider Life from the cloistered spaces of our own lives, I wonder: how many of us are thinking about whose life we’re really living? Are we — have we been — living a life we authored ourselves? Or are we living out the dogma of the false self? How can we evolve from a false story to a true one? What do we need to do to make that happen?
We all live in groups — family groups, friend groups, work groups. But more often that not, these groups wittingly or unwittingly reinforce our false self dogma.
Group therapy with an experienced, thoughtful facilitator, offers a real re-authoring opportunity. I’d love every human to experience group therapy. If you’re interested in learning more about group therapy, check out www.agpa.org. (Or talk to me :)). And in the meantime, Group by Paul Solotaroff is a the best introduction I know. (And it’s a great read).
Happy Friday!
Be well, wash your hands, and stay connected.
4/30/20
Podcast Wednesday 4/29/20
Happy Wednesday! 
Today’s pod choice is Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman. Some of you know Dax from the show Parenthood; I know him as Kristin Bell’s husband (she of The Good Place). Armchair Expert “celebrates the messiness of being human.” Each podcast features Shepard and Padman interviewing a celebrity, journalist or an academic, then Monica does a fun post-interview “fact check” on statistics and claims mentioned by the expert guests.
Episode 201, last week’s interview with Glennon Doyle, is fantastic. Glennon was best known as a “Christian mommy blogger” back a decade ago, founded the nonprofit Together Rising, wrote of New York Times bestselling memoirs Carry On, Warrior, Love Warrior, and Untamed (currently all over the best seller lists). A former addict, and mom of 3, she’s now married to Olympian soccer star Abby Wambach. She’s one of the best writers about the extreme messiness of being human and one of my favorite people to read — from her viral post Don’t Carpe Diem back in 2011 to her most recent book Untamed.
Dax and Glennon (and Monica, and Glennon superfan Kristin Bell) discuss how love and control can’t co-exist, disappointing people, the origins of and recovery from bulimia and addiction, forgiveness, sensitivity as a superpower, how sports are a great channel for life lessons and feelings, and all the narratives we live in whether they work for us or not.
They talk about the high stakes of living a life that is true to your soul, restoring your own boundaries, dismantling what no longer works, and burning all the memos we’ve been given about how life is supposed to be.
They look at scarcity mindset vs. abundance mindset. They ask: What’s the difference between being a model for others, an icon — a projection for others– vs. a person living in such a way that gives others permission to live their highest truth and truest life?
Glennon on realizing how closely her daughter watches her to learn how to be a woman in the world:
“I realized I told myself over and over — ‘I’m staying in this marriage for her. But would I want this marriage for her?’ And if I wouldn’t want this marriage for her, why am I modeling for her bad love, and calling it good mothering?”
This message to stay in pain comes from the message, or “memo” as Glennon calls it, that says a good mother is a martyr. She buries her true self and calls it love. All of us get societal memos of varying types, and it’s up to us to think critically rather than just swallow it and bury ourselves if we don’t match the memo.
What does a good parent do? What is selfish? What is honoring?
Which brings to mind one of my favorite quotes by Carl Jung:
“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”
What a burden, as a child, to believe that you are the reason your parent is slowly dying an unlived life.
How we live our personal lives is both a metaphor for, and makes up the fabric of, our world. Not only is the personal political, the personal is a microcosm of the world we live in.
As you listen to this podcast (and hopefully read Glennon’s book Untamed), think about what memos you’ve been given– both individually and all of us, as a culture, a group, or a subgroup. What burdens did we inherit, what memos have we been given, and what needs to burn?
What life are you creating, what life in you is yet unlived, and what has this time apart taught you to want?
See you Friday…
Be well, wash your hands, and stay connected!
Lisa
4/27/20
Poetry Monday, 4/27/20
Welcome to week 5 (6?) of our U.S. slice of the world pandemic. I’ve lost track. As always, I’m looking at poetry on Mondays, podcasts on Wednesdays, and books on Fridays, for words and conversations that give me perspective and sustenance as we travel through this bizarre and unexpected landscape. If it’s helpful to you as well that makes me very happy!
Podcasts are my daily companion when I go for walks. Cheryl Strayed’s new podcast Sugar Calling (an episode drops each Wednesday) is a favorite and as I mentioned in an earlier post, she’s reaching out to older (60+), wiser writers for their take on this history we’re right now living through. 
What does this have to do with poetry? In last week’s interview with Amy Tan (author of The Joy Luck Club among other great books) Tan and Strayed both spoke about a poem written by poet and editor Daniel Halpern in 2013. Halpern is also Tan’s editor.
Halpern had never been through a pandemic, and had no idea we’d be here 7 years later…so it’s remarkably prescient. (He also didn’t remember writing this poem, which is kind of funny). I felt it just captured so well the moment we’re living through right now.
Read this poem and notice, what words or phrases jump out to you?
What do you feel when you read this poem?
Pandemania
There are fewer introductions
In plague years,
Hands held back, jocularity
No longer bellicose,
Even among men.
Breathing’s generally wary,
Labored, as they say, when
The end is at hand.
But this is the everyday intake
Of the imperceptible life force,
Willed now, slow —
Well, just cautious
In inhabited air.
As for ongoing dialogue,
No longer an exuberant plosive
To make a point,
But a new squirreling of air space,
A new sense of boundary.
Genghis Khan said the hand
Is the first thing one man gives
To another. Not in this war.
A gesture of limited distance
Now suffices, a nod,
A minor smile or a hand
Slightly raised,
Not in search of its counterpart,
Just a warning within
The acknowledgment to stand back.
Each beautiful stranger a barbarian
Breathing on the other side of the gate.
–Daniel Halpern
The words that jumped out at me: beautiful stranger. A new sense of boundary. Jocularity, no longer bellicose. And fewer introductions.
I miss the beautiful strangers in my life, even as I hew closer to my favorite co-quarantine people, even as I delight in connection with my beautiful clients and beloved friends and family through a computer screen. I miss the normalcy of chatting with my seatmate on an airplane, small talk with a barista, social transactions at the grocery store, new neighbors, the repair person, the clerk in the shoe store. I miss the beautiful strangers that once populated my days.
There are fewer introductions. In this forced pause, I realize how many shiny new objects, people, events made up the fabric of my days. Days, weeks, months whizzed by at a dizzying pace. This feels like a time to sit with what I have, to hold it, and turn it over in my hands, and look at it. What a gift. And, at times, it feels sad. I miss the new. It’s a paradox.
A new sense of boundary. We have new boundaries in our lives, like it or not. As I move through this time, I’m thinking of how a virus is both real and a metaphor. What is unseen that I let in? Do I want to have more boundaries here, and less there? More there, less here? How permeable is this or that boundary? I have time, now, to think on this. The very idea of boundaries has changed for me, and for many people I talk to.
I appreciate having some distance from some of the jocularity and bellicose-ness. There was a certain pace to our lives before this quarantine time, and a lot of fear and anger and denial accompanied it. Awareness of our culture going awry, the horror of climate disaster looming…somehow, jocularity and bellicose humor seemed both an insult to that reality, and a way to distance ourselves from it. As you’re living it (frantically, quickly, always moving), it’s hard to have perspective, hard to name it, hard to imagine something different. Slowing down and having a break from the hamster wheel feels right somehow, feels good. So does looking at humor and respecting it as a holy tool of resistance, not a way to tap dance faster and faster.
How did this poem speak to you? How do you reconcile the “barbarian at the gate” with your need for people, for touch, for connection in your life?
Be well, wash your hands — and stay connected!
Lisa 
4/24/20
Book Rec Friday 4/24/20
Happy Friday!
Each Friday I’m sharing a book I’ve loved, one I think may be interesting/helpful/relevant/on topic (as we move into a much longer period of self-quarantine and distancing than any of us thought back in March).
Words — poetry, spoken, or on the page — are my comfort, so if nothing else, this exercise keeps me focused and gives structure to my week. I love hearing about what other people are reading, listening to, and finding helpful too — so please, if you got something — click on the title and share it in the comments!
I remember exactly where I was driving when I first heard Tara Westover being interviewed. I had to immediately pull my car off the road and call my sister.
Westover’s memoir, Educated, tells the story of being raised in a large fundamentalist, isolationist, survivalist family on a mountain in the US west…and Westover’s eventual decision to get an education, which led her to a new kind of life. It’s a story of identity, coming of age, and the realization that to be human is to define your own reality through life as you see it — through your own eyes, your own understanding of the world, and your own experiences that define it.
Her experiences are quite amazing.
Tara Westover was born in 1986, into a family of 9 in rural Idaho. She had no birth certificate, and no schooling. No vaccines, no medical records. No social security number.
And no intervention for the mental illness and violence that visited her family.
Her father distrusted all institutions. The family survived on her mother’s midwifery and herbalist practice and her father’s scrap metal junkyard. At all times, the family prepared for “days of abomination” and had “head for the hills” bags packed.
Eventually, one of her older brothers made it off the mountain and into college; later Westover taught herself enough grammar, math and science to take the ACT and get into Brigham Young University. There, she heard about the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Movement for the very first time. Westover eventually graduated magna cum laude, studied at Harvard and earned her PhD at Cambridge. It was a journey fraught with immense pain, disconnection,
I asked myself why I felt pulled to recommend this story and the answer lies in the concept of isolation, and it’s opposite, connection.
There are many kinds of isolation. Isolation of the mind and spirit. Isolation from ideas, from experiences. Isolation from the human spirit. Isolation from information. Isolation from community and within a community.
As we live in a form of isolation (social distancing), what ideas and thoughts and beliefs and actions are we isolating with?
Who is isolated from what our society offers; how does what our society offers isolate some of us and include others?
What world will we create when we go “back” — whenever and in whatever form that is?
Again — this unwelcome, uncomfortable, un-asked-for pandemic offers us a breath, a moment in time, to think about what we miss, what we really need, what connection we long for. Though we didn’t ask for it, we’ve been given a space to consider the kind of connection we have, we need, and we can create. Culture and society have ideas about that — but individually, we do too. And we can use that power we have.
Educated is a good meditation on all of this. It’s also an incredibly gripping, page turning read about family, loyalty, connection and disconnection, belonging, sanity, the human spirit, and the purpose of an education.
One reviewer wrote:
“A punch to the gut, a slow burn, a savage indictment, a love letter: Educated somehow contrives to be all of these things at once.”
Well said.
Have a good weekend, and be well, wash you hands and stay connected!
Lisa
4/23/20
Podcast Wednesday 4/22/20
I’m thinking a lot about loneliness. And solitude. And connection. You too? We’re not alone. Dr. Vivek Murthy, former Surgeon General of the United States just wrote a book, Together: the Healing Power of Social Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. He spoke recently on Brené Brown’s new podcast, Unlocking Us, and also with Shankar Vedantam on Hidden Brain, the NPR social science podcast, — different, both excellent interviews. 
This week’s Hidden Brain episode, A Social Prescription: Why Human Connection Is Crucial To Our Health.
About Hidden Brain: Vedantam is NPR’s social science correspondent and he uses storytelling to break down the latest social science research for listeners. (I loved the September 24, 2018 episode entitled The Psychological Forces Behind a Cultural Reckoning: Understanding #MeToo (which answers why #metoo caught fire now — when sexual assault had been raised time and time again with little traction in the past?) and — a nice companion to this week’s Vivek Murthy podcast — The Lonely American Male, from March 19, 2018.)
Dr. Murthy talks about how during his time as Surgeon General he came to realize the deep connection between the serious health issues we face, and loneliness. Loneliness a bigger measured problem than diabetes and heart disease (yet we don’t talk about it). Suicide rates have gone down in many areas of the world; why have they worsened in the US? What’s the connection between deep, disconnected loneliness, depression, anxiety, health outcomes and mortality rates?
Relationships, Murthy says, are a powerful source of healing, yet we’re just starting to talk about this and understand how connections with others deeply affects all our health outcomes.
We have to “rethink and harness the power of relationship and recognize that they’re not just nice to have, they are necessary to have–they’re an essential part of the foundation that makes us healthy well and strong,” Murthy says.
Vedantam asks if the current COVID-19 crisis, and “social distancing” is increasing our loneliness. Will it make us more disconnected, make us more unhealthy? Drive up bad health outcomes and mortality rates?
This crisis, Murthy answers, is an opportunity to re-think and re-center our lives around relationships — to more deeply appreciate the power they have in our lives, to re-focus our attention on them. And not just our close ties, but also our loose ties. The neighbors we wave at but don’t know their names. People we pass on our commutes. Strangers we smile at or share a word with. Co-workers. Near and far, appreciating all our human connections and the role they play in the fabric of our well-being. Murthy says:
If we approach this with intentionality, if we approach this time with the mindset that we are going to double down and focus on both the quality and quantity of the time we dedicate to the people we love, then I think we may be able to come out of this much stronger than when we began. We may be able to use COVID-19 as a way to reset how we approach relationships and to revisit the place that relationships have in our lived priority list.
Using this time with intentionality — I love that idea.
Murthy reminds us loneliness doesn’t always present straightforward; it can manifest as anger, irritability, depressed mood, and worry/anxiety. Loneliness feeds into and is a companion to addiction.We also attach shame to loneliness. In all these ways, loneliness begets loneliness.
Our brains that associate chronic loneliness with stress and danger, which has the effect of focusing ourselves on ourselves, — logical from an evolutionary perspective (promoting our safety). But sadly this creates a vicious cycle of being unaware that others want to connect and are ready to help, if we could just take the risk, be vulnerable, trust and ask for help. It’s a downward spiral that is challenging to break.
Interestingly, in the midst of the solitude this spiral lands us in, we can find the seed of real connection.
Connection to self, Murthy says, is the foundation we need to connect to other people. In solitude we can go inward and develop our own self-perspective — instead of just absorbing the cultural messages we’re not good enough.
Solitude allows us focus again on just being. We can take a break from noise and doing and action. It can be simple, such as taking a moment to really listen to the ambient noise around you. Naming three things you’re grateful for right now. Following your breath for a minute.
In this time of great upheaval, it’s more important than ever that we find time for that solitude. And the key here is that a little bit of time can go a long way. This is about spending a few quality minutes allowing ourselves to just be.
Building our relationship with ourself, in other words, gets us ready to connect with others. And it’s through that connection that we build real wellness, real health.
What a great mindset for using this time. As we physically distance, let’s focus on relationships, including the one we have with ourselves.
There’s so much more in this episode — such as the “moai” Murthy and a small group of his friends use to stay intentionally and deeply connected. And I loved his interview with Brené as well; check these episodes out!
Be well, wash your hands, and stay connected —
Lisa