Reflections after responding to the Santa Fe shootings: As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk would have predicted, it broke through when I started dancing, if you can call the thing I was doing (something that increasingly began looking and feeling like some angry Elaine Benes gyration) dancing. “Dancing,” the thing I was doing, began the weekend … Continue reading Guns in My Area
“The Doctor Won’t See You Now…”
I checked my phone before going to bed last night and I saw I’d missed a group text from a colleague earlier in the evening. She told us she’d just heard how a favorite psychiatrist on our referral list had died by suicide, and rather dramatically at that. I was dumbstruck. I stared at the … Continue reading “The Doctor Won’t See You Now…”
On remembering not the reminder but what is to be remembered…
[Gen 9:8-17] You promised not to wipe out ALL flesh ever again, O God. You hung up your bow, your capacity to just start over in an instant. Now and then, you remind yourself of this promise with an all-inclusive arc of color in the sky. You hope this reminds us, too. But we are … Continue reading On remembering not the reminder but what is to be remembered…
Eulogy for a Syrophoenician Woman
[Given at First Reformed Church, Spring Lake, MI, January 12, 2018] Good morning. My name is Holly Teitsma. I am here with and representing my step-son Austin Teitsma, grandson to Dena, and my husband, Jack Teitsma, Dena’s son. Dena, therefore, was my mother-in-law. She was my first and only mother-in-law, even though I was not … Continue reading Eulogy for a Syrophoenician Woman
When in Need of Wisdom
In the movie Six Degrees of Separation, Stockard Channing’s character, Louise “Ouisa” Kittredge, the sophisticated spouse to Flan, a wealthy international art dealer played by Donald Sutherland, blithely narrates for him as he rotates a two-sided Kandinsky on a vertical axis: “Chaos…Control. Chaos…Control…” Around and around he shows the double canvas, one side painted wildly … Continue reading When in Need of Wisdom
Bread in the Desert, Part 1
I long for the desert. In the desert, the blessing of life, its humid breath, was easy to discern. In between the rocks that outlined the dusty trails, trails that were scratched anonymously into mountainsides, the ones you ambled for no reason other than because you felt you must, the ones that almost made you … Continue reading Bread in the Desert, Part 1