Week 3

              A Palomino in Wyoming


Good afternoon.  Hope you are doing well today!

I will return the first essays and we will pick up from where we left off last week, speaking of matters of health and of how we can nurture wellbeing in ourselves and others.  I want to give you some time to look over your writing and finish your homework response (if you have not).  I also will review a few composition details, namely the importance of contextualizing your remarks, using imagery to convey experience, and providing readers with references such as source authors, site names, article titles, and so on, where appropriate or called for in work that borrows from that of others.

I am curious to hear and read your thoughts/compositions on the various Keys to Wellbeing 
listed at the greatergood Berkeley site: gratitude, empathy, awe, community, diversity, altruism, et al. Here I'll briefly address mindfulness, loosely defined as a state of conscious awareness in which thoughts, emotions, and feelings can be held in focus and studied or contemplated, and thus better understood.  The mindful state allows for a check on the many ways we get lost in mindlessness, and involves slowing down enough to bring attention to the present moment.  It seems simple but in practice it is difficult.  Nonetheless, mindfulness as a meditation practice is a proven means of reducing stress and enhancing health and it is being used around the world–in hospitals, clinics, schools, prisons–to alleviate pain, suffering, and confusion and to bring greater peace, joy and clarity.  On this topic, Jon Kabat-Zinn, scientist, clinician, and best-selling author is one to read (I'll be providing some photocopies of his writing) as he developed the first mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program widely used.  He writes of mindfulness and meditation in Full Catastrophe Living (2013), a "landmark work" originally published in 1990:   

     "The capacity to respond mindfully develops each time we experience discomfort, pain, or strong emotions of any kind during formal meditation and we just observe them and work at allowing them to simply be here as they are, without reacting.  As we have seen, the practice itself grounds us in alternative ways of seeing and responding to reactive states within ourselves, moment by moment. It introduces us to an entirely different way of being in relationship to what we find unpleasant or aversive or difficult. It offers a new sense of being, one that allows us to feel more in touch with what is unfolding moment by moment.  It therefore expands our sense of being anchored and stable, at least to some degree, in our recognition and appraisal of an event within the larger field of our awareness.  This is akin to a new way being, and thus a new way of feeling more in touch and in control in relationship to our experience, even when things are difficult.  We come to see that wise rationality–and therefore more appropriate and effective responsivity–can come out of inner calmness, clarity, acceptance, and openness.  We come to see that we don't have to struggle with our thoughts and emotions, and that we can't and don't have to try to force things to be as we want them to be in that moment–or ever."   (338-339)



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Above:  A calming painting on view at Art Basel several years ago.


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In Focus:  

I hope to review the Stanford lecture on what's going on in the body and brain during depression. Related,  here is a link to an essay in the New York Times about how we sometimes struggle to distinguish sadness from depression.  

For those who may enjoy reading about the lives of those who are redefining gender norms, I found the following story (set, in part, in South Florida) eye-opening, as the author's experience of her own body leads her to a radical intervention.  It is titled "All in One Piece."


For those of you interested in healthy diets, a piece on the Mediterranean diet:  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/opinion/mediterranean-diet-nutrition-weight-loss.html

The Aspen Ideas annual gathering is a symposium of sorts on a variety of topics, including health. Check it out as you begin gathering ideas for the research paper:   https://www.aspenideas.org/content/about


Two links demonstrating direct quotation of prose and poetry at the online writing resource called OWL: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/03/ and https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/577/04/

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Poetry 

A Blessing   by James Wright (1927-1980)

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness   

That we have come.

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs.   

At home once more,

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.   

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me   

And nuzzled my left hand.   

She is black and white,

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

Morning Swim  by Maxine Kumin (1927-2014)

Into my empty head there come

a cotton beach, a dock wherefrom

I set out oily and nude

through mist, in chilly solitude.

There was no line, no roof or floor

to tell the water from the air.

Night fog thick as terry cloth

closed me in its fuzzy growth.

I hung my bathrobe on two pegs.

I took the lake between my legs.

Invaded and invader, I

went overhand on that flat sky.

Fish twitched beneath me, quick and tame,

In their green zone they sang my name

and in the rhythm of the swim

I hummed a two-four-time slow hymn.

I hummed Abide with Me.  The beat

rose in the fine thrash of my feet,

rose in the bubbles I put out

slantwise, trailing through my mouth.

My bones drank water, water fell

through all my doors.  I was the well

that fed the lake that met my sea

in which I sang Abide with Me.

Homework:   Read one or more of the above linked pieces and write a 350-word response that examines the health issues illustrated and one or more of the Keys we've been discussing. Include title, author, place of publication, and at least one use of direct quotation.