TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

There’s a quote by bell hooks that I come back to when I’m going through a tough time. In her book All About Love: New Visions, she wrote, "Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion."

I think we find this thought especially challenging as Americans. So much of the ideal of the American spirit is about independence and self-reliance. It’s a harmful myth that we are supposed to be able to do most things on our own: that idea that you can “bootstrap” your way to security or success or happiness.

So often we only ask for help if we try to do something alone and fail. We might only reach out to others as a last resort, because we don’t want to be a burden or to appear incapable. But what if the expectation of community was such that we didn’t feel like we had to go it alone? What a relief that would be.

Togetherness is good for us. It's healthy for our bodies and our minds.

The pandemic certainly showed us what it feels like to be isolated from one another, and research has shown the mental health risks of isolation. If the last few years have shown us anything, it’s that what we have is each other.

There are real benefits of feeling part of something bigger, whether via family, or church, or neighborhood. I know that when I’m stressed or sick or sad, what makes me feel better is the people I love. Feeling their presence, or even their support from afar, gives me strength and comfort. It’s as if they’re helping me carry something heavy; they make the burden feel a little lighter.

What if we let go of this idea of strength alone and embraced interdependence — strength together? What if we saw turning to community not as a sign of weakness, but as a sign of wealth — an acknowledgement that we are so rich with support, so rich with friendship. And beyond that, I think of community as being broader than just people. Isn’t place part of community? The creatures, the landscape, the trees and plants. When I feel grounded in a place, I have a sense of being held. You can see love everywhere if you look closely enough.

As hooks wrote, healing happens in community, and I feel that spirit in today’s poem.

Pathway
by Paula Bohince

I wiped my mouth clean and went, deranged,
into daylight, mincing (careful walk of the oft-falling)
to the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola
where a duck swam singly as if transformed into a crystal
of exquisite peace, in a cloudless basin.
Never mind the motorcycles’ keen or idling exhaust,
the teenaged beauty’s boyfriend taking, again
and again, her photograph against a red and ivory backdrop.
Feather or flesh, any veined thing
was absorbing the same sunbeam. I felt a neuron
pulse, a pathway changing course. Rain roads
and roads made by people, transient road the duck
made of her stylized blue, converging.
Our sensitivities, our natures, together just once. Healing,
the literature says, is relational. As the wound was.

“Pathway” by Paula Bohince from A VIOLENCE © 2025 Paula Bohince. Used by permission of Princeton University Press.