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Spending this winter just outside Taos, New Mexico, I now understand why it’s called the Land of Enchantment. In my casita at an elevation of 8,000 feet, I am steeped in peace, stillness and unbelievable views. How lucky I am. This is my idea of paradise with time for hiking, online teaching, cross-country skiing, reading, writing (click here to read my latest essay published in Decor Maine magazine) and two-stepping!

In February I will head to Ucross, Wyoming where I’ve been invited to participate in an artists’ residency for the month to work on my next memoir. Then I’ll make my way to Vashon Island Artists’ Residency near Seattle, Washington for another month-long retreat. After attending the Centrum Artists’ Residency, I will come home to Maine in time for another gorgeous summer near the ocean.

Best of all, because my classes are all online, I get to continue the teaching I enjoy so much from wherever I am.

This month, I have two new offerings for bringing more creativity and fun to your writing…

Blank Page as Playground

Thursday, January 25th 6 – 7:30 PM EST

Continuing the fun and unbelievably effective format poet Sarah Carson and I have been teaching with our Little Frankensteins classes, we have decided to team up to offer a one-time 90-minute workshop for people who would like to see what all the fun is about.

Come experiment beyond the boundaries of poetry and prose, learn strategies to make play and discovery part of your writing practice.

The workshop will include time for in-class writing as well as exercises you can continue beyond the class.

Click here for more information and to register.

If you would like to spend more than one evening as part of this process of finding the unexpected while amping up the creativity of your writing, join our 5-week asynchronous workshop in February…

Little Frankensteins

February 5th – March 3rd

Asynchronous

You will receive the lessons and assignments in your inbox each week and participate in group discussion boards for support and feedback from award-winning poet Sarah Carson and me on your work.

Click here for more information and to register.  

And finally…

Sarah Carson and I are curating this wonderful new website. Each week OK FRANK will feature the work of a writer or poet who is bending the traditional rules of genre to produce exciting and inspiring short pieces of work. Along with the poem or prose of the week, will be a message from the creator about how the particular piece came about.

Visit OKFRANK.COM to see what it’s all about.

Subscribe to get a new and innovative short something in your inbox each week.

OKFRANK.COM is ad-free!

I am honored to share this essay by my friend Dr. Lenna Liu of Seattle, Washington from today’s edition of the South Seattle Emerald

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VOICES

OPINION | A Reflection on the Meeting of Martin Luther King Jr. and Thich Nhất Hạnh

JANUARY 15, 2024 EDITOR

by Lenna Liu

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The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s portrait hung in the entryway of Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic’s (OBCC) Central District location where I spent most of my 30-year pediatric career. Birthed during the Civil Rights era for Seattle’s Black community, this beloved clinic was where I had my education in Black history. It was here where we celebrated Juneteenth, singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” decades before Juneteenth became a federal holiday. It was here, where our motto has been “quality care with dignity,” that I practiced seeing the dignity inherent in every person, no matter their circumstances. It was here where I grew to understand how much of the “dis-ease” we see in medicine is the impact of social determinants of health, such as poverty, oppression, and trauma. It was here where I learned in real day-to-day tangible ways how the history of Black Americans has continued to play out as lingering inequities in housing, schooling, and even access to healthy foods, decades after our country has been trying to right these wrongs.

Seeing these struggles, I was always asking myself, “How can I possibly help families whose struggles and concerns feel beyond the scope of a clinic room and for which there are no treatments or medication?” As pediatricians, we are trained to be advocates, to work beyond the clinic walls to speak out for policies and legislation that support children and families. But advocacy and policy change take time, often a long time. I struggled with knowing what to do in the moment when I could see the sleepless worry and fatigue in a parent’s eyes right in front of me.

Sometimes answers come in the midst of our own deepest suffering. In the middle of my career, my marriage fell apart, and I found myself lost, unmoored, and deeply grieving the loss of my dreams for my children and myself. It was during this time that I had to learn the deep inner work of healing. I had been practicing yoga for exercise and relaxation, but during this time, yoga became something much more than exercise. As I moved through yoga poses, opening and stretching my body, tears would suddenly appear and begin to fall — a physical and emotional release I did not know my body needed. When I sat in the final minutes of meditation after an hour of mindfully moving my body with breath, I felt moments of calm and the sense of coming back to myself again.

I knew these skills of meditation and mindfulness were something I had been missing in my life. To learn how to slow down, to be with complicated emotions, to not abandon myself or ignore what my stressed body was telling me were all essential to my well-being. These practices also invited me to look more deeply at parts of myself that were hard to look at: my tendency to overdo and then hold it against others for not doing their part; feeling judgmental of others for qualities in myself that I was unwilling to see; learning to forgive others and myself. In addition, I grew to see the parallel between understanding myself and how I interacted with those around me. Learning to have more compassion for myself, I became even more compassionate to others. Learning to see and forgive myself for mistakes I made, I was more able to forgive others for theirs. Learning these practices changed my life — they changed my ability to navigate life and deepened all the relationships around me.

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I am inspired by another photo of Martin Luther King Jr. In this photo, he sits next to the great Buddhist teacher often called “the father of mindfulness,” Thich Nhất Hạnh, at their first meeting in Chicago, 1966. Despite their very different backgrounds — a Black Baptist minister leading the Civil Rights Movement and a Vietnamese Buddhist monk calling for peace during the Vietnam War — they recognized in each other a kindred spirit working toward justice. As a pediatrician working in a clinic birthed during the Civil Rights era, the image of these two visionary leaders working together inspired me in merging the inner work of mindfulness and compassion with the outer work of building community and social justice.

After years of my own healing, I resolved to find a way to bring mindfulness practices to support the well-being of families at my clinic. I knew that reducing the stress of parents would help their children. However, I also knew that most of my families lacked access to these practices. Yoga and mindfulness classes can be expensive, feel exclusive, and are indulgences for many. They should not be. During this time, several local parents of children with disabilities were also searching for something to help them cope with the stress and challenges of their days. They found a course on mindful self-compassion and were struck by how these self-compassion practices were one of the first things they had ever found to help, a balm for the isolation and lack of understanding they felt in other parts of their lives. In 2017, several OBCC and Seattle Children’s health care providers partnered with these parents in a grassroots effort to create a mindfulness and compassion program for parents that we brought to OBCC.

These parent facilitators, mostly Women of Color, were also community leaders and organizers, already deeply skilled in building community and holding space for listening and supporting others. In our sessions, we shared mindfulness practices with interested parents and caregivers. We gave space for participants to share how they were doing and for others to listen deeply with an open heart. Instead of facing their challenges alone and in isolation, we found a sense of common humanity in these sessions, a shared sense of facing life’s joys and hardships in community.

I learned so much from these parents and these practices, a very different kind of knowledge than I learned in medical school. These skills complemented the science of medicine with the art of living and grew my capacity to be a doctor who could be present — really show up for my families and see and hear them, to listen in a way that was being squeezed out of health care as we were rushed to see more patients in shorter periods of time. It allowed me to continue to prioritize “quality care with dignity” — bearing witness to another person, hearing their stories with an open heart, holding space for the complexities of their lives, showing reverence for what they endured. During these times when many are experiencing an absence of feeling seen or being heard, our presence for each other’s inherent dignity, this witnessing, is a profound gift of healing.

Our team accelerated our efforts at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, offering free weekly mindfulness drop-in sessions online. Then, after George Floyd’s murder, we recognized the importance of offering classes by Black parent facilitators for the Black community, while also offering classes (adapted by language and culture) led by Spanish-speaking and Somali parent facilitators for their respective communities. Unfortunately, our program was recently ended due to OBCC budgetary constraints; our team is saddened that we are no longer able to share this foundational practice of well-being with more parents and caregivers. But I also know the seeds of mindfulness we planted during these past seven years, and particularly during the pandemic, will root and grow when conditions are right and will continue to support those we reached and perhaps beyond.

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On this day of honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and nearly two years after the passing of Thich Nhất Hạnh, I write to share this story and to honor both men at a time when we urgently need their teachings and guidance.

As I think about them, their teachings about Beloved Community rise to the fore. The divisiveness that permeates our world right now masks our common humanity. As a pediatrician surrounded by newborns, children, and their parents, I was reminded daily that we share the same hopes and fears. The vulnerability we feel as we become parents is the shared reality of our lives. There is a deep fragility to our human condition, yet newborns, children, and each of us are also remarkably resilient and strong. To survive and feel safe, we often dichotomize and reduce life, or each other, to good or bad and safe or unsafe, but in reality, life is not that simple. Rather, life, and each of us, is exceptionally complex, many-layered, and we need to build our capacity to hold ever greater complexity and nuance.

How can we build this capacity to see the dignity and complexity in each other? I witnessed and experienced these small acts of collective healing in our mindfulness classes and know these are some of the ingredients needed for what is ahead. The meeting of these two great men can be a reminder to all of us of the necessity of inner healing and collective action, and that the two are not separate, but are essential pieces for ourselves, for our children, and for our world.

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The South Seattle Emerald is committed to holding space for a variety of viewpoints within our community, with the understanding that differing perspectives do not negate mutual respect amongst community members.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the contributors on this website do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the Emerald or official policies of the Emerald.

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Lenna Liu is an emerging writer and a retired University of Washington emeritus professor and pediatrician who cared for children and families at Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic for over 30 years.

📸 Featured Image: Left: Thich Nhất Hạnh in Paris, France, in 2006. Photo is attributed to Duc (pixiduc) (under a Creative Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED license). Right: Portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. by Betsy Graves Reyneau, part of the exhibition “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin.” (Photo courtesy of National Archives, photo no. 559202.)

Announcing Cross-Genre Writing Workshop: BLANK PAGE AS PLAYGROUND

Thursday, January 25th 6-7:30 PM in the Zoom Classroom

Poet Sarah Carson and I had so much fun teaching Little Frankensteins, our genre bending online series built to make writing poetry and prose an experiment in play, that we decided to offer BLANK PAGE TO PLAYGROUND, an evening seminar January 25th for people who want to let their inner Frankensteins loose to experiment beyond traditional boundaries. Participants will learn strategies to make first drafts into places for discovery and exploration. Presentation of hybrid forms and in-class writing exercises will be incorporated as well as tools you can take with you to make your writing more exciting and fresh. Click here for more information and to register. Tuition: $65

AND…

Registration Open Now for Next Online Series of Little Frankensteins starting February 5th:

If this idea of workshopping with experiments in language, bent genres, and creativity sounds like something you would enjoy for more than just one evening, click here to register for the asynchronous five-week version of Little Frankensteins starting February 5th.

In this version of the class, you will receive the lessons with examples of the different forms via email, do the writing each week and then share your work by participating in online discussion boards with feedback on your writing from the instructors and your peers. The link for this class starting February 5th is here.  Tuition: $297

 

I am pleased to share this work by memoir student Joy Krinsky. The essay was first published in the current issue of HerStry, an online platform empowering women through stories.

Joy writes:

This is my second essay published. I am grateful to HerStry for turning out to be a great home for these early writings. And to Catharine for continuing to support, encourage and nurture my work.

One of the personal benefits of having pieces published is that I find myself far more comfortable reading the work to acquaintances, family … and strangers! I have been fortunate to find a community of writers and readers at the Literary Salon in Brunswick Maine that allows me to share my work and appreciate the work of others. For that, too, I am grateful. 

Cheers, to a new year, to darkness and to light.

Darkest Night

On the darkest dark night of winter, one small light marks the start of the festival.

This darkest night is the longest night, too. In winter, in Maine, daylight can last maybe eight hours—if you’re lucky. And as the moon of the month of Kislev wanes from quarter, to sliver, to new, the Chanukah festival begins.

The first night is marked by blessings and the lighting of the first candle. The first blessing on this and every night of Chanukah praises God, or Adonai, or Creator, or the Spirit, who makes us holy by commanding or obligating us to kindle this light of Chanukah. The second blessing goes on to praise the one who performed miracles for our ancestors in their days at this season.

And on the first night, like on first nights of other festivals, an added blessing is offered, the Shechecheyanu, which praises God for granting life, sustaining us, and enabling us to reach this moment.

The addition of one light each night—one candle, one ner—the darkest nights are made brighter. Indeed, the light increases. A symbol and ritual of hope.

There is something physical about the experience of lighting Chanukah candles. By necessity, the family stands close to each other, so that each of us may reach and light their shamash “helper” candle first and, following the blessings, light the night’s candles in each of our respective menorahs. This is one time, more than any time or place throughout the year, when donning my identity of Jewish Mama, I make sure everyone’s head is covered with a kippah.

There is a basket in a small cabinet in the living room where we store kippot. Sometimes the collection grows large, overflowing, unruly, and then I will sort and sift to make a reasonable assortment again. Some are interesting, others meaningful, many beautiful, or gifts, remembrances of a family wedding, or a bar or bat mitzvah.

I have always particularly favored our Bukharian kippot. The Bukharian Jews of central Asia, now heavily transplanted to Queens, NY, create a distinctive style of kippah that is immediately identifiable in shape and design with ornate embroidered decorations. There was a time when the four of us each had our own Bukharian kippah. The kids outgrew theirs. But for many years, David’s Bukharian kippah was his favorite, his “go-to.”

In the later years, his taste and choice of kippah grew simpler. But not just simpler, really the simplest. The most minimal. The kind that fills and has filled the bins in synagogues for generations. Black. Single layer. A mere wisp of weightless cloth to cover one’s head.

I sometimes wonder if that was a portent of his leaving us, leaving our family, our family tradition, the one where he must have so often felt the outsider.

At Chanukah, he would alternate, along with the kids, between earnest participation, sarcastic eye rolling, borderline pyromania, and worst of all—just there to appease and please me.

I don’t know why “just to please Mama” should be the least valued. I suppose we want to pass along our traditions, and “success” is measured by the next generation fully embracing and practicing as we do. But perhaps “success” really is the act of doing things in order to please; whether it be your mother, father, sibling, or someone else.

On the other side of the French doors to the dining room, the food, the gifts, the singing, the spinning dreidel game, everything else awaits.

We are close, we are four close together. Each holding one lit candle, over the small table by the window. Lined with aluminum foil, always aluminum foil. Each shamash in hand flickering, struggling. In each flame, there is the potential for great light, as well as devastating destruction.

That closeness, nearness, proximity. A fleeting brush on the back or more deliberate hand on a child’s head or shoulder. Our voices, Baruch atah Adonai. We watch the light, as the ancient Rabbis instructed. We neither read by it, nor create other light. But simply gaze, look at, and observe. We bask in that glow. When the intimacy of the lighting of the chanukiahs and the brightening of the darkness is complete, we are enveloped by the quiet of the room around us. The quieting of the surrounding world.

*

When four became three, when David’s life ceased, with no preparation, abruptly severed from us and our number reduced, a darkness filled the space where a person once stood. The darkness now increased, instead of the light. The absence, David’s absence, was a painful reminder. And not only a mental reminder, but a physical, muscle, deep in my gut memory. Like a phantom limb.

The pain and sadness and emptiness and growing darkness of the first night on that first Chanukah was stronger and more penetrating than I had anticipated. If a passerby had glanced in the window that night the looks on our candle-lit faces would have been of shock, confusion, and fear.

So for our grieving family, to endure this ritual for seven more nights was too much to bear. We did not observe the other nights of Chanukah that first year.

As one year, two years, three years have come to pass, we have once again joined together, three where there once were four. Our rituals remain, we choose kippot from the basket, the meal and gifts and songs await in the next room. We stand close together and light and bless and gaze. My hand gently grazes the backs of my now adult children. And what of that dark space? I struggle with whether the space is empty or full. But of one thing I am certain; the dark space remains, and we hold this space as it holds us.

-Joy E. Krinsky

In July the editors at Decor Maine Magazine asked me to write a piece for their Kitchen Issue. What I sent them appeared in this month’s print issue. You can also read it here below. I hope you enjoy it.

The most practical place our family ever lived was a modest two-floor, two-bedroom apartment where the first floor was mostly kitchen. Stove, cabinets, and fridge dominated one wall, and an island in the middle stretched half the length of the apartment with a sink and enough counter space for this mother to cook for her family of five.

When I stood at the island, rear end inches from the stove, hands busy sudsing dishes or rinsing out the juicer, a glance to my right allowed me to assess danger levels as my three boys (ages two to eight) sparred and tumbled in their ninja suits in front of the picture window that, along with a chair and love- seat, defined the living room. At the other end of the island, a small table stood in front of the back door. Both areas doubled as entryways, but the kitchen was the main event, command central.

In those days, a command center was essential. Food had become our biggest hope for getting our middle son well. After two six-week inpatient stays for chemotherapy and a third for the bone marrow transplant, Chan was looking almost as well, and certainly as happy, as any six-year-old kid could be, (if you ignored the steroid-chubby cheeks and shadows under his eyes).

Freed from hospital constraints, he could at last run and tussle with his brothers, the only visible evidence of his cancer a white tube emerging from a small hole above his heart, looped and carefully affixed with a strong metal clip to his red Manchester United shirt. This arrangement kept it from getting pulled out during all the rough and tumble play.

After surrendering completely to a western medical approach eight months previous, we were now left with food as the only aspect of his treatment that felt under our control.

AML M6 is a form of leukemia so rare, the doctors in Thailand who diagnosed it couldn’t give us odds on his recovery. They could only tell us it was serious and that we would need to leave immediately from our home beside the Mekong River to seek treatment in the US.

Days after diagnosis, we flew across the Pacific to begin a life orbiting around Seattle Children’s Hospital. On nights I stayed with Chan (hospital rules: only one adult each night—a sudden end to the family bed we had always shared), my husband read all he could find about the best diets for cancer. From among so much conflicting advice, he decided steamed broccoli and vegetable juices were the winners and showed me which pressure cooker and Champion Juicer to purchase.

Command central was where we kept the pill organizers. After the transplant, Chan required 36 pills per day. At age six, he was an expert at not only watching the blood drawn from the vein in the crook of his elbow while keeping up a lively conversation with whichever new phlebotomist was working, but also at swallowing pills. Cheerfully drinking bitter juices became yet another of his superpowers.

It all seemed to be working. The play, the laughter, the broccoli, the love. Chan was strong and healthy. The doctors were impressed.

Then one day as I was chopping more carrots and celery for juicing, the phone rang.

“Hello, this is Crystal.” Our contact nurse from the Hutchinson Center. “I have some news for you.”

“Yes?” I waited, not knowing whether to hope or worry in that tiny space of time before her next sentence. I heard a delay, long enough for an inhale.

“Chan’s last draw revealed a high concentration of blast cells.”

I felt the familiar impatience and discouragement from not knowing how to interpret these medical facts forever being reported to me. WBC, RBC, platelets, blasts. Preoccupied at home with trying to keep a toddler, a deadly illness, and the rising fear in my heart all under control, keeping up on numerical blood count ranges was beyond my mental, emotional, and energetic capacity. “What does that mean?” I am ashamed to recall that I didn’t try to mask my irritation.

Another pause. Longer this time. “It means the cancer is back. It means you and your husband need to come in to meet with the doctors.”

It meant, we found out the next day, there was nothing more they could do for Chan. He had, they said when pressed, no more than a few months to live.

The best they could offer was to “make the rest of his life comfortable.” This, we found out, again by pressing them for specififics, translated to transfusions and morphine and death in their good, clean hospital for my sweet, strong boy.

That night, my husband convinced me this was not a good plan. The next day, we obtained the doctors’ blessings to return to Thailand, where we would fight for Chan’s life with meditation, vitamins, love, family and food.

***

A week later, we were back in our home on the banks of the Mekong River. There, in the local style, our kitchen consisted of no more than a pair of burners connected to a propane tank, small refrigerator, slab of tree trunk and massive cleaver, bamboo steamer for cooking sticky rice, and cabinet for dishes. Outside the back door stood a sink that drained out onto the cement floor and across to the gutter that ran the perimeter of the yard. The kitchen was minimal because people there rarely kept food stored at home. Instead, food was purchased fresh from the morning market at the center of the village each day.

The market opened at 2 a.m. Our neighbors on each side rose soon after midnight to prepare their carts and wares. Every afternoon, the grandfather on one side of us sat beside a small fire in the outdoor kitchen, puffing on a fat homemade cigar and slowly turning a pig’s head over the smoke, while the grandmother ground pork and stirred meat and spices in a huge wok over the stove. In the dark of early morning, they snipped apart the sausage links strewn from the rafters and carried them up the dark street.

The young couple and mother-in-law on the other side of us rose at 2 a.m. to load and roll their metal cart up the lane, leaning together to push it up the hill, huge woks clanking against the propane tank required to boil the oil to fry and puff the hundreds of triangles of rolled-out dough into hot greasy mouthfuls of chewy air for customers.

Our first morning back home, after hearing the neighbors leave, I dozed under the mosquito net until the boys stirred beside me a little before sunrise. Waking quickly, they began their morning routine of cuddles and laughter and urging me and daddy out of bed.

“Let’s go, Mamma! I want pa tong ko!” The doughnuts.

“I want num dtao hoo!” Homemade and heavily sweetened soy milk.

“I want sang kaya!” Coconut cream jellies steamed in banana leaves.

So many foods they loved and had missed for nearly a year, the knew now waited only blocks away. At the market we walked together along muddy dirt paths where women presided over stalls illuminated by strands of naked light bulbs. Thick, dark squares of pumpkin bars glistened with a sheen of coconut cream. Heaps of ruby red mangosteen bristled dark spines like strange sea creatures. Pyramids of banana leaf packets steamed out aromas of wild mushrooms, Mekong fish and kafir lime leaves. Servings of stew rich with gamey meat, dark leaves, and orange jungle roots sloshed awkward against the constraints of rubber bands expertly twisted around the simple plastic bags that held them.

It seemed everyone we met beamed at us, shouting bright greetings after our absence. Nine months is a long time to be away after years of regular visits to their stalls. The vendors smiled at all of us, but especially at Chan. I must have looked like a ghost then, 20 pounds lighter than when we’d left, lips cracked from forgetting to drink water. It was as if the strength that went into Chan’s body came out of mine. I know by the way they beamed at him and then glanced at me, they saw it too.

Women grabbed Chan’s shoulders, holding him at arm’s length and squeezing tight. “Kengleng dee, nah?” So strong, you are, yes? Their unapologetic touch, bold words, so much encouragement, kindness felt like islands of rest I clung to in a rushing river of worry. They say he looks good. Maybe he’s going to be OK.

And whatever we bought, whether it was a half kilo of peanuts scooped out of a hot wok, a dozen skewers of pork sizzling over hot coals, or a bag of doughnuts snatched from boiling oil, every vendor added something extra as they handed us our purchases, gifts of nourishment, gifts that seemed to say, We are so happy for you. Keep going. Don’t give up. Eat. Be well. ▪