Showing 1 - 10 of 287 annotations tagged with the keyword "Spirituality"

Living

Hermanus, Oliver

Last Updated: Apr-13-2023
Annotated by:
Brungardt, Gerard

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Living is a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru, itself his homage to Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The screenplay is by Kazuo Ishiguro, who may be the perfect person for the job - born in Japan, raised in Britain, Nobel laureate in literature. The movie stays faithful to the original (some scenes almost frame for frame) while at the same time providing a more contemporary time, place, and English language (with the run time decreased from 143 to 102 minutes) all combining to provide a greater accessibility for many today. 

The protagonist, Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy), is the long-standing director of the bureaucratic Public Works Department in post-WWII London. When given a terminal prognosis he starts asking the big questions of life, quickly finding out that not only does he not know the answers but is struggling to phrase the proper questions.
 
After a brief time trying to find his answers through a night on the town, Williams befriends a former Public Works employee, a bright and vivacious young lady who, journeying with him, leads him to the threshold of what he is looking for. The film remains loyal to one of Kurosawa's most acclaimed devices when, after his funeral, we are told the rest of Williams' journey to find himself as his co-workers share their memories, piecing together the final few weeks of his life.    

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Barefoot Doctor: A Novel

Xue, Can

Last Updated: Sep-06-2022
Annotated by:
Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction — Secondary Category: Literature /

Genre: Novel

Summary:

Yun Village, China is a remote town near the mountains. Its 2,438 inhabitants are mostly poor but remarkably optimistic and stoic. Ancestors from the spirit realm visit the hamlet and roam the mountainside. The living and the dead appear to communicate with relative ease. Mrs. Yi (Chunxiu), more than fifty years old, is the village's vibrant "barefoot doctor" - an essentially self-taught healthcare provider with only six months of formal medical training under her belt. Yi's husband is quite supportive of her work. Their only child died at age two.

Yi is revered for her knowledge, patience, and compassion. Most afflictions she treats are chronic diseases, but Yi also delivers babies, cares for children with measles, and counsels a woman who attempted suicide. The therapeutic benefit of attentive, concerned listening along with reassurance are evident in her interactions with patients.

Traditional Chinese herbs, acupuncture, and Western medicine are all in the healer's armamentarium. Yi cultivates herbs and also forages on the mountain for other useful plants. She supposes, "Sickness and herbs are lovers" (p244). As Yi grows older, the need for a successor - a devoted, younger barefoot doctor - is always on her mind. She successfully identifies candidates, then inspires and mentors them.


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Annotated by:
Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

The title of this memoir derives from the Native American custom of bending a tree’s growth in order to indicate a direction of safe passage.  The custom represents a reverent cooperation with nature through which a compassionate communication is accomplished: a message to other journeying souls as to how they might find a way to their flourishing.  The title is exquisitely apt for this memoir, which echoes the gesture of the arrow tree, testifying to a safe passage through the wilderness of COVID.  The author, a first-rate, published Victorian scholar, contracted COVID-19 in March 2020 upon her return from a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge, which was cut short as a result of the pandemic. 

Weliver has suffered from symptoms ever since: hers is the experience of living with long COVID.  The condition warrants her taking a leave from her university, and she returns to her childhood home of Interlochen, in northern Michigan.  Her living in and engaging with the natural world there encourages her to undertake meditations about that world and her place in it as she lives with her illness.  The writing—the foundational means of her healing—inclines her, crucially, to think with the stories of the Odawa (Ottawa) and the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Anishinaabek ("Original Man") of the region, which she researches as a means of deepening her understanding of her home, her origins, and the nature of her identity.  Her quest for understanding turns not only to these stories, but to an integration of them with the wisdom of other guides in her life: authors of the Romantic and Victorian periods, poets and thinkers of Taoism and other ancient Eastern philosophies, mentors in her rich journey of studying both literature and music (she attended Interlochen Center for the Arts, Oberlin, where she double-degreed in English Literature and Voice (Music), Cambridge, and the University of Sussex), and her own family, particularly her mother.  Her prose is accessible and welcoming, not at all the erudite sort one might anticipate from a reputable scholar: it invites curiosity and encourages insight that is, at times, breathtaking and joyous.  This “arrow tree” memoir points its readers in the direction of a safe passage to the home of our natural world, where, in finding union with that world, we may experience healing not only from COVID but from habits of the heart that have left us more broken than we know.

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Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Journal

Summary:

Nicolas Diat is a French journalist who, over the course of many months, traveled throughout France visiting a number of monasteries.  Because monks live their lives in many ways preparing for death, for eternity, Diat wondered if they had special insights about our final days on earth. "A Time To Die" contains a foreword by Robert Cardinal Sarah; comments by the author ("Extraordinary Stories); eight chapters, each the story of a particular monastery and particular monks; an epilogue; and closing remarks by the author.

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Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

There are 46 poems in this volume (the author's second full-length collection), divided into four sections.  The author's first book, "The Ninety-Third Name of God" , introduced us to her family and especially to her diagnosis--inflammatory breast cancer--the disease discovered in 2004 during her pregnancy, the disease that claimed that claimed her life in August, 2018, when she was forty-nine-years old.  This second collection continues Silver's illness narrative, poems that might serve as a journal of her journey through treatment, anger, despair, determination, and faith.

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Summary:

Michael Pollan, a journalist who is known for his work on food, takes on mind-altering drugs, or more specifically, psychedelics. According to Pollan, “after several decades of suppression and neglect, psychedelics are having a renaissance” (p. 3). His aim is to tell “the story of this renaissance” (p. 4). 

Pollan pegs the beginning of the renaissance to three events in 2006. The first was the symposium surrounding the one–hundredth birthday celebration of Albert Hoffman, who is credited with discovering LSD (he was in attendance and lived for another two years). The symposium put a spotlight on a few studies of psychedelics that inspired other researchers and practitioners to enter or stay in the field. The second event was a U.S. Supreme Court decision permitting importation of a banned psychedelic substance for religious purposes, which effectively reanimated federal government recognition of psychedelic drugs. The third event was the publication of a well-received study showing the psychological effects of certain psychedelic drugs, and in so doing, conferred some credibility and encouragement for further study (and use). Psychedelics were beginning to inch their way from counterculture to mainstream culture.

Before Pollan picks up on what happens after the eventful year of 2006, he goes back to the early 1950s when psychedelics first attracted attention as treatment for “addiction, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, autism, and end-of life anxiety” (p. 141). He quotes researcher Stephen Ross, who asserts that during this time, “there had been forty thousand research participants and more than a thousand clinical papers!…Some of the best minds in psychiatry had seriously studied these compounds in therapeutic models, with government funding” (pp. 142-143). The trajectory towards therapeutic uses would come to an end in the 1960s when “a moral panic about LSD engulfed America, and virtually all psychedelic research and therapy were either halted or driven underground” (p. 185). Pollan identifies several contributing factors to the precipitous reversal in the status of psychedelics. Among them were their associations with Timothy Leary (“Turn on, tune in, drop out”) and with counterculture movements that were seen as threats to mainstream society in general. The era ends in 1970 when psychedelics were made illegal in the U.S., after which they were largely forgotten. They began to reappear in the 1990s, which rekindled an interest in them that would reach an inflection point in 2006.

Bridging the mid-twentieth-century history Pollan provides and the era commencing in 2006 he describes in detail later, is a chapter reporting on his own experiences with psychedelics. Pollan arranged three separate “trips” with three individual psychedelics: psilocybin, LSD, and the little-known 5-MeO-DMT, or “The Toad.” He carefully chose a tour guide for each one. Pollan experienced what he interpreted as a dissolution of his ego, which made more room for his consciousness: “I was present to reality but as something other than my self” (p. 264). He also reported spiritual and mystical experiences, which surprised him because he is not religious in much of any way, and he found others who had similar experiences.  
Even the most secular among them come away from their journeys convinced there exists something that transcends a material understanding of reality: some sort of a ‘Beyond.’ (p. 85)  
The term “spiritual” for Pollan became “a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomena that arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced” (p. 288). 

In another chapter bridging the past and the present, Pollan covers the neuroscience of psychedelics and the current understanding of how the brain works. The chapter will appeal mostly to neuroscientists, pharmacologists, and clinicians. It’s not required to appreciate what the book offers on the whole. 

Pollan devotes a chapter to ongoing investigations into clinical uses for psychedelics in near death, addiction, and depression. These investigations had moved into mainstream biomedical research institutions. Results were encouraging enough to generate additional studies, expand treatment programs, and motivate the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to push researchers for more information on depression in particular. Pollan also reports that “dozens of medical schools have asked to participate in future trials, and funders have stepped forward to underwrite those trials” (p. 350). 
 

In the final chapter, Pollan recognizes that despite the momentum behind mainstream biomedicine interest in psychedelics, established clinical and regulatory frameworks pose daunting challenges for broad-based adoption anytime soon. That aside, Pollan argues for the use of psychedelics in situations that are not limited to health problems per se, but also for “the betterment of well people,” which was also an interest of early researchers. To Pollan, the betterment comes from the effect of psychedelics to expand consciousness. 
Most of the time, it is normal waking consciousness that best serves the interests of survival—and is not adaptive. But there are moments in the life of an individual or a community when the imaginative novelties proposed by altered states of consciousness introduce exactly the sort off variation that can send a life, or a culture, down a new path. (p. 407) 
His conclusion is that without the assistance of psychedelics, the vastness of the mind and the mysteries of the world can never be known. Psychedelics for everyone! 

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Summary:

Responding to a shortage of doctors in rural areas in 2013, Dr. Virji, a Muslim, moved from the urban East coast to a small town in Minnesota.  Welcomed at first, he and his family began, after Trump's election in 2016, to experience withdrawal, suspicion, and outright racism in his own and neighboring towns, despite having established solid, trusting relationships with patients.  His children were being ostracized in school.  Discouraged, he took steps to accept a job in Dubai, but changed his mind after a local pastor invited him to speak in her church to correct common misconceptions about Muslims and to engage his neighbors in deeper dialogue about their differences and commonalities.  The lecture was so successful, he took it further into other towns and parts of the country.  He has stayed in Minnesota and witnessed change because of this invitation and his candid, open-hearted response. 

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Marrow: A Love Story

Lesser, Elizabeth

Last Updated: Sep-25-2019
Annotated by:
Burke, Katherine

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Elizabeth (Liz) Lesser receives a call from her sister Maggie, telling her that she has had a relapse of lymphoma. Maggie’s best chance of survival is a bone marrow transplant; of the three other Lesser sisters, Liz is Maggie’s perfect match. In an effort to bolster the stem cells’ chance to be successfully grown, harvested, and transplanted, Maggie and Liz embark on a process to do a “soul marrow transplant;” with the help of a therapist and through many difficult conversations, the sisters resolve sibling rivalries, explore their family history, and forgive each other for old assumptions and judgments. Through the journey they learn to live with vulnerability and authenticity, and as the poet Rumi writes, meet each other in the field “beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.”  

Eventually, Maggie’s body begins to succumb to the cancer, and the entire family prepares for her inevitable death. Maggie, an artist who works with dried and pressed botanicals, strives to complete a formidable exhibition entitled “Gone to Seed,” an exploration of life and mortality. Liz seeks forgiveness and reconciliation with their other two sisters. Finally, Maggie and her family wrestle with the decision to end standard treatment, begin palliative care, and consider physician aid in dying.




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Annotated by:
Schilling, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

In Ladysitting, novelist and memoirist Lorene Carey writes candidly and reflectively about the year and a half she cared for her century-old, ferociously independent paternal grandmother. The experience became a critical moment for personal and familial discovery. Carey’s intensive caregiving began when Nana Jackson could not be discharged from the hospital to the house where, for decades, she had lived by herself. Growing up, Carey enjoyed enchanted weekends of indulgence in Nana’s sunlit suburban home in South Jersey, a respite from her family’s life in urban West Philadelphia. Partly in gratitude for those weekends, partly from a sense of duty, Carey made physical, emotional, and spiritual space for Nana in the home she shared with her husband, a minister, and their teenage daughter. Along with Carey’s own artistic, community, and professional commitments, she also maintained the property management business that her grandmother ran until her confinement. Carey’s decision to become Nana’s primary caregiver brought momentary satisfactions along with overwhelming frustrations.  

Carey’s narrative agilely transitions between present encounters with Nana Jackson and the past: her own past and her African- and Caribbean-American relations’. By doing so, Carey tries to make sense of the complicated woman in her care, herself, and relationships within her family. She discovered generations of mostly “free-people-of-color,” several financially and politically successful, whose ambitions confronted Reconstruction, the Jim Crow South, the migration north, and the “lynchings [that] made sure that every gain would be paid for in blood and money, if not by [her family], then by other black people, somewhere.” How might that history, Carey asks, help her understand her family’s generations of divorces (including her own), alcoholism, deceptions, estrangements, and the elusive efforts of one generation to build on the accomplishments of the others?   

It took Carey ten years to research and reflect on that question. And then to write, hoping “to clear away the rage, uncover the simple grief, stored in the muscles that seized up then and cannot remember how they were before, and to convince us both, Nana and myself, that she has left this plane. And to forgive.”  

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Annotated by:
Shafer, Audrey

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Sunita Puri, a palliative care attending physician, educates and illuminates the reader about how conversations about end of life goals can improve quality of life, not just quality of dying, in her memoir, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour. Thirteen chapters are grouped in three parts: Between Two Dark Skies, The Unlearning and Infinity in a Seashell. The arc of the book follows Puri as she is raised by her anesthesiologist mother and engineer father – both immigrants from India – Puri’s decision to enter medical school, her choice of internal medicine residency followed by a palliative care fellowship in northern California and her return to practice in southern California where her parents and brother live. Besides learning about the process of becoming a palliative care physician, the reader also learns of Puri’s family’s deep ties to spirituality and faith, the importance of family and extended family, and her family’s cultural practices.

Puri writes extensively about patients and their families, as well as her mentors and colleagues. She plans and rehearses the difficult conversations she will have with patients in the same way a proceduralist plans and prepares for an intervention. She provides extensive quotes from conversations and analyzes where conversations go awry and how she decides whether to proceed down a planned path or improvise based on the language and body language of her patients and their family members. We visit patients in clinic, in hospital, and at home, and at all stages of Puri’s training and initial practice. Some of the most charged conversations are with colleagues, who, for example, ask for a palliative care consultation but want to limit that conversation to a single focus, such as pain management. We also learn of the differences between palliative care and hospice, and the particularly fraught associations many have with the latter term. She feels insulted when patients or families vent by calling her names such as “Grim Reaper” or “human killer” (p. 232), but understands that such words mean that more education is needed to help people understand what a palliative care physician can do. 

As a mediator of extremely difficult conversations, where emotions such as shame, guilt, fear, helplessness and anger can swirl with love and gratitude, Puri finds the grace to acknowledge that all such emotions are part of the feelings of loss and impending grief, and to beautifully render her reflections on these intimacies: “Yet although I am seeing a patient because I have agreed that they are approaching death, if I do my job well, what I actually encounter is the full force of their lives.” (p. 206) Having met many dying people she notes: “Dying hasn’t bestowed upon them the meaning of life or turned them into embodiments of enlightenment; dying is simply a continuation of living this messy, temporary life, humanly and imperfectly.” (pp 221-2)
 

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