Posts made in January, 2012
Attention Must Be Paid
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the act of paying attention and what that means. Last year around this same time I came across a cover article in Newsweek entitled Grow Your Mind. It was by Sharon Begley, author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, a book on neuroscience and Buddhism that I read some years ago and liked quite a bit. This past week, I found myself going back to the article because of something I remembered her saying about the act of paying attention. I found this: One of the strongest findings in neuroplasticity, the science of how the brain changes its structure and function in response to input, is that attention is almost...
Read MorePraying by Mary Oliver
It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak. So I’m thinking this poem by Mary Oliver could be instructions for a writer—or instructions for a teacher—which, if looked at in a certain way, are perhaps not that different. I’m at the beginning of a new semester, the beginning of brand new classes, teaching high school sophomores and seniors. Fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and eighteen year...
Read MoreInstructions
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ from “Sometimes” by Mary Oliver, from her collection, Red Bird (2008) Photo from next to our living room...
Read MoreMorning Poem by Mary Oliver
I’m not much of one for New Year’s resolutions, but I am someone who tends to pay attention at the beginning of a new year. What is possible? What might be trying to happen in this next year? What could happen? “Morning Poem,” is one I came across just before the new year. It speaks to that sense at the beginning of some mornings—or at the beginning of some years?—a sense that something new is happening, again, all over again. Or could be. This is how it begins: Every morning the world is created. Under the orange sticks of the sun the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again and fasten themselves to the high...
Read MoreAbout Me
I'm a former physician, now a high school English teacher, returning to Writing and Healing because it's one of those topics that just will not let me go. I'm working on a book now, transforming my previous site, One Year of Writing and Healing, into a more coherent form, as well as adding a lot of new material. If you feel so moved, I'd love to have you be a part of it. You can find your invitation under Book above and also on my home page.