Image Credit: Elena Kloppenburg

AFTER TEN YEARS IN MY OFFICE, I finally replaced three seriously distressed end tables I inherited from Mollie, the psychotherapist who practiced there for 20 years before me, who I suspect inherited them from her predecessor, Don, who’d been in the space since 1984.

The end tables were a mess. Deep yellow rings swirled on their pine surfaces, stains from tea cups over the years. Therapists always serve tea, right? The layers and layers of rings were hypnotic, a fossilized record of thousands of therapy sessions. While over four decades the three of us believed whole-heartedly in the truth of human feeling and the healing power of relationships, apparently no one believed in coasters. For the longest time I told myself I wasn’t fussy about furniture and didn’t care how the office looked, as long as it was clean. But if I’m being honest, there was more: I was attached to those end tables with their deeply weathered surfaces.

WHEN I WAS 13 YEARS OLD, I read the book Sybil, about the therapy of a woman with what was then called Multiple Personality Disorder. I won’t get into the controversies of her story here. At the time, I believed it was true. Reading about Dr. Wilbur’s healing journey with a client troubled by an abusive childhood, I believed I’d found my calling and my people. When I was 18, I went to Vienna as a student, read the early psychoanalysts, and confirmed this would be my future.

Noticing that fossilized record before me during sessions with clients, I recognized something core to the field, an indwelling. I liked being reminded I’m part of a long lineage of helpers bringing healing, one conversation and one cup of tea at a time, in a world that dishes out a lot of adversity and suffering. In a series of poems called “Sources,” Adrienne Rich names a kind of ancestral knowledge, the sense

“of being a connective link
in a long, continuous way

of ordering hunger, weather, death, desire
and the nearness of chaos.”

THE LONGER I DO THIS WORK, the more I realize that ego—whether it’s attachment to my expertise, or the idea that I alone can heal my clients, or one of those rescuer fantasies we all eventually have to shed—is a toxic element that undermines our effectiveness, our wisdom. Some clients stay a long time, some leave prematurely, and some ghost us without explanation. Just because I can’t see what happens once they’ve left me doesn’t mean their healing has stopped or that they don’t at some time take up the work with someone else. We belong to a team of people we don’t even know.

Heavy as it often feels, we don't carry the work alone, even when we work by ourselves in an old office with seriously beat-up furniture. The three tables sit in the basement now, the graveyard for all the discarded therapist furniture since 1984. I didn’t realize what they meant until they were gone.

INSPIRATIONS

It is rarely a therapist’s brilliance that makes the difference. Our clever interpretations? The bold interventions that give us bursts of adrenaline and self satisfaction? The occasional stroke of something that feels like genius? These usually go unnoticed by patients. Instead, it is almost always the qualities of the relationship, the empathy, the desire, and ability to truly see the other, and the willingness to give honest feedback that one so seldom gets in regular life.
IRVING YALOM

The first product of self-knowledge is humility.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it.
URSULA LE GUIN

Examine all things intensely and relentlessly. Probe and search each object in a piece of art; do not leave it, do not course over it, as if it were understood, but instead follow it down until you see it in the mystery of its own specificity and strength.
ANNIE DILLARD

For this reason, humanity — in all its grandeur and woundedness — must never be replaced or surpassed. We can embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities, provided that we do not abandon the very essence of our humanity, namely the capacity for relationship and love.
POPE LEO XIV

We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self.
JAMES BALDWIN

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
OSCAR WILDE

UPCOMING WEBINARS AND WORKSHOPS WITH WAYNE

“An ‘Hour of the Heart’ in an Era of Chaos: Clinical Strategies” (virtual book group). June 5, 12, and 19, 2026, 9:00 am - 10:30 AM each day (6 CEUs ethics).

“Mindful Supervision: Advanced Applications” (webinar), every third Friday of month beginning September 18, 2026, 9:00 am - 10:30 am each day (6 CEUs supervision).

“Trauma-informed Resistance in an Age of Overwhelm: Clinical Strategies,”
Revolution Hall, 1300 SE Stark Street, Portland, OR 97214, October 9, 2026, 8:30 am - 4:00 pm, with Tori Lopez, LCSW (6 CEUs cultural competence/clinical).

“Expanding "The Shrink Next Door:" An Ethical Case Study” (webinar), December 4 and 11, 2026, 9:00 am - 11:00 am (6 CEUs ethics).

For three decades Wayne Scott, MA, LCSW has taught continuing education classes to helping professionals. His private practice focuses on individual adults and couples as well as clinical consultation. His writing appears in The Psychotherapy Networker, The New York Times, Huffington Post, Poets and Writers, and The Sun, among others. His memoir, The Maps They Gave Us (Black Lawrence Press, 2025) was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award and the Oregon Book Award.

My own weird situation is I have both a clinical social work degree and a degree in creative writing. I’ve spent as much time learning to be a writer as I have figuring out how to help people in the fifty-minute hour. Nowadays, with my clients, I draw as much on my training in story-telling as I do on my clinical education.

I’ve participated in countless workshops and critique groups and classes, bands of humans huddling over manuscript pages, puzzling over truth and beauty. They’re not always helpful. In grad school I dreaded one workshop so much it made me nauseous. A couple mean-spirited critics looked down on everything. It stymied the creative process. A saner person would have fled that cauldron of snakes, but I wanted the grade. The best workshops are animated by a spirit of good will, curiosity, and love of literature. A teacher with an ego in check and some ideas about craft is helpful.

PHOTO: Frank Flores (Unsplash)

SOMETIMES THERAPY FEELS LIKE we’re working on the draft of a memoir. The client brings their story, fettered with supplied messages of who they’re supposed to be: dregs of religious, racial, and other oppressions; echoes of critical, unhappy, or struggling parents with their opinions; encounters with the world's nastiness and adversities. Mostly I ask questions, like in a workshop, trying to expand the scene and the characters, to see everything and everyone more fully, searching for what Zora Neale Hurston called “the untold story.” I’m curious about mysteries and confusions, solipsisms, the bedevilment of all that is unremembered, glimmerings of meanings moving into clarity, the barely articulate shame we compel into language, if we’re patient, then acceptance. Collaboratively we revise what Julia Alvarez calls the “tangled-ness.” Cliches, dogma, and other people’s orthodoxies are out. They don’t make a compelling story. They don’t disappear, but they move to the side, like grumpy, one-dimensional characters who populate even the best novels. In therapy as in the workshop, we are excavating the client’s voice, the fount of self-authoring, that will guide them in life and relationships.

We’re clearing space for the hero of the story.

* * *

INSPIRATIONS

I find that the older I get, the more baffling it all is, the more the mystery deepens. I want wildness, some tangled-ness.
JULIA ALVAREZ

Whatever is magical in the world, whatever brings color and sound and light and joy, was brought into the center of living by those people curious enough—perhaps angry enough—to go to the edge of town, the forest, the river, and see what else was in the world. Someone recognized the boredom, the waste of sitting in the dark and merely living and invented the story and the song.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not know quite what you were doing and what will happen next.
REBECCA SOLNIT

Regret is the time machine to the past.
Worry is a time machine to the future.
Gratitude is the time machine to the present.

No one books my travel for me.
I decide where I want to go.
ANDREA GIBSON

That’s what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks.
TILLIE OLSEN

WAYNE SCOTT’S writing appears in The Psychotherapy Networker, The New York Times, Huffington Post, Poets and Writers, and The Sun, among others. He is a psychotherapist in private practice. His debut memoir, The Maps They Gave Us, about a couple’s adventures in marital therapy, is a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the Oregon Book Award.

IT’S TRUE CONFESSION TIME. While I do read clinical research, like a good mental health professional, some of the best inspiration for my psychotherapy practice comes from—

this is hard to acknowledge—

The New York Times’ Modern Love column. I don’t always love it, it’s true. When my daughter was a teenager, our father-daughter bonding ritual was to discuss the merits and flaws of each week’s column. We’ve both sent in essays to sit on their slush pile. The published pieces we enjoy reading achieve an intimacy on the page: plainspoken struggles with human connection, smattered with quirkiness, regional and generational particularities, maybe an epiphany at the end. It’s a satisfying recipe. Like the best therapy sessions. Or the pleasure of a heart-to-heart with a friend.

Last November a Modern Love contributor, Brent Chaim Spodek, who’s a rabbi and a marriage counselor, wrote a story, “The Three Times I Married My Wife,” about different marriages he’s had to the same woman; iterations of the same bond shaped by shared and not-shared adversities, aging, and growing wisdom. Of course I love the idea of long-term partnership as a series of improvisations—the embrace of creative adaptation at the heart of relationship success—but I particularly admire a question he and his spouse ask each other on their walks:

When have you felt close to me this week, and when have you felt distant?

I liked the question so much, I started asking it of my couples at the start of sessions: “When have you felt close to each other this week, and when have you felt distant?” The invitation yields rich information about each person: What measures do they use to gauge closeness? How often do those measures overlap?

How do you know when you feel close? For some clients it was laughing, having fun, and playing games; for others it was crying over fears and hardships; maybe it was watching a movie and holding hands; or nowadays going to protests. For others it was spirited debating. Some clients, sadly, don’t know what feeling close feels like; that’s part of the healing work. When

I’m with my partner, it’s an end-of-the-week ritual of going to our neighborhood Italian restaurant where the waiters know us and we’ve memorized the menu and we can hear each other talk. With the guy I dated for eight years, it was another restaurant on the other side of the river, where we had a special table.

TODAY IT’S JUST PLAIN HARD AND SCARY to be alive, with the empire crumbling, the threat-saturated news cycle, and the violence. An easy default is to dissociate within ourselves, to numb, and to isolate from others. I don’t always know what to do. But I do know one thing for sure: continuing to work hard to stay close—to partners, kids, friends, neighbors, communities—is an antidote that keeps us as healthy as we can be, in spite of the forces against us.

INSPIRATIONS

Why are you so afraid of yourself… of changing things? …

You can’t try to live safely, there’s no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully.
URSULA LE GUIN

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.
GEORGIA O’KEEFE

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.”
ROBERT FROST

Maternity is derived from tenderness and love. Solidarity is tenderness between communities. It’s really simple. It’s philosophical, yes, but it’s actually the simplest feeling there is.
SONIA SANTIAGO HERNANDEZ

We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.
ZOHRAN MAMDANI

We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.
MARK CARNEY

Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN (often attributed, but actually from The Hobbit movie)

FOR THREE DECADES WAYNE SCOTT, MA, LCSW has taught continuing education classes to helping professionals. His private practice focuses on individual adults and couples as well as clinical consultation. His writing appears in The Psychotherapy Networker, The New York Times, Huffington Post, Poets and Writers, and The Sun, among others. His memoir, The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined, is available through Black Lawrence Press.

IT WAS A SLEEPY DECEMBER AFTERNOON in a government building in the heart of the Pacific Northwest. I was staring at a computer screen, wincing at the la-la-la of carols from someone’s desk speaker. The phone rang, stabbing the white noise.

“Hey. I have a favor.” My friend Robb is a Public Information Officer. “A television crew is coming. I need you to check on the holiday tree in the lobby. Make sure there are no Christian images on it. If there are, make sure there are ornaments from other faiths too.”

“There’s no tree anymore,” I said blandly.

“What?!”

I pulled the phone away from my ear. “They took it down when those lawyers complained about a Christian symbol in a government building.”

“Well, put it back! I told the reporter decorating the tree was a secular activity for youth from the neighborhood.”

“Seriously? But I don’t know where it is.”

We like to tease Robb that, likable as he is, when it comes to work, he’s vintage Type A. “Find the tree and call me back!”

Before I share what happened, a disclosure is in order. I’m cynical about Christmas. I hate the ubiquity of its songs and symbols. If I ever have to explain those terms that left-of-center folks use—hegemony or dominant culture—I point to December. It’s like no other faiths exist.

In the lobby I asked the security guard: “Do you know where the tree is?”

He looked up from his computer. “We took it down when those lawyers complained.” He led me to a storage room. A defeated giant, the tree was on its side. Some branches were mangled. Colored balls were scattered on the floor. A few were broken.

I called Robb. “I found the tree.”

“Great! I’m on the road.”

“It’s a mess,” I explained. “There’s no story.”

“That news crew arrives in twenty-five minutes.”

“Just explain we had to take the Christmas tree down. Separation of church and state. That’s an interesting story, too.”

“It’s not a Christmas tree. It’s a holiday tree. Put it back up.”

“There isn’t time!”

“PUT THE DAMN HOLIDAY TREE BACK IN THE LOBBY!”

I held the phone away from my ear again. The guard winced. “We have to put it back,” I said.

IMAGINE APOLLO 13 AS AN OLD-FASHIONED CHRISTMAS SPECIAL, but instead of sending men to space, the ground crew decorates a messy house on a deadline, the world watching anxiously. Robb is the Gene Kranz character.

Failure is not an option, gentlemen.

We had nothing but two pairs of hands, adrenaline, and a foul-tasting concentration of holiday panic. The guard and I hoisted the tree on an office swivel chair, gathered scratched ornaments, and clumsily maneuvered to the lobby. Pine branches scratched my arms. I had tinsel in my mouth. As we passed colleagues, I barked: “All hands on deck! We need help getting this thing decorated! A television news crew is coming!”

That’s an interesting thing about the dominant culture. When you need help on the fly setting up a Christmas tree, zealots pour out of the woodwork like a mob of crack-high elves. Everybody’s a Who in Whoville.

We had twenty minutes. I feared Robb’s fury and the world’s judgment. As I crawled on the ground to adjust the tree stand, I couldn’t tell if the drops pouring off me were perspiration or tears. “Are you decorating?!” I shouted, sensing the swirl of employees. Someone tripped over my leg. “Watch it, will you?!” Struggling to straighten the tree, I kept thinking, Please don’t sing carols, please don’t sing carols…. When they started, it was “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”

Somehow, in these moments of dark crisis, we get a burst of strength. I jammed the trunk in the stand. Furiously I turned the screws. Someone kicked my shin. “There’s a phone call. It’s your director.”

“Jesus, I’m trying to get the tree stable!”

“It’s the director. He says it’s important.”

“Are you serious?” I shimmied out. My drenched shirt, which had been white, was stained from sap. I took the phone. “Yes?”

“Can you make sure there are no Christian symbols on the tree?”

All I had cared about what making sure the tree wasn’t crooked. “Yes, sir,” I said, heart thumping.

“Thank you,” he said. “Merry Christmas. I mean, Happy Holidays.”

THE PREMISE OF EVERY HOLIDAY SPECIAL I’ve watched is that Christmas is embattled until an ordinary hero rises up to salvage its “true meaning.” We had resurrected a mangled Christmas tree. All the blinking, twinkling, tied-up-with-a-bow, revelry-jammed chaos of the holiday had been concentrated into twenty-five minutes of perfectionist terror. Oh my God, I thought, looking at that tree, in near-hallucinatory exhaustion. Was I one of those heroes? After all this cynicism, was I going to have a Christmas Epiphany?

“The Twelve Days of Christmas” trailed off at “five golden rings.” Co-workers retreated. The news mobile and Robb pulled into the parking lot.

“You should get out of here,” mumbled the guard. “You look like someone kicked the shit out of you.”

Shins smarting from being trampled, I retreated to my office. No one would notice my hands, bloodied with holiday stigmata; my flushed face; my sap-stained shirt. It would ruin the story they told about the holiday.

Whatever they chose to call it.

My newsletter, Heart’s Imagination, about psychotherapy, healing, and the creative life, comes out monthly. My memoir, The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined, is available from Black Lawrence Press.

We have not long to love.

Light does not stay.

I DISCOVERED THIS TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ POEM last month (see below). I had a hard time getting it out of my head. I put it in the poetry post outside our garden. While raking leaves, I found myself pausing to re-read it and wonder about its enigmatic voice. Do you ever have that experience, when words cast a spell you can neither explain, nor resist, nor shake? I started thinking about what the writer Dorothy Allison calls “the essential soul connection” between writers and their readers. The stuff of healing, it happens between therapists and clients too.

Over weeks of raking, as I puzzled over his lines, there were a couple things I noticed about “We have not long to love.” Single-syllable words dominate. They create iambic rhythms in the mind that resonate with our own breathing in this moment, in this century, so distant from the young Tennessee Williams, in his twenties, in the 1940s, thinking about love and ephemerality. Like those moments the poet is trying to describe, his short syllables both order our breaths and pass quickly through our minds. He’s not offering a haphazard bit of dialogue, but inviting us into a common meditation. “I” becomes “we.”

Neuroscientists describe a phenomenon called “co-regulation,” a physical mirroring that occurs in human relationships. Therapists know all about it. When two bodies sit together in space, their nervous systems resonate. Soft gazes meet, breathing synchronizes, hearts settle into a common rhythm, and quiet voices signal confidences to follow. The magic of therapy comes when a dysregulated soul shares a painful story with a therapist, and the therapist’s ability to stay grounded creates a shared emotional acceptance of what is. Something that was blocked begins to flow. Neuroscience-informed therapist Bonnie Badenoch calls this therapeutic magic “right-brain to right brain connection.” It is essential to the work.

POETRY, LIKE THERAPY, IS A GROUNDED MOMENT of connection. In therapy, two people are in the same room or maybe a virtual meeting. In poetry, the poet’s voice is inside our heads and hearts, another kind of grounding. Either way it’s bodies connecting, sometimes in the same moment, sometimes across centuries. In a violent era, we need these tender things. They are the preservation and endurance of our best selves.

“We have not long to love” says nothing about queerness, but we know so much about Tennessee Williams, that other meaning slips into our awareness, reminds us that love, for this young man, newly out in a world hostile to his gay identity, was fraught with danger. “I could but did not, reach/to touch your arm.”

Now the poem has been sitting in my poetry post for three weeks filled with heavy rains. Autumn is nearly over. The trees are nearly bare. We are talking to clients about holidays and solstice and the dark months and the new year and all the feelings. The paper holding the poem in the poetry post is damp and soggy. It melts and the poem looks like it is collapsing. “The tender things are those/ we fold away.”

POEM

We have not long to love.

Light does not stay.

The tender things are those

we fold away.

Coarse fabrics are the ones

for common wear.

In silence I have watched you

comb your hair.

Intimate the silence,

dim and warm.

I could but did not, reach

to touch your arm.

I could, but do not, break

that which is still.

(Almost the faintest whisper

would be shrill.)

So moments pass as though

they wished to stay.

We have not long to love.

A night. A day....

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

INSPIRATIONS

My words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.

ALAA ABD EL-FATTAH

In times of great struggle, when it seems that everything is falling apart, we must remember that there is a power greater than the forces of division. The struggle for justice, for dignity, for equality, is not a fleeting moment but a long hard process, and in that process we must learn to lean on each other. The community, our shared humanity, is what gives us the strength to keep going. The world may seem broken, but it is in the healing, in the rebuilding, where hope is found. And we must keep building, together.

TONI MORRISON

I promise, I stone-

cold-promise

that the face of utter

hopelessness

is the face of something just about to change

JOSEPH FASANO

You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.

PEMA CHÖDRÖN

Remaking ourselves and those we treasure in story is our revolutionary transgression. We reach out of, and past, our isolated human bodies to the essential soul connection. We are not alone. We live in the tribe, in story, in lyric and meter and song that does not end.

DOROTHY ALLISON

In the end we will all become stories.

MARGARET ATWOOD

ONCE, IN MY HEYDAY OF PILGRAMAGES TO PSYCHOTHERAPISTS, I only wanted to see the stars. In the late 90s my partner and I, married only a few years, saw Marianne Walters in her office in Washington, DC. She founded The Women’s Project in Family Therapy, a think tank, and co-wrote The Invisible Web, introducing feminist thinking into family therapy. At the time I worked in a psychiatric hospital. Every day I sat in group therapy surrounded by patients with scars and cuts and rope burns. My partner worked in public policy, her life tethered to the red light on the top of the Capitol building, burning late into the night. We were overwhelmed and mad at each other and confused about marriage.

There were two sore points. One was my mother. She and I thought alike. Whenever she visited, I agreed with her. What do you think of this waffle iron? How shall we prepare tonight’s chicken? Inevitably, my partner disagreed with one of us. But my mother and I always agreed. A single parent of three sons, she did not know what to do with a daughter. She leaned on the same habits of salty directness she had with her sons. When my partner complained, I listened, but I didn’t get it. She needed to stand up to my mother, I told her. Once, embroiled in an argument, I said, “Your worst problem should be you married a man who worships his mother.”

And there was more. For two years we hadn’t been able to get pregnant. We were going broke paying for drugs and surgeries.

THAT FIRST SESSION WE SETTLED IN for what we thought would be a long haul with our intractable dynamic. In her prime as a therapist, Marianne Walters was a short woman with a joyous smile, a gregarious spirit, and a deep voice. She listened to us describe why we were miserable: the difficult mother-in-law; the impossibility of getting pregnant; hormones and surgical procedures; and sex on demand with arguments buzzing in the background. As we explained ourselves, I felt like I was drowning. I kept glancing at the clock. We were past the fifty-minute mark. Where was the ending? The plan for our next meeting?

Finally Marianne Walters turned and looked me in the eye. “Wayne, you need to tell your mother to cut it out,” she said. “You need to stick up for your wife.”

Her directive didn’t seem very feminist. “Shouldn’t she stand up for herself?”

“No,” she said. “She’s your mother. You need to make sure your wife feels included.”

This didn’t feel like relationship therapy at all. Wasn’t she supposed to watch us figure our circuitous way out of the dark cave?

“Just tell your mother to be nicer to your wife,” she repeated. She turned to my teary wife. “It’s hard now, sweetie. But you’re middle class people who want a baby. You’ve got resources. You’ll get a baby. It’s going to take time. Be patient.”

How could she make such a reassurance? Obviously we couldn’t just *get* a baby. Even by having sex when tests indicated the egg was sitting there—just sitting there!—in my wife’s uterus waiting for a sperm visitor, the little guys couldn’t get through the door.

Then the famous feminist family therapist said we were done. She didn’t believe we needed therapy. We needed to do what she said.

Exhausted, my partner and I walked onto the street bustling with pedestrians. Where was the self-determination? Where was the nuanced processing? We felt like a drill sergeant had barked at us: Grow up!

Other than some hollow politeness that escaped me in my bristly state, I never thanked Marianne Walters that last moment on her doorstep, when she bid us goodbye and good luck. My partner and I never talked about her blunt directives. Less than a decade later, I heard that she had died. Here’s what I wish I could say to her:

That week I told my mother to be nicer to my wife. It was simpler than I imagined. My mother loved my partner. She didn’t understand how her ways came across as critical. But she knew from her own marriage what it was like to feel unwelcome by a mother-in-law. She started taking my partner out for pedicures and buying her gifts. Then we took a break from trying to have a baby and focused on getting out of Washington, DC, enemy of fecundity and family. We moved 2,750 miles away. Over four action-packed years, we had three beautiful babies.

That blustery day we huddled in her office—me righteous, her in tears—Marianne Walters was actually telling us about love: its unsentimental edges and realignments; its jagged sacrifices; hard work and messy long-hauled-ness; and the necessity of grace.

It just didn’t sound like anything I would have recognized as love.

Oh, I should have thanked her more sincerely.

I should have thanked her.

My newsletter, Heart’s Imagination, about psychotherapy, healing, and the creative life, comes out monthly. My memoir, The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined, about a couple’s adventures in relationship therapy, is available from Black Lawrence Press.

THERAPY: https://waynescottlcsw.com/

BOOK: https://www.waynescottwrites.com/

PHOTO CREDIT: Kateryna Hliznitsova

READING IRVING YALOM’S LAST BOOK, Hour of the Heart, has been my morning consolation. For that last word, autocorrect substituted “consultation.” So maybe my coffee with Irv Yalom has been both a consolation and a consultation.

Over the entirety of my thirty year career, Yalom has been there, humming in the background. His ideas about existential therapy have become so widely generalized, I remember reading about key concepts--instillation of hope, tapping the power of the here and now, universality--in textbooks. My first academic article, before I figured out I didn’t want to write academic articles, applied Yalom’s ideas about social behavior to groups I was running for school-aged, sexually abused boys, a confoundingly tough population, the stuff of bad dreams. Even then Yalom was a consolation and a consultation.

NOW THE ELDER THERAPIST IS NINETY FOUR. His memory and stamina are failing, but his heart is expansive. He decided to offer one-time-only, hour-long consultations to clients: a model of therapy that fits a man, still brimming with wisdom, who can’t recall what happened yesterday. Would there be anything useful he could offer in a single hour? (Can you imagine the pressure?)

Hour of the Heart recounts sessions--in bite-sized chapters perfect for morning coffee--with a window into Yalom’s interior struggle: his self-doubts, his anxiety about his failing memory, grief over his deceased wife, and worries about the degree to which these conditions of age compromise what he can offer. He experiments with self-disclosure, putting his vulnerability on the table to facilitate closeness. He wrestles with doubts yet ultimately still hazards to invite the client’s reflections on the here and now. “How are you and I doing in this session?” is an oft-repeated question.

His humility is his superpower. “It is rarely a therapist’s brilliance that makes the difference,” he tells us. “Our clever interpretations? The bold interventions that give us bursts of adrenaline and self satisfaction? The occasional stroke of something that feels like genius? These usually go unnoticed by patients. Instead, it is almost always the qualities of the relationship, the empathy, the desire, and ability to truly see the other, and the willingness to give honest feedback that one so seldom gets in regular life.”

Last week one of my clients asked, “How are we supposed to cope with the state of our world?” I looked at them quietly, as if we were holding that important question between us. I’ve been borrowing here-and-now strategies from Yalom’s book. “I don’t know,” I said, anchored in a humility that knows what it doesn’t know, a truthful place where we still keep each other company. “I struggle with that as well, and it’s hard.”

My newsletter, Heart’s Imagination, about psychotherapy, healing, and the creative life, comes out monthly. My memoir, The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, is available from Black Lawrence Press.

In June 2026, I’m facilitatign an online continuing education discussion group: “An ‘Hour of the Heart’ in an Era of Chaos: Clinical Strategies,” June 5, 12, and 19, 9:00 am - 10:30 am each day. (6 CEUs ethics are approved through NASW.)

THIS MONTH I HAD ANOTHER QUASI-SABBATICAL in Vienna: reading and writing and doing yoga during the day and seeing clients virtually in the evenings. Most clients I see on video. A few prefer phone calls where we both walk in our respective neighborhoods: peripatetic therapy. I was staying in Leopoldstadt, one of the old Jewish neighborhoods east of the Donaucanal, a ten minute walk to my yoga studio. During phone sessions I’d walk in the secluded, maple-lined paths of a park called the Augarten, 129 acres enclosed by ancient stone walls.

In the center of the Augarten looms a Flak Tower, an anti-aircraft monstrosity, installed after the 1938 Nazi takeover, used to protect the city during air raids. Austrians don’t know what to do with it, it’s a part of their dark history, so it stands empty and foreboding in an otherwise picturesque baroque garden surrounded by children’s playgrounds, playing fields, swimming pools, and picnic areas. Graffiti on its side states NEVER AGAIN.

The park closes at 9 pm. An alarm goes off warning everyone to get the hell out, and security guards sweep through to make sure the message isn’t missed. It’s absurdly efficient. One evening, deep in the center of the Augarten, I was talking to a client and lost track of time. The alarms startled me. Still listening to my client’s story, I picked up the pace, heading to one of the entrances. It was locked. Had I waited too long? Dusk was falling. I didn’t see many people in the park. Not saying anything to my client, I skedaddled to another exit, breath quickening.

It’s an amazing thing about being a therapist: we compartmentalize so efficiently. While I was attuning to my client’s story, in another part of my brain a panicked thought was rising: I’m going to get trapped in the Augarten. I’m going to spend the night under the gruesome Flak Tower. Or maybe a security guard will arrest me with my terrible German and call my spouse back in the States to come and get me, and she’ll be pissed.

I hurried for an exit a quarter mile away. There was no hiding. “I have to apologize if I seem distracted,” I told my client, “but the park where I’m walking is closing, it may already be closed, and I can’t find an exit that’s not locked.” An odd thing to confess, but it was true. We laughed, uneasily, but I was worried. We were at the end of a session that had run over. It was nice to have my client’s company while I continued fumbling in the dark to find a way out. When I reached the next locked entry, a teenage boy outside the gate noticed my anxious expression. “Der einzige Ausgang befindet sich in der Sudecke!” he shouted. My panicked brain didn’t understand, but he pointed to an exit in the distance. Flanked by security guards, it was still open. "Danke!" I ran, my client still on the line.

“We’re going to have to wrap up,” I told them breathlessly, still a therapist in the session. “The only way I can get back for my next session is if I run like the devil.”

WHILE I WAS ON THIS QUASI-SABBATICAL so far away, I did pay attention to news at home. It brought up questions about how we’re supposed to live and do our work caring for clients while enduring a cruel era with our government turning against its people. It was helpful to remember: many of us have developed a mental discipline enabling us to focus on our role and purpose while at times holding worry and fear in another part of our bodies. It was helpful to consider: the intentional use of authenticity builds safety and a healing connection. It was helpful to recall: it’s not the first time in history therapists have done their work while the world fell apart. Finally, the truest thought of all, it was helpful to confirm: the illusion that we never get lost is unhelpful. And it doesn’t fool anyone.

A FEW WEEKS AGO, ON A SUNNY SUMMER MORNING, when I walked out to the backyard to drink my coffee and read my book, I noticed that someone had destroyed the poetry post. They had taken the two poems out of the box and scattered them on the sidewalk, then ripped the copper-topped box off the post and thrown it onto the flagstone patio. It lay in two pieces at my feet. I was shocked. Who wrecks a poetry post?

I love my poetry post. Before I got my own, I used to give poems to my neighbors to put in theirs--something no one really wants. A Father’s Day gift, over fifteen years ago, the first poem my own post held was written by my eight year old son. Since then a lot has happened to it: birds shit on it; clematis strangles it; roses encircle it; beetles and spiders invade, once sitting on Emily Dickinson; poems have been ripped up (too much Mary Oliver in this hood?); and neighbors have left poems as surprises. Poems get nabbed so often I leave one or two of the old ones underneath so it’s never empty. Once someone decorated the post with Christmas ornaments. Pedestrians leave me notes about how a poem moves them. It serves purposes I am constantly discovering.

Because my spouse works in the garden a lot, there is so much to maintain and I don’t help as much as I could (but I keep the poetry post stocked, so that’s something), passers-by shout to her, “Wonderful poem!” or “I love this one!” and, hose in hand, weeds at her feet, she replies, “Oh, is there a new one?” Watering during Portland’s furiously hot summers is a mighty endeavor.

THAT MORNING I DIDN’T SAY MUCH about the wrecked poetry post. I wanted to stew. Maybe I had read too much news the night before but in my head I concocted this idea that it was a sign of the overall shittiness of the world, a general uptick in cruelty, that someone would take time to wreck something as unoffending as a poetry post. I thought about the two poems left scattered on the sidewalk: Rainer Rilke’s “Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower” and Cameron Awkward-Rich’s “Meditations in an Emergency.” Written over a hundred years apart, in separate seasons of war, they couldn’t be more different in tone and style. Yet, seeing them on the concrete, they seemed to be speaking to each other, their lines braiding into a new meaning: "Let this darkness be a bell tower/and you the bell,” “I wake up and it breaks my heart,” “be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,” and “I was raised in the institution of dreaming.” I had to admit: it was interesting to think about poets having a conversation across a century.

It was a little thing in the tumult of bad news, but the wrecked poetry post got to me. “I will write something that will make people cry for the state of the world,” I fumed. All day I composed an essay in my head but it was too pissed off to be good and what I wanted was for people to feel something.

When I came home that day, my spouse asked me to see some perennials she had planted. The poetry box was reassembled, sitting on a chair. “Who did that?” I asked. “It just needed a nail,” she said. The next day my son, who is now twenty-three and owns a power drill, came by and re-mounted it and it looked the same, probably more sturdily fixed in place than it was, and the story I was writing in my head, which was supposed to be about the shittiness of the world, shifted to be a story about how the people who love us notice when we’re hurt. Even by things that seem like they shouldn’t matter.

INSPIRATIONS
Each human is a complex, contradictory story. Some stories within us have been unfolding for years, others are trembling with fresh life as they peek above the horizon. Each is a zigzag of emotional design and ancestral architecture. All the stories in the earth’s mind are connected.
JOY HARJO

This is a dark time, filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don’t be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings.
JOANNA MACY

Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.
ROBIN WALL KIMMERER

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
AUDRE LORDE

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am,
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America
LANGSTON HUGHES

HEINZ KOHUT’S ROLE IN THE HISTORY of the talking cure (re)captivated my imagination during the COVID pandemic, when, as the trouble in the world piled on here in the Pacific Northwest (deadly virus, racial unrest, violence and political instability, forest fires and smoke, to name a few) all my therapist colleagues were becoming overloaded with people desperate for help. (As a graduate student at University of Chicago, where Kohut was a huge influence at the time, I had had to take a quarter-long course in his ideas about empathy and healing.) The times recalled a story that Viktor Frankl, one of Kohut’s contemporaries, told in Man’s Search for Meaning. During his imprisonment in a concentration camp, Frankl hid his profession, doubtful that he could be helpful when he suffered under the same oppressive circumstances, until one day the other prisoners found out and compelled him to give a talk.

“God knows, I was not in the mood to give psychological explanations or to preach any sermons,” he writes. “I was cold and hungry, irritable and tired...but I had to make the effort to use this unique opportunity. Encouragement was now more necessary than ever.” People needed connection, desperately. He tells his listeners about hope and resilience, rooted in hard experiences, that suffering and sacrifice magnify a sense of purpose. “They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning.”

It’s fascinating. The so-called talking cure--whether we’re talking psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, or specific models like Dialectical Behavioral Therapy—evolved over a century punctuated by global wars. Its earliest ideas emerged during a volatile period that included genocide. How could these contradictory forces—the striving for psychological health and an honest reckoning with suffering and healing, and one of the most violent periods, when millions perished needlessly—be so tightly intertwined in the same century?

When he was twenty-five years old, still living in Vienna, Kohut was in psychoanalysis with August Aichhorn. When I was in Vienna last year, I visited the 19th century building at Schönbrunnerstraße 110 where it happened, imagining Kohut walking to and from his appointments, five days a week, along the Ringstrasse as it was increasingly overtaken by mobs and Nazi troops. Aichhorn’s grandson sent me photos of the office as it looked in 1938, and I was awestruck by the image of the couch where Aichhorn’s patients would lie during sessions. Enclosed on three sides by bookshelves, it’s a powerful symbol of the human aspiration toward insight, epiphany, beauty, and understanding; a warm literary cocoon. Imagine lying there, looking at all those books, sharing your confidences and fears, your overwhelm, feeling heard. Aichhorn was famously gentle and warmly down-to-earth. Nothing changed about how violent the world was—Kohut’s analysis was cut short when the young man was forced to flee Austria that year, only a few weeks behind Freud’s departure—but he had this protected time, a caring, trusting relationship, in this safe pocket, this fortress of books.

Somehow, amidst despair, that experience of connection kept the possibility of healing alive, a kernel of empathy that magnified over time in his work; touched, consoled, uplifted, and fortified more people, including us today; and, against the odds, always against the odds, expanded possibilities for health and hope.

INPSIRATIONS

“I will also try some time to help others to heal their own suffering and live life more clearly.” HEINZ KOHUT, 1938

“Oh, child! Somewhere inside you, your future has already unfurled like one of those coiled-up party streamers, once shiny, shaken loose, floating gracefully for a brief moment, now trampled underfoot after the party is over. The future you’re capable of imagining is already a thing of the past. Who did you think you would grow up to become? You could never have dreamt yourself up. Sit down. Let me tell you everything that’s happened. You can stop running now. You are alive in the woman who watches you as you vanish.” DANI SHAPIRO

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” ALAN WILSON WATTS

“From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” VIRGINIA WOOLF

CLIENT SHARE CULTURAL PASSIONS with me. Every week--sometimes it feels like every session--I get recommendations for television series, podcasts, articles, books, new authors, and quotes. I keep a list of entertainment options to investigate.

This part is shared with permission. Last week a client, someone my age and demographic, mentioned that he had heard a song that activated an unexpected wave of grief for his spouse who had recently died. He was doing so well, managing day to day, and then, this--a song? What happened? I remembered the song from my childhood in the 70s, the Bread version, pretty, but I had never considered the words. He sent a version to me in a link, I stored it for later, and we had our session and talked about all the ways that grief sneaks up, takes us unawares; how deep it is.

Driving home, I queued up the song he mentioned: “Everything I Own.” Listening to the words for the first time, I didn’t drive more than a mile before I had to stop.

And I would give anything I own
I'd give up my life, my heart, my home
I would give everything I own
Just to have you back again

Suddenly his sneaker waves were my sneaker waves. Oh, that’s what he was feeling. I hadn’t lost my spouse, but I got it on a deeper, more emotional level. I had the faintest sense of missing someone dear, of wanting them back so badly.

RIGHT BRAIN TO RIGHT BRAIN CONNECTION. So much of what we’re learning about what works in psychotherapy is that healing happens when we create a rich, co-regulatory environment with our clients, when we don’t lean as heavily on the logical, verbal side of our brains—the words—but relax into the visceral, symbolic, non-verbal bond—the music—that implicitly flows when two mammals sit in conversation, if only we pay attention to it. Music--all creativity--emerges from the numinous galaxy of the right hemisphere. It’s the portal to healing. There was a missed opportunity when my client said the song brought up something. I should have suggested we listen to it together. I would have understood in a more powerful way, in the moment, with him.

Always listen to the song.

POSTSCRIPT: Several months after I wrote this blog another client showed up for a session and mentioned that a song they just heard had released an unexpected wave of sorrow for someone they had cherished and lost. I had to resist some barrier in myself—what? professionalism? some formal detachment socialized into the therapist’s role?—but I remembered my resolution from that past session and I said, “Let’s listen to it together.”

It was seven minutes long. We both teared up. We talked so deeply afterwards. I have no regret.

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SOMETIMES, SITTING IN THE TORRENT OF ANXIETY typical in a day in the life of a psychotherapist–it’s amazing how the ripple effects of political chaos settle in people’s bank accounts, retirement plans, and rattled nervous systems—I wonder if there is some other therapist, sitting in an alternate-universe office, where clients are worry-free and happy about where we’re at. But those folks probably don’t go to therapy.

Like many of my clients, I’m struggling with what we’ve been dealt in this moment of historical tumult. I’m turning to ancestors for wisdom. In 2001, Toni Morrison, brilliant angel, gave an interview with Juan Williams. He asked the question: “How do you survive whole in a world where we’re all victims of something?”

Off the top of her head, without even a stray “um,” she responded: “Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.”

These words perfectly capture the project engaging us as healers and good people in this era collapsing under the weight of its confusions. I love her sentence: “It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances” (my italics). With overwhelmed clients I find myself reframing adversity with a question: “How does the way you tell the story change if you assume you were in an impossible situation?” If it's an impossible situation, you can't blame or self-judge or pathologize as readily--that second dart of cruel interpretation is gone--because everybody is floundering and grasping; it’s just the suffering endemic to the human condition; the ground for meaning-making. Supporting new therapists, in particular, when they're mired in these exploitative settings with harsh work expectations, I ask: "What happens when we accept it's an impossible situation, and we did nothing wrong?" The situation still sucks. But we don’t.

BUT I’M NOT A NIHILIST. NOT EXACTLY. Think back on your own life: Every situation once considered “impossible” eventually becomes something else. Lurking within every impossible situation there’s something we can’t see yet: heroes working behind curtains; creative and improbable adaptations; an earth-rocking variable we didn’t know existed; or maybe an uneasy acceptance. But that word, “impossible,” can act as a placeholder for grace.

In this dark moment, we all deserve grace.

INSPIRATIONS

We should keep our feet on the ground to signify that nothing is beneath us, but we should also lift up our eyes to say nothing is beyond us.

SEAMUS HEANEY

I realized long ago that everything I have had to heal from has taught me to become a fortress of both strength and softness. That to reclaim our freedom, we need to become both silk and sword. To find the keys to the cages they are determined to keep us in, we need to be strategic with what we have learned from our pain. We have worked too hard to become prey all over again. Everything that haunts you is also an army that you lead. Every wound that aches is also what forged you from need. What is trying to hurt you has no idea what you are capable of surviving. What is trying to make you bleed does not know of what you have already survived.

NIKITA GILL

Everything that is tearing us down today will become a memory, and this memory will be shared as an anecdote or a story or a poem or a play or a warning. It will be shared with another human being, who will then understand that he is not alone in his sadness. This is why we show up for others and tell our tales and listen to others. The great congregation meets daily, and you are someone’s angel today.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

SUSAN SONTAG

When, if ever, is it OK for therapists to recommend that clients end their relationships?

Since I began teaching my continuing education workshop for therapists, “Love is Not a Pie: Helping Clients Navigating Consensual Nonmonogamy,” this question comes up frequently. Sitting in sessions with couples during big transitions or crises can be excruciating. It’s difficult to shield oneself, as a therapist, from the pitch of their emotional suffering. It’s tempting to suggest they might be healthier if they were apart, but that’s our need, not necessarily theirs. (Maybe it’s us who want to break up with them, and we’re not allowed to do that.) I often wish there was a magical app. Folks in troubled relationships could enter data about their relationship and the app gives them a verdict: stay together or break up. There is no such app. Well, there are several, but they don’t look credible. At all.

The decision to part ways is an existential crisis, and there’s no shortcut. It’s important to honor the fraught process of decision-making, often filled with difficult but important growth and epiphany. I have talked with individuals and couples, sometimes for years, while they sorted out what they wanted to do with a difficult relationship. I could never have wrung a book-length memoir, The Maps They Gave Us, out of my own marital struggle if the therapist, Linné, hadn’t given us a wide berth of time. The messy process of couples re-sorting and re-becoming demands patience, perseverance, and unbiased support. (With couples in which there is interpersonal violence, I will name abusive behaviors, even if it risks alienating them or them quitting therapy, and remind them everyone deserves to be safe. But that’s not prescribing a breakup.)

Humility is the most powerful tool we therapists have. I never suggest that clients break up, if you haven’t figured it out already. In the professional relationship I have too much power, and I can never know everything about what their partnership means, or the future impacts of a breakup. I listen, I ask questions, I witness, I wait. I borrow a lot from what I know about motivational interviewing, listening for “change talk,” individual sentences I can repeat and affirm, that can lead to a different story of a healthier future they might embrace.

“HOW ARE YOU DEALING with the stress of your own fears while holding space for others?” This question came from Beth Eyler, LICSW, a trusted colleague and friend who years ago was a graduate student in one of my classes. “That’s the big question,” I responded. “I don’t know.” But her wondering--it echoes through many of us, sitting across from clients, who do the work of healing--kept me up at night. At 4 am, I woke up, realizing that I did have some ideas.

Before I scribbled them down, I found old “Heart’s Imagination” newsletter content from the summer of 2020--an awful, dark time--when I responded to similar questions. They had titles like “Staying Present While Coping with Overwhelm,” “The ‘Good Enough’ Therapist in a Time of Global Upheaval,” and “What Makes Us Stronger.” Questions I posed, still relevant today, were: What is a ‘good enough’ therapist in an era of unfathomable crisis and uncertainty, with no end in sight? How do we use our own suffering in service to our clients? What makes us stronger? Overwhelmingly, the tone was one of, well, overwhelm.

While there were some good nuggets in those old newsletters, they were dated, and I had grown. We are always translating adversity into new wisdoms. Whereas before I was flooded by powerlessness, now I am angry and fiercely protective of my attention and emotional reserves. I am tuning out political barking, these grown-up schoolyard bullies, and paying attention only to the stuff that matters: family, friends, community, clients, art, and--sparingly--a few trusted news sources. I am shutting out the manipulative dross and focused on endurance, resistance, holding up others, and creative adaptation. If this is a war for psychological integrity and autonomy, this is our home terrain, and we won’t lose. I have a focused anger, evenly distributed over the moments. It is not rage--that would be exhausting and I have to conserve my strength--but it is energy and it is fierce and it keeps me strong.

HERE ARE THREE IDEAS for dealing:

1. Adjust expectations for healing. Depending on our proximity to the threats, the present moment is a crisis, or a swirl of interconnected crises, or a maybe-crisis on the horizon, and nobody heals in a crisis. Oftentimes the best we can do as healers is mitigate the impacts of injury, promote attention to diet, sleep, exercise, and meaning-making, build and enhance authentic human bonds to lessen toxic aloneness, allow feelings, and support a sense of agency, endurance, and resistance.

2. Stay focused. Again and again, I have rock-solid gratitude for the brilliant heart and intention of the therapeutic relationship, this powerful container that saves. Truly it’s sacred. In turbulent times like these we’re planting the seeds of a healing we will not see. Even clients who don’t seem to be doing well in the short-term are getting something and may find themselves taking advantage of what they learned long after they’ve left us. It’s always been about faith.

3. Make space for art in all forms. Creativity is the antidote to destruction, the wellspring of all healing. Some of the most earth-shaking art--literary or visual or musical--emerged during periods of global upheaval. My goodness, just look at the abundance of amazing literature, film, and music--products of the dark pandemic--that are coming out now! Art-making is meaning-making, and it fortifies us, helps us grow bigger.

INSPIRATIONS

The journey I'm taking is inside me. Just like blood travels down veins, what I'm seeing is my inner self and what seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my heart. It doesn’t matter what’s waiting on the other side, or if I pass through darkness and silence or encounter ghosts or monsters. I don’t know what’s waiting for me. But I have strength in my body and clarity in my mind to see it through. This is my journey and I’m on my way.

HARUKI MURKAMI

How do we begin to trust and ride upon the unsure, tentative groundswells of remaining present with what is here in each moment?

BONNIE BADENOCH

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

ARUNDHATI ROY

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.

URSULA LE GUIN

There is reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.

JAMES BALDWIN

An old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples: ‘No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.’

CARL JUNG

EVEN THOUGH I’M TITRATING my exposure to the news cycle, with its immersive cruelty, its pervasive sense of threat, it gets to me. I wake up at 4 am and resist the urge to reach for my phone to see if something has happened. (Something has always happened.). I keep a book of poetry on my nightstand if I’m determined to stay up. I found myself wondering, a bit of a koan: Has the world ever felt this dark? Are these really exceptionally tragic times?

I thought back to the summer of 2020, the worst days of the pandemic quarantine: we were masking and there wasn’t a vaccine in sight; the political dynamic was frightening; information was confusing; forest fires were raging, smoke was choking; there were riots a few miles away; frequently we heard the thunder of helicopters. I had two teenagers at home. In a webinar I taught on trauma-informed strategies for pandemic endurance, someone asked: “What do we tell our children?” I began to answer, then started to cry. And there were so many people—especially those with targeted identities, those who were ill—who had it worse.

Memory is tricky. I can no longer recall the pure despair of that time period. Any recall is filtered through my awareness of what happened afterwards: fires were contained; riots dissipated; a vaccine became available. Certainly it’s not true everything got better. But they didn’t stay at that awful pitch. Every overwhelming adversity, like a tragedy on the stage, is defined by uncertainty, the things we don’t know, elements waiting to be revealed.

Uncertainty makes the feelings worse, puts us at risk of immobilization. The inability to predict the future activates the human threat response in a powerful way. But I’m wondering if the lesson of the summer of 2020 is to take a step back from the anguish and fear, to consider the long view of history, and to reassure ourselves that there are things we don’t know yet, that we will know (like firefighters tackling the fires, scientists working on a vaccine, other forms of resistance we can’t imagine yet). Robert Penn Warren reminds us: “No story is ever over” (see the full quote below). And maybe trusting that there are helpers we can’t see yet will free up energy for us to act, to find our own purpose and resistance.

FOOTNOTES

Robert Penn Warren

“After a great blow, or crisis, after the first shock and then after the nerves have stopped screaming and twitching, you settle down to the new condition of things and feel that all possibility of change has been used up. You adjust yourself, and are sure that the new equilibrium is for eternity.... But if anything is certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over, it is just an inning, and that game has a lot more than nine innings. When the game stops it will be called on account of darkness. But it is a long day.”

Adrienne Rich

“What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other’s despair into hope?—
You yourself must change it.—
what would it feel like to know
your country was changing?—
You yourself must change it.—
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair. “

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