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Episode 53: The Gathering Room: Why and How to Hope With Dr Jill Bolte Taylor

About this episode

In this very special, hour-long Gathering Room, Martha talks to her friend and hero Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor about a subject we all need to hear more about: HOPE. Jill talks about hope in microcosm (the neural networks of the brain), while Martha looks at how the exact same systems and processes function at the macro level of groups of people and ecosystems. (Originally aired: August 22, 2021)

Show Notes

Episode Links

View on YouTube for closed captions.

Credits

“Illuminate” by Punch Deck | https://soundcloud.com/punch-deck

Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

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September 6, 2021
AT 6:00 PM

Catherine Adams

I had to share this poem that literally just arrived in my inbox:

Monet Refuses the Operation
–by Lisel Mueller

Image of the WeekDoctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

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December 16, 2021
AT 8:39 AM

Sylvia

What day and time is the live Gathering Room/? I have only been able to catch replays of it. My social media notifications don’t seem to be notifying me when the Gathering Room starts. I would love to sit in on the session live if possible.

Thank you so much!

Sylvia

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