Drew Myron's Blog, page 38
March 26, 2016
On Medicine & The Arts
Ruth Madievsky blends the mind of medicine with the heart of art. She is a doctoral student at the University of Southern California's School of Pharmacy and a research assistant at an HIV clinic specializing in maternal care.
At 3 Good Books (the blog series I host), Ruth shares her favorite books on the theme of Medicine & The Arts.
Propofol
My kidneys are leaning into the wall of my back
like a pair of boxing gloves,
the way my grandfather is leaning
into the idea of an operating table,
a paralytic agent, his body
a space station for someone else's hands.
I work in the hospital where it will happen.
I work and wait for the part
where the lungs I keep wanting this month to be
stop huffing propane, stop threatening
to make like my patient's veins
and collapse. Inside
the sterile compounding room,
I shoot drugs,
down an IV bag's gut. I listen
to the outer-space hum of machines
that eat the air out of the room.
There is nothing sexy
about incision.
There is nothing about the phrase
nasogastric tube
that makes me want to look
both ways before crossing the street.
I want to hold him
like he is something other
than a mucus membrane.
Like maybe the planet inside him is Pluto,
like it's not really a planet at all.
— Ruth Madievsky
from Emergency Brake
March 22, 2016
Thankful Tuesday: Because I'm desperate
Jenny Holzer, artist
Today, surveying the splendors of spring, I discovered a chair lodged high in our tree.
It's been a wet, windy, gray winter. And now, according to the calendar, we're in spring. But the sky is hanging fierce to its damp mood, shaking out rain and gloom.
Wearing my tired sweaters and scuffed boots, I shake my fist at the sky. "Please," I plead, "let me wear something other than high necks, thick sleeves, wool and fleece."
I won't even ask for an open-toe shoe. Even a shoe without socks would suffice.
But because rain and bitterness threaten to rust my heart, I'm challenged to set aside my gripes. And so, I look past the neighbor's deck chair wedged in my spruce.
Setting aside the furniture, I see camellias in a burst of hot pink, a clutch of hyacinths, and a shag carpet of grass. Daffodils, my favorite announcement of spring, pop up in unexpected places. As if wild, they dot remote roads in a random pattern, and patchwork through vacant lots and scraps of land.
In the gray of a record gloom* spring flowers are the happy-to-know-you welcome wagon. They arrive to the party early, and with too much enthusiasm. But, oh, how I'm drawn to the tender promise. Hand me a loopy bouquet of these spring charmers. I'll never turn from the innocence of those not yet battered by weather and wear.
* not just my disposition, but real data showing Oregon's wettest winter on record.
It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things, and more. And today It's Thankful Thursday on Tuesday because the best way to minimize a sour mood is to move toward gratitude. What are you thankful for today?
March 20, 2016
On Sunday: The Challenge of Humility
So, this is our ongoing challenge: Not to turn everything into us. In truth, the deepest function of humility is that it helps us take experience in on its own terms, not violating its own nature — all in an effort to be nourished by life that is different from us. Through this effort, we find the corresponding seeds of such life in us. They are the common seeds of grace that can sustain us.
- Mark Nepo
The Book of Awakening
March 14, 2016
You're wondering if I'm lonely
[image error]We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?"
— David Foster Wallace
I've spent my life swinging between alone and lonely.
Alone, as in solitude, as in quietude. Alone is where my real life happens.
Lonely is sad, wanting, an aching yearn, an enforced aloneness. Lonely hurts.
And yet lonely carries a certain sort of necessity. To truly feel fullness, you must know emptiness.
Song
You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.
You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely
If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns' first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep
If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning
— Adrienne Rich
I'm trying not to wear my loneliness, and yet it fits. It's become convincing and comfortable. Initially, the fit is snug, but with time there is loosening, acceptance. It's not flattering, but loneliness makes the body invisible, the mind numb. I turn inside myself.
I'm trying to believe that loneliness is not a character defect, not a resignation, but I'm wondering, now, if it is a default setting and I haven't the energy, or trust, to turn the channel. Decades since it's aired, and I'm still watching reruns of M.A.S.H. I'm mixing my metaphors. Loneliness makes you blurry. You lose definition. You mistake edge for action, feeling for thought. Loneliness is so far from alone that though you're lost, you no longer ask for directions home.
It’s not that
I’m lonely but that
I went to bed too
late and alone
and miss the promise
of you.
It’s not that I’m sleepy
but in the morning
I wake slow and
wide, do not stir,
do not want
this quiet time
in solitude.
It’s not that I
don’t like solitude
but that my
mind travels
and confuses
not here with
gone, slow with
sad, alone with
lonely.
It’s not that I
am alone but
that my body
is a planet
in the
dark
without
its star.
— Drew Myron
Are you still with me?
Loneliness is both penetrating and true, mean and cruel. Who are you now? and now? and now? When loneliness pushes for answers, you want aloneness to rise, to take charge, answering: I am here. Full, feeling, alive.
March 6, 2016
Baby bangs are not for you (or me)
We've got rough patches and easy streets. Weeks that move like months and days that last a year. This past week, I've known each stretch. In the spirit of William Stafford's Things I Learned Last Week, I offer my own (puny and profound) nuggets:
Things I Learned Last Week
1.
Athleisure is mostly leisure.
Is everyone exercising, or just wearing lycra and driving to the store for more Cheetos?
2.
Baby bangs favor no one.
I know because in 1999 I tried blunt, super-short bangs and my already-full face took on funhouse mirror proportions. It was the longest growout in history, rivaling that of my current bad hair situation: short-in-the-back, long-in-the-front, otherwise known as the reverse mullet or the midlife mom cut.
3.
It's not cars or coal destroying the planet — it's cows!
No really. My sources are legit: a former cattle rancher, National Geographic, and the documentary Cowspiracy.
4.
I'm not alone, and poems prove it.
Ada Limon shares my love of quiet (and my disdain for phone calls):
The Quiet Machine
I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand
in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field
across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from
people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't
answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the
floor in the kichen and pretend I'm not home when people knock.
There's daytime silence when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I
do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent
and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that
comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones
and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's
how this machine works.
- Ada Limon
from Bright Dead Things
5.
The answer is gin.
On those gravel-in-the-shoe sort of days (or weeks), gin and a friend provide solace and grins (emphasis on friend, because drinking martinis by yourself is just sad).
Your turn: What have you learned?
March 2, 2016
Our strange, ruined, rotting bodies
Franny Choi - poet and teaching artist
Do you know Franny Choi?
She's a poet and teaching artist, and I like her style:
I am most drawn to work that places me in my body,
work that awakens me to the heartbeat, to breath,
to muscle and bone . . . " she says. "By 'body language'
I mean not only speaking about the body, but asking how
our (strange, ruined, rotting) bodies would speak if we let them."
On 3 Good Books, Choi explains why the topic of body language resonates through her work, and offers book suggestions too.
February 28, 2016
On Sunday: I follow language
Because each time I write, each time
the authentic words break through,
I am changed. The older order that
I was collapses and dies. I lose control.
I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language.
I follow the sound of words, and I am surprised and transformed by what
I record.
— Susan Griffin
from Thoughts on Writing: A Diary
an essay in The Writer on Her Work
February 24, 2016
Because life is full . . .
[image error]reminder no 7 • by drew myron
Because life is full of information and I often need a nudge.
Reminder, a series by Drew Myron
No. 1 - Note to Forgetful Self
February 18, 2016
Thankful Thursday: Shirley & other wonders
Shirley Plummer - photo by Chris GraamansShirley says she needs to do more.
"I should write every day. I should write in forms. I should challenge myself," she says, with a head shake and a sigh.
We're admiring her book. Her debut. At 85, Shirley Plummer is now a published poet.
I'm so happy for Shirley my face hurts from smiling. And happy for the power of writing, for the magical, mysterious way creative expression can lift and change.
While she had long dabbled in words, it was only five years ago that she began to take writing seriously. She read and studied and attended a weekly writing group. She forged friendships with writers and exchanged ideas. Her days and journals swirled with words.
A few years ago she fell ill, and then fell down. What followed: surgery, rehab, slow unsteady steps to something that looked like normal. Not so much recovery as readjustment. Her mind, she says, isn't as sharp. Loose change rattling. Cloudy.
When she says, "I can see the end," she's not talking about today. But she's got a lot to do, she says, and ideas to explore.
But first, she has reading events to celebrate the publication of her debut poetry collection, The Task of Falling Rain.
Are you in Oregon? For the love of Shirley and poetry and creative expression, please attend her book release parties:
• Saturday, February 20 at 2pm, Waldport Community Center in Waldport, Oregon
• Saturday, March 5 at 2pm, Yachats Commons in Yachats, Oregon
If you're not nearby, give a nod and a note of thanks to the force of creativity which saves, changes, lifts and connects.
It's Thankful Thursday. Is there anything better than gratitude (which is really just another form of love)? What are you thankful for today?
February 8, 2016
Can't get you out of my head
we spread a blanket spread
ourselves almost pulseless
in pacific deception
- from A Duet of Novices by Gail Waldstein
from The Hauntings
I've got word envy. Or poem envy. Or something like a revved-up appreciation for another's work.
Does this happen to you? You read a line, a passage, a chapter, and you are moved, but it comes with a twinge of wish. As in, I wish I'd written that.
These twinges, this envy, at first feels petty but is really instruction in disguise. This yearning awakens, and then asks why? And the why leads and encourages us to find our own version, our own voice, our own way.
What's leading you?
