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During the next two months, I will guide a number of workshops on writing poems to help relieve some of the stress of emotional trauma – not how to write better, but writing to feel better. During the weekend of November 7 - 9, I will conduct a program on “Writing for Wellbeing—Emotional Healing through Expressive Writing” at Mercy by the Sea Retreat and Conference Center in Madison, Connecticut. If you attend, I’ll show you how easy-to-understand poems can be beautiful, uplifting, and healing. Our discussions will center on what poetry is all about, and how famous writers have created poems to address their own personal issues. I’ll show you how to write poems to better manage any emotional trauma – from the stresses of illness or grief to the rupture of a relationship or the loss of purpose and hope. I’ll share my two secret hacks to get you writing your first poem, and there will periods of reflecting, writing, and sharing. For details and to register . That’s in November, for a weekend. On September 12, I will be in Manhattan to conduct a workshop on the healing power of poetry. My poetry program will launch the Friday Arts initiative at New York City’s Mount Sinai Cancer Center. Friday Arts is a monthly enrichment program designed to nurture creativity, community, and healing for cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers. This session at Mount Sinai is in addition to the healing poetry gathering I host each week at the American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge, also in New York City. And you already know about the “Healing Verses” workshops I hold every other Wednesday via Zoom. We read set a theme for the meeting, read a poem that speaks to that theme, and then write our own poem. This Wednesday, September 3, we’re going to talk about the poem, “Let Evening Come” by Jane Kenyon. I’m going to tell the Zoom group what I think is the real definition of hope – and its true healing power. The Wednesday workshops have a one-hour format: • Reading and discussing a famous poem that has healing properties • Quiet time to write your own poem • An open period when you can read something of your own if you want to To join my Zoom room – open to everyone – enter this link into your browser: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89034950365?pwd=DEFfvQ1bMqlUX1Wu1qK3mApkR0Q1gH.1 The foundation of the teaching I do is Expressive Writing, a therapeutic discipline developed at the University of Houston in the early 1980s and replicated more than 2,000 times since then. It’s a kind of writing unlike journaling, and research has shown it yields significant benefits in alleviating emotional trauma, with general enhancement of immune system function, physical health, pain symptoms, sleep, and overall functioning. In the long term, trauma victims report feeling happier and less negative than before practicing Expressive Writing. And isn’t that what we all want?

She was young, tall, and supremely elegant but weak and thin from weeks of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. She wrote the loveliest poem I’ve heard in a long time and wept as she read it to me. It’s miraculous, I thought when she and I were together to talk poetry last week, how such beauty blossomed from the dark humus of her disease. In guiding cancer patients to write poems to ease their emotional trauma, I witness how the rude rigors of cancer treatment magnify emotions and set them very close to the surface. Right beneath the breastplate, it seems, hard against the heart. So expressing feelings in poetry comes more easily than otherwise. In addition to teaching cancer patients and their caregivers, I conduct workshops in healing poetry for people who are dealing with all sorts of emotional trauma. The phenomenon of heightened creativity applies to all of them. Perhaps due to the fact that all emotional trauma exhibit common characteristics: unexpected, unwanted, and seemingly beyond our ability to make them stop. I continue to be awed at how men and women with no background in writing can craft breathtaking poems that grow out of the fertile soil of their suffering. They are testimony to what I always tell them: “What you learn in this room will not lead you to poetry as much as what you bring with you into this room.” The myth of the suffering artist is misleading. It’s not suffering itself that produces creativity, but the psychological growth and awareness that arise from it. In her 2007 book When Walls Become Doorways , psychologist Tobi Zausner writes: “Life’s lowest moments can hold our greatest potential for creativity and transformation. When the wall of illness becomes a door of opportunity, the worst of times can bring out the best in us.” As an aside, you should know that when Zausner was diagnosed with the most aggressive kind of ovarian cancer in 1989, she was told she would not last the year. Instead, her life changed for the better and she completed a doctorate in art and psychology. The healing poetry I teach is founded on the discipline of Expressive Writing developed at the University of Houston and replicated more than 2,000 times. The premise: writing for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day about a topic that triggers strong emotion has been shown to help people garner meaning and a measure of relief from their stress. Marcel Proust was on board with the idea long ago. He wrote: “Ideas come to us as the successors of griefs. And griefs, at the moment they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart.” Author Mark Nepo stresses that we cannot choose to indulge solely in happiness. He writes: “If you are thirsty, you can’t dip your face to the stream and say, ‘I’ll only drink the hydrogen and not the oxygen.’ If you remove one from the other, the water cannot remain water. The life of feeling is no different. We cannot drink only of happiness or sorrow and have life remain life.” My Catholic faith advises me to “offer up” any suffering that comes my way in order to remove its weight from my shoulders. I say no. I say embrace sadness and suffering. It’s a portion of our humanity and has yielded some of our most creative achievements as a species. As proof, here’s the young woman’s poem that took my breath away last week, drawn from her experience with radiation treatment: I settle into the bed that is not a bed into the cradle that is not a cradle nestling deeper like a pine cone on the forest floor this bed that is not a bed holds no sweet dreams or lazy Sundays cookie crumbs or lovemaking thirty seconds until your first beam a crackly voice announces bang whirl whoosh it’s happening now I imagine light gliding through me filling me spilling out of me the machine quiets I suppose I am healed now As Dr. Zausner puts it: “When the wall of illness becomes a door of opportunity, the worst of times can bring out the best in us.”

I’ve had the opportunity to work with two starship commanders. One was the hero of Apollo 13. The other the hero of TV’s original Star Trek series. During my years at IBM, ROLM, Siemens, and Executive Media, my work as a speechwriter expanded to encompass writing and producing live corporate events. These were also known as business theater—recognition meetings, sales rallies, management conferences—for audiences ranging from a few hundred to more than 10,000. One of the benefits of being a producer is that the job enabled me to indulge my boyhood fantasies. In creating program content that would excite and motivate audiences, I was influenced by my boyhood passion for science fiction. I had watched Captain Video on my family’s black-and-white Dumont and deported myself as one of his “Video Rangers.” I was in the movie theaters for the premieres of the 1950s sci-fi movies that are now classic: “The Thing” … “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” … “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” So it was a natural for me to hire Jim Lovell, whose heroic performance brought the crippled Apollo 13 and its crew safely home. That’s him in the top photo, along with his team of lunar module pilot Fred Haise and command module pilot Jack Swigert. Captain Lovell served as on-camera narrator of an identity video for the high-tech ROLM Corporation, which pioneered voicemail among other telecommunications innovations. I picked him up at SFO, noticing how he put on his seat belt first thing. As we drove down Route 101 past Moffett Field, he reminisced about testing planes tethered to an anchor post inside one of Moffett’s vast hangars. In the car that day, I asked Captain Lovell the question that had burned since my days as a Video Ranger: “Just how strong is the thrust you feel when you lift off?” His disappointing answer: “About the same as accelerating a car.” Heck, Captain Video had me believing the acceleration of lift-off practically flattened your eyeballs. Captain Lovell was a delight to work with—affable, patient, and a natural on camera. I hired him a second time to speak to a ROLM recognition event about his near-fatal Apollo 13 experience. Then there was Captain Kirk—William Shatner. You remember: “To boldly go . . . ” On stage in front of six hundred or so top performers at a different ROLM recognition event, the CEO—a German national—talked with a video-projected Captain Kirk who was supposedly orbiting Earth in the Starship Enterprise. Then, using what’s known as a “laser cone” effect, we beamed Shatner down to the stage to join the CEO and help him conduct an awards ceremony. Shatner turned out to be a not-so-good choice. For one thing, he toyed with the CEO and kept going off prompter. Shatner enjoyed tripping up the CEO, who was trying to follow a carefully crafted script to help him with what was his second language. I came away thinking that Shatner seriously thinks he’s a starship commander. The difference between the two? One of these starship commanders was a real hero. The other only played one on TV.

The Bible’s book of Revelation shows no patience for those who take no stand: “Because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out.” Harsh words for not doing something. Why are we so reluctant to commit? Social and psychological pressures play a major role. Many of us fear social rejection, career consequences, or being ostracized. Humans also suffer from a strong leaning toward conformity. It’s easier and safer to adopt the stance of our fellows instead of developing an independent position. Research distinguishes between two types of commitment: • Approach commitment is driven by a desire for future rewards • Avoidance commitment tries to duck the negative consequences of broken relationships Solomon Asch's experiments in the 1950s demonstrated the power of group pressure. In his studies, participants conformed to obviously incorrect group answers approximately thirty-seven percent of the time. Asch noted, "The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to say white is black." Stanley Milgram was another researcher into “obedience.” His findings showed how strong authority figures are able to influence conformity: two-thirds of participants were okay with administering dangerous electric shocks when told to. Pressures toward conformity remain robust today, with social media amplifying pack mentality through features such as likes and shares. It’s this kind of societal uniformity that may give rise to statements like, “their marriage failed.” Marriages don’t fail, people do. “Mistakes were made” is a side-step. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but people make mistakes. Look at how flat-out honest the composer of Psalm 41 states what happened to him: My best friend, whom I trusted, who broke bread with me, has scorned me and turned against me. What happens when we’re unwilling to take a stand on important matters? Experts tell us such individuals may struggle to develop a sense of self. This can lead to a life spent in the slipstream of others. Sailors, when a storm threatens, head out to sea. They know the most dangerous place is at the dock. Author Mark Nepo notes this about the ocean: the deep is safest. Near the shore are rocks to be battered against and undertow to fight. By comparison, the deep is a “hammock.” Peter of Alcantara, Spain, was a sixteenth-century saint known for his energetic efforts toward reforming the Catholic Church. His advice to those of us who fear cutting against the grain: “Matters in the world are in a truly bad state. But if you and I begin in earnest to reform ourselves, a really good beginning will be made.” Still not convinced? Then turn to the gospel according to Charles M. Schulz, as found in The Complete Peanuts: Patty: I'll be the good guy. Shermy: I'll be the bad guy. Patty: What are you going to be, Charlie Brown? Charlie Brown: I'll be sort of in-between; I'll be a hypocrite. (The painting above is “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” by van Gogh)

When the rooster who lives in my brain wakes me each morning at 3:30 or 4:00 (which is all the sleep old men need), I like to have a couple of cups of coffee while I read something uplifting. Three readings last week told me the same truth in different words. It began with Thomas Merton’s Journal entry of July 31, 1961. On that day, the monk-mystic-poet-author came to the realization that truth is found in the reality of his own life, “as it is given to me . . . by complete consent and acceptance.” In other words, I am what I am, and there’s no changing that despite my most fervent yearning otherwise. Second was this quote from Saint Gianna Molla: “The secret of happiness is to live moment by moment and to thank God for all that he sends us day after day.” In other words, it’s all good, because God does not impose evil on us. And I can attest to this. In the autumn of my life, I can look back and witness how the most outrageous strokes of bad luck have all turned out for the best. All of them. I had never heard of Saint Gianna, but a turn through Wiki educated me. She was a pediatrician in Italy who, during her fourth pregnancy in 1961, developed a fibroma on her uterus. The options were an abortion, a hysterectomy, or the removal of the fibroma alone. She opted for the removal of the fibroma, reasoning that her child's life was more important than her own. She successfully delivered a daughter by Caesarean section, but died of septic peritonitis a week later. The daughter became a doctor of geriatrics. Finally, there was a chapter from Mark Nepo’s blockbuster, The Book of Awakening. Nepo draws a parallel between Thích Nhất Hạnh’s enlightenment comes when the wave realizes it is water, and the enlightenment that can be ours the moment we realize we’re made of – love. Think about it. I, for one, entered existence because of the passionate love of two young people. What does it do to our fear of living when we realize we’re made not only by love, but also for love? Writes Nepo: “Grace comes to the heart when it realizes what it is made of and what it has risen from.” When Moses asked God’s name, barefoot before the burning bush as Chagall portrays him, above, he was told: “I am who am.” Spiritual writers aren’t alone in probing the nature of being. Some of the unlikeliest people are amateur ontologists. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek franchise, once wrote a script titled “The God Thing.” As a result, he was interviewed about his religious beliefs. He said: “I believe I am God; certainly you are; I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God. In some sort of cyclical non-time thing we have to become God so that we can end up creating ourselves, so that we can be in the first place.” In a way, we are the same stuff as God. Existence. Ani mi shani in Hebrew. Esse in Latin. Being. This is the truth behind all our pseudo-philosophical flailing about “Be yourself” . . . “Be all you can be” . . . “Too big for your britches.” This is the truth revealing the thinness of the skin separating us from the other members of the human herd. This is the truth driving the Socratic dictum: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” In the dark of my library before dawn last week, many voices were speaking to me as one. I am what I am. Made simply to be and to love, for I rose from love. Yes, I have memories and I have dreams, but there is no past, no future. Eternity is in the present. Waiting for me to unclench my fist.

There were an estimated 19.8 million pickleball players in 2024 in the U.S. On the other hand, sales of poetry books amounted to about three million – less than 0.4% of total book sales. So why do I even bother writing and teaching poetry? Because I’m not about to move to The Villages, drive around in a golf cart like a Fred Flintstone wannabe, and play pickleball until my knees give out. Research tells us that male mortality increases by two percent in the very month men start claiming their Social Security benefits. So the answer for me is, publish or perish – literally. It was novelist Thornton Wilder who said seniors need to stave off death through work – even if it’s work that no longer drives a career. It’s not only the act of writing poetry that is enabling me to give the Grim Reaper a run. Teaching others to do it is a major factor. Volunteer work simply makes you feel good, as the above photo of the Hope Lodge staff and volunteers attests. Supporting others has even been found to reduce chronic inflammation. At least one study shows high levels of social support lower cortisol and inflammatory proteins. Three years ago I took Wilder’s wise advice and made it my “old man’s project” to teach cancer patients and their caregivers how to write poems that help them feel happier and healthier. One “student” told me: “Writing poems has been a great outlet for me, and I thank you so much for introducing me to this. It’s very therapeutic and healing.” Another said: “Your class has opened a new world to me, and I'm so appreciative.” You can imagine how comments like those make me feel. It can’t compare to winning a pickleball match. My program with the American Cancer Society is called Verses of Hope. Once a week I commute from my home in New Haven to the Society’s Hope Lodge, a block from Madison Square Garden. My involvement with Hope Lodge seemed to peak on Wednesday during a reception for the New York City social workers and medical center representatives who are responsible for referring patients to stay at Hope Lodge during their scheduled treatment regimens. The aim was to show these visitors the range of services available to Lodge guests during their stay: reiki, estate planning, movement, play, art therapy, healing cuisine, and, of course, my therapeutic poetry writing. I was able to personally meet and brief eighteen persons during the reception and all of them – all of them – walked away sold on the physical and emotional benefits of expressive writing. When the reception ended at seven o’clock, I set up in the Society’s meeting room and conducted my Zoom poetry workshop, which I offer every other Wednesday. I began these bi-weekly workshops last month as an effort to provide ongoing support for writing healing poetry. It’s a supportive, no-critique, safe space – all about feeling better, not just writing better. We read and discuss a poem that has healing attributes, spend fifteen minutes writing a poem in response, and the remainder of the hour is an open microphone period for participants to share their poem if they want to. Each workshop has a theme relevant to emotional stress, anxiety, or trauma. So far, we’ve explored themes of fear, perseverance, humor, coping, and self-discovery. Our next Zoom gathering will be at 7 P.M. Eastern on August 6. We’ll see what the poem “Those Winter Sundays” can teach us about self-healing. The workshops are open not only to cancer patients, but also to anyone who would like to apply poetry to smoothen some of life’s rough edges. Here is the Zoom link.

I’m sure you’ve heard by now that we humans are creatures that came from the sea. Which might explain our somewhat batty bathing habits. It’s getting worse, too. The youngest adults among us, Gen Z (ages 18 to 27) spend the longest time in the shower – nearly twice the average 12.3 minutes of baby boomers (ages 60 to 78). Pulitzer Prize winning naturalist Edward O. Wilson believed that because we evolved in nature, we have a biological need to connect with it. That makes sense. Our species has historically settled and built our cities near bodies of water. We spend our vacations and our days off sunbathing at beaches. Simply put, we are biologically meant to bathe, and, while we’re at it, to bask. Both words come from the same Old Norse batha . One of the greatest virtues of taking a bath is its unique ability to promote physical and mental relaxation – while at the same time juicing our creativity. Writers, typically a dotty bunch to begin with, are particularly attracted to use the tub as their workspace. Playwright Oscar Wilde enjoyed lavish baths infused with salts and herbs. He believed that these indulgent moments allowed him to rejuvenate his mind, contributing to his creativity. Referring to the tranquility of the bath, Wilde once quipped: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Henry David Thoreau would often retreat to his bath as a place of contemplation. It was part of his resolve to take to the woods because he wished to live “deliberately.” In her Pulitzer-Prize-winning, autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar , Sylvia Plath wrote: “I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath, but I can't think of one.” Maybe her husband’s infidelity was the one? Poor, suffering Sylvia opted to end it all by sticking her head in a gas oven rather than soak in a hot bath. Poet Rod McKuen wrote song lyrics in his bathtub, and Benjamin Franklin took what he called “tonic baths” each morning, working in the nude for an hour to start his day. Dalton Trumbo, too, wrote in the bath, but at night and not alone. He enjoyed the company of a parrot, a gift from actor Kirk Douglas. Agatha Christie was another writer who stripped to write. She composed murder mysteries while soaking in her commodious Victorian bathtub – munching on apples, to boot. Although he himself wasn’t known for writing plays in the tub, Tennessee Williams must have had some fetish about bathing. In “A Streetcar Named Desire,” he has Blanche constantly jumping in and out of the bath (in an attempt to cleanse herself of her past?). Contemplative and rejuvenating, indulgent and ascetic. The challenge of the bath lies in navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of luxury and discipline. All this talk about bathing is getting to me. I think I’ll grab a Granny Smith and edit this essay in the tub.

I’ve made a career choosing and placing words into arrangements certain people have found pleasing. So it’s only natural I view my life as a series of words—a story. But my eyes are opening to the spaces between the words. It’s not because I’m a writer that I see life as a story. It’s true for each for us. We’re all authors. Among the words that tell our lives are marriage, kids, work, travel, church, flirting, and so forth. The longer we live, the more experiences we have, the depth of our relationships—the greater the number of words available to describe ourselves. In typography, printers have for centuries relied on precise measurements of the spaces that are the tools with which they work—hair space, thin space, leading, word space, picas and points and kerning. In my early days as a newspaper make-up editor, I kept a “pica stick” in my pocket to gauge the accuracy of our efforts. Now, though, as I grow older, isolation and quietude is revealing my life not only in words, but words separated by empty spaces of silence and stillness—the emptiness of time passing. Pam Bruno, who attended my day-long program on poetry writing at Mercy by the Sea Conference Center in October, described her “God of empty spaces” in her poem: The silent spaces in my day Are more powerful than my words Living in the stillness Between two notes I hear the voice of God The spaces between the words of my days have always been there, I guess, but I notice them now. The striking thing is that each empty space is lengthening. They are unwelcome for they carry a sad listlessness. Remember Wendy Beckett, the famous “Art Nun” from the 2001 PBS documentary series? She once described prayer to the abbess of a women’s monastery like this: “He [God] wants to possess me. And when I let Him, it is prayer. Always His love drives Him to possess. And when we have time, He enters . . .” It’s the scariest definition of prayer ever. Scariest because of the qualifier: “. . . when we have time.” Her words made me realize I’m aware of God only when I choose to have time for him. Mine is the God of empty spaces. This spring The Penwood Review published this poem, which Sister Wendy’s words inspired me to write: REVELATION 3:20 His hair drips with the dew of morning as he taps. He’s lusted all night, my swain, beckoned me unbeknownst as I slept. Any lover seeking consummation knocks roughly, boned knuckles on renitent oak. But not mine. This suitor won’t wake me. He wants me already woke, waiting. Or he moves on. As he desires. Only then beg him enter. Only then endure his awful love. We can, however, fill our empty spaces—pausing to listen to rain, for example, relishing a perfect cup of tea, or enjoying conversation with a friend. All these are manifestations of the Divine. It’s the last example that’s key, I think: conversation with a friend. Engagement calls for community—family, friends, people of like mind. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Sister Wendy again, who spent most of her life in utter isolation as a hermit, venturing out only to record her BBC art programs. She writes: “All persons are made for community. It's not the prerogative of the religious life.”

For a society founded on a “declaration of independence,” most of us enjoy very little true freedom these days. Brown people live in fear of ICE thuggery. Black people face open racism disguised as DEI. White people claim their equal rights are being eroded. How do we achieve real independence? It starts by understanding what freedom is – and is not. Spiritual writer Richard Rohr says it this way: “Most of us try to find personal and individual freedom even as we remain inside structural boxes and a system of consumption that we are then unable or unwilling to critique. Our mortgages, luxuries, and privileged lifestyles control our whole future. Whoever is paying our bills and giving us security and status determines what we can and cannot say or even think.” In other words, it’s the entrenched institutions, systems, and processes of our culture that keep us willing captives. I say “willing” because as a society we seem to be clutching some romantic dream of what our all-American life should be. As a result, we’re terrified by any disruption to what we feel is normal and accepted. When we surrender to this fear and perceive danger all around, we grasp at whatever we think will protect us. I’ll give you an example. When I lived in Puerto Rico, I learned from the local divers that to catch a Caribbean lobster, all you have to do is push a length of broomstick into the hole where it’s hiding. The lobster will grab it and not let go, even as you pull the stick from the hole and deposit the tasty crustacean in your bag. So what’s the path to true freedom? Declare independence by refusing to be co-opted by illusions of security, possessions, and power. In his classic novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance , Robert Pirsig describes “the old South Indian Monkey Trap.” The trap consists of a hollowed-out coconut chained to a stake. The coconut has some rice inside, which can be grabbed through a small hole. The monkey’s hand fits through the hole okay, but his clenched fist can’t fit back out. The monkey is trapped, not by anything physical, but by an idea it probably learned from its mother: “When you find rice, hold on tight!” Psychologists call this einstellung , a settled way of thinking – our instinct to solve a problem in a tried-and-true manner even though there might be better solutions. Much like the monkey clutching a fistful of rice or the lobster clenching the broomstick, we hold on to things that don’t necessarily serve us. The things we’re most attached to can keep us shackled, too often with toxic effect. Valuing ourselves only according to our successes and satisfactions is to miss the point of every faith tradition – that contentment comes by valuing ourselves as God does, simply for who we are.