Mending 6: connection
Welcome to mending, a monthly haven where words meet inner wisdom, and stories intertwine with the art of health and healing.
At the heart of Narrative Medicine is a belief in the power of the human story. Words, among other human expressions, have the ability to enlighten and connect us to our most vulnerable or even seemingly insignificant moments in life.
These moments speak volumes to the richness of our humanity. And in sharing your words you support the production of neurochemicals like dopamine and oxytocin that activate your body’s healing potential and your brain’s capacities to overcome challenges in ways that cannot be understated.
Light
Dark
Your expression is where we find the intersection of Narrative Medicine and Functional Nutrition: in the recognition that everything is connected, we are all unique, and all things matter.
Each monthly issue of mending is a journey into a landscape of words, healing, and personal interpretation. They will be inspired by the gentle wisdom of poets and artists and the reflective insights of our guest contributors.
Why does this matter? Because in the riddle of healthcare, amidst the supposed precision of diagnoses and treatments, the human story often whispers, seeking to be heard. mending leans in and listens to these whispers. It invites you to do the same for yourself.
It’s time to explore the depths of your own narrative and the fabric of your human condition, beyond your signs and symptoms, or maybe in concert with them. Join me as we weave together threads of empathy, inquiry, and understanding. mending is more than a newsletter— it’s a dialogue, and initiation, and a celebration of the stories that make us human, illuminating their integral role in our paths toward healing.
Mending 6: connection
Naïve
by Tim Seibles
I love you but I don’t know you
—Mennonite Woman
When I was seven, I walked home
with Dereck DeLarge, my arm
slung over his skinny shoulders,
after-school sun buffing our lunch boxes.
So easy, that gesture, so light—
the kind of love that lands like a leaf.
It was 1963.
We were two black boys
whose snaggle-toothed grins
held a thousand giggles.
Remember? Remember
wanting to play
every minute, as if that
was why we were born?
Those hands that bring us
shouting into this life
must open like a fanfare
of big band horns.
Though this world is nothing
like where we’d been,
we come anyway, astonished
as if to Mardi Gras in full swing.
There must be a time
when a child’s heart builds
a chocolate sunflower
while katydids burnish the day
with their busy wings.
This itching fury that
holds me now—this knowing
the early welcome
that once lived inside me
was somehow sent away:
how I talk myself back
into all the regular disguises
but still walk these streets
believing in the weather
of the unruined heart.
My friends, with crow’s feet
edging their eyes,
keep looking for a kinder
city, though they don’t
want to seem naïve.
When was the last time
you wrapped your arm
around someone’s shoulder
and walked him home?
Question: After reading the poem, what comes to mind as you reflect back on the poem’s title, Naïve?
Contributor Answer: I want to first say that I couldn’t love this poem more. I’ve read it aloud several times now and it sings in me, offering this image of innocence and youth and easiness, something so inherently right that is lost with time and knowledge. It strikes me that often we use the word “naïve” in a negative way. Naïve as silly or immature or short-sighted. But in this poem “naïve,” which is both the title and in the line about the speaker’s friends, who wish for a “kinder city” but “don’t want to seem naïve,” is less a negative state than perhaps an ideal state. The boys who walk home are naïve, perhaps, because they aren’t yet aware of or confronting the many challenges that will come to their easy affection: racism—direct and institutional—and perhaps a kind of masculinity that will make it harder for them to connect in this way, a life that requires “regular disguises” and brings with it “itching fury.” But I think the speaker reveals a longing for that naivete that isn’t just a longing for a lost innocence, but also a calling back for a way that we could or should live. My favorite lines in the poem are, “believing in the weather of the unruined heart.” I think the poem is asking if we could actually have a world where our hearts are unruined and our naivete not something to be lost.
Reader: What lines in the poem resonate with you most when you read this poem? Why?
Writing Prompt: Write about an arm over the shoulder.
Contributor Response: I am thinking about the times that my husband and I may be walking down the street and he’ll reach over to put his arm over my shoulder, and how easily my arm will reach out to circle his waist. After more than 20 years together, the movement is easy, our affection is easy. But we never stay arm in arm like this for long. His arm is heavy, his shoulder sensitive, and we drop back into our own strides again. More natural for us is for me to loop my hand into his arm, or to hold hands. Holding hands the affection we turn to most often. And holding hands makes me think of so many people. Of watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a theater with my friend Laurie, who responds to movies in such visceral ways, and would just grab my hand in the thrilling parts, so unexpected and off the cuff. How I might reach to squeeze a hand when someone is suffering. How at the end of his life, my father wanted his hand held, and after not having held his hand for more than 30 years, I sat with him while he focused on the tv, focused on his own breathing, and held his hand. And my brother held his hand. And my father’s wife held his hand. How we come back to affection, how we know to give affection, how Ram Daas says we are all just walking each other home and sometimes that means an arm over the shoulder and sometimes that means sitting quietly at someone’s side and sometimes that means a hand held until the palms are moist and then even longer.
“Reader: Now it’s your turn! Write to the prompt: write about an arm over the shoulder”
Reader: Reader: Now it’s your turn! Feel free to hit ‘reply’, set your timer for 5 minutes, and write to the prompt: write about an arm over the shoulder.
You can also send your responses and feedback to scribe@andreanakayama.com
Guest contributor: Vivé Griffith is an Austin-based writer and educator whose work focuses on using writing in community to expand opportunities for intellectual and creative connection. She serves as Special Projects Advisor to the Clemente Course in the Humanities, supporting engaged teaching in classrooms across the country, and is a faculty member at Austin Community College. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Oxford American, The Sun, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. A former Public Voices Fellow at the OpEd Project, she earned a certificate in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University in 2024 and is building a series of workshops geared toward supporting patients and caregivers, You can learn more on her website, https://www.vivegriffith.com, subscribe to This Week in the Poetry Box for a peek into what’s in her curbside poetry box, or subscribe to her Substack, A Hill in Austin: Notes from a Street in an American Boomtown, for her reflections on living in a changing city.
