How To Build A Fire: Stories of Hope
As Narrative Medicine founder Rita Charon famously says, “the care of the sick unfolds in stories.” At the end of this tumultuous year, in the midst of a global pandemic, a pivotal election here in the US, natural disasters ranging from flooding to fires around the world, I start to think about the word “sick” and what that means on a larger social level. Are we emotionally, environmentally, culturally sick? What would wellness look like on a community level? On a global level? How can wellness unfold in stories, too? In this month’s narrative medicine round table, we turned to stories of hope to re-imagine what is possible in a world so very different than the one we expected.
Our workshop began with a close reading of Mary Oliver’s “A Poem For The Blue Heron,” which, like many of Oliver’s poems, explores a natural landscape, subtly inviting us to wonder what the outer world reveals about our inner, human world:
1
Now the blue heron
wades the cold ponds
of November.
In the gray light his hunched shoulders
are also gray.
He finds scant food — a few
numbed breathers under
a rind of mud.
When the water he walks in begins
turning to fire, clutching itself to itself
like dark flames, hardening,
he remembers.
Winter.
2
I do not remember who first said to me, if anyone did:
Not every thing is possible:
some things are impossible,
and took my hand, kindly,
and led me back
from wherever I was.
3
Toward evening
the heron lifts his long wings
leisurely and rows forward into flight. He
has made his decision: the south
is swirling with clouds, but somewhere,
fibrous with leaves and swamplands,
is a cave he can hide in
and live.
4
Now the woods are empty,
the ponds shine like blind eyes,
the wind is shouldering against
the black, wet
bones of the trees.
In a house down the road,
as though I had never seen these things–
leaves, the loose tons of water,
a bird with an eye like a full moon
deciding not to die, after all –
I sit out the long afternoons
drinking and talking;
I gather wood, kindling, paper; I make fire
after fire after fire.
In the first stanza , a blue heron “wades the cold ponds of November,” noticing the scarcity of food as water turns to ice. The speaker of the poem is conspicuously absent, neither watching nor interacting with the bird, divining the scene from a distance. As our group leaned into this stanza, examining its imagery and patterns, we noticed that something interesting was happening in the contrast between cold and fire: “When the water he walks in begins / turning to fire, clutching itself to itself / like dark flames, hardening.” Even in this bleak winter landscape where all is becoming ice, “fire” and “flames” are (at least metaphorically) present. How is this fire like or different from the fire we see in the last stanza, we wondered?
In the second stanza, the speaker finally appears to tell a story that seems, at first glance, like a detour: s/he remembers being led “kindly” back from unknown territory with the warning: “Not everything is possible; some things are impossible.” This scene was the most controversial for our group. Some of us read the lines pragmatically — after all, some things ARE impossible — and interpreted the gesture of leading the speaker “back from wherever [s/he] was” as a true kindness, a saving grace. Others read these lines tongue-in-cheek, interpreting the “kindly” gesture as well-meaning but essentially limiting: after all, who are you to tell me what is possible and impossible for my life?
The third stanza returns to the heron, now facing an important decision — to migrate or to stay. The tension between possibility and impossibility mounts. He “lifts his long wings / leisurely and rows forward / into flight.” We assume a decision has been made to fly south toward the “swamplands,” but the speaker uses an interesting word to describe the heron’s plan: “to hide,” and therefore, “to live.” If the heron’s choice to migrate suggests the freedom and courage to change, “hiding” seems like the last word we’d expect to take center stage. Again, the line between opposites fails to hold: there is fire in the ice, possibility in the impossible, hiding in the freedom to move. Oliver’s use of contrast is not as straightforward as we thought. The story thickens under our attention.
The fourth stanza toggles from the heron’s winter world, now without the heron, to the speaker’s own private world “in a house down the road,” drinking, talking, and making “fire / after fire after fire.” We return to our initial question: how does this fire compare with the fire from the first stanza, the “dark flames” of ice that propel the heron on his journey? One student, lucky enough to have close access to herons in the woods behind her home, remarks that they are not always such solitary creatures. Sometimes they gather in droves. We remember that the heron at the beginning is conspicuously alone — not even the speaker is present with him — while the speaker’s “talking and drinking” at the end likely happens with company. The fire in the last stanza is one you gather around, while the fire in the first is one that propels you to action.
Stories function in a similar way, we mused: inherently community-oriented (all stories presume a teller and a listener, even if only hypothetically) and catalysts for change (even if that change is just an idea, planted like a seed for future action). To put an exclamation point on our discovery, we noticed that the speaker uses “paper” to feed the fire. Could the poem itself be just such a place for connection and change?
Many other themes arose in our close reading, including acceptance, boundaries, and the cyclical nature of death and rebirth, trauma and healing. No matter how our opinions diverged on the details, we could all agree that, at the end of the poem, hope is a choice — sometimes a hard one. One student, paraphrasing Viktor Frankl, said it best, “Hope is not a child of happiness, but of despair.” Like fire in the ice, hope is born from suffering, propelling us toward each other simply by virtue of the suffering we share, the winter common to us all.
We finished our workshop by writing to the prompt: “What is possible?” I was astounded by the stories of hope, solidarity, even magic that resulted. Some students’ stories sounded like fairy tales, others like manifestos. All of them little fires, beckoning us closer to warm our hands. Through our writing, we found new meaning in that enigmatic line where the speaker “makes fire after fire after fire.” We realized that hope, like justice, is a fire you have to stoke over and over and over again.
For me, stories offer a kind of healing. They ask us to listen, to imagine the world from other perspectives, and to be moved — literally transported, sometimes changed, hopefully moved to action. They expose us, not just to each other, but to ourselves. In this one-hour workshop, we all got a fresh glimpse of what is possible right here, right now, as we lean into the changing season and “row forward into flight.”
If you participated in the workshop, please feel free to share your reflective writing in the comments below! (Remember this is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.) If you didn’t participate in the workshop, but you enjoyed “A Poem For The Blue Heron” and you’d like to reply to the writing prompt, we welcome your writing in the comments as well. Just set a timer for 5 minutes of free writing and post your exercise below without editing. We’d love to see where this poem took you!
If you enjoyed this class and you’re ready for more, please join us for a 9-week Narrative Medicine Program designed for healthcare professionals starting on Monday January 25th 2021. Unlike this live ZOOM call, our program takes place asynchronously, so you can complete assignments at your own pace with weekly “due dates” and discussion boards that keep our classroom collaborative and co-creative.
Each week, we’ll be studying one artwork with corresponding philosophy, discussion, and reflective writing activities that will refine your ability to listen and engage with stories in a clinical setting. Find out more on our website, and join our Facebook Group for an invitation to our next ZOOM workshop!
