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The Dalai Lama in Williamsburg
I had the opportunity last week to see the Dalai Lama speak in Williamsburg. He’s currently making a tour of small colleges and he was appearing at William and Mary, where my daughter is a student. It made for a delightful visit. Tickets for the event had sold out within 15 minutes. More than eight thousand people attended. The line into the arena began two and a half hours before the event—and these were all people with tickets. So interesting. The student who introduced him said we would likely...
The Armful by Robert Frost
This poem by Frost can be about a lot of things, I suppose. For me, this week, it seems to be about revision–and how hard it can be to hold coherent images and ideas and how sometimes you just have to put them down and rearrange them–again. Madness, perhaps–but also it seems now a necessary madness. I went back to earlier chapters of One Year of Writing and Healing to pick up some threads to carry forward–and realized that deep revision is again necessary. Chapter 2 as it stands...
All Shall be Well?
For some reason a couple weeks ago, I found myself looking for the quote by Julian of Norwich about all being well. I found this: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well which T.S. Eliot then included in the fourth quartet of his Four Quartets: And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well And I also found, unexpectedly, this song, which I quite like, by a young man by the name of Gabe Dixon....
Talking to Grief by Denise Levertov
The title for the chapter, “Making a Place for Grief,” was inspired by and begins with an excerpt from “Talking to Grief” by Denise Levertov: You long for your real place to be readied before winter comes. You need your name, your collar and tag. You need the right to warn off intruders, to consider my house your own and me your person and yourself my own dog. I think there’s a kind of brilliance in this poem, that resonates with so much that I understand about imagery...
When I Am Asked by Lisel Mueller
I’m not at all sure that June is the right time for grief. But I’m in the process of revising my book, and that’s what I’ve been working on these last couple weeks. It’s interesting. I’ve tended, for a variety of reasons, to look at grief more in November—that’s when I tend to hear and feel most the voices of grief—and to feel a resonance between those voices and the waning light. Now, in a sense, I feel as if I’ve been looking at grief out of season. We’ve also...