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I am on a pre-Easter retreat –Thursday to Sunday – at the Trappist monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts, so I’m posting this essay from October 2015 because it does a decent job of capturing the experience as well as my mindset a decade ago. I’ve exhausted whole decades of my career running from project to project, meeting to meeting, event to event, commitment to commitment. Running, so I wouldn’t be late. Now, as I celebrate a birthday whose number is as revolting as Voldemort, I am still running: two bed-and-breakfasts . . . two books published in the past year and five more in various stages of development . . . a weekly blog posting . . . a weekly column in an online magazine . . . three corporate clients on two coasts. I am running to do it all—before the time comes for me to go. I hope to catch up with myself during these days of silence.. Thomas J. Watson, Sr., transformed the tiny Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company into what was once the world’s most revered corporation—IBM. His slogan, which was the centerpiece of all the company’s endeavors, from research to sales to service, was the simple, single word: THINK. I spent almost twenty years at IBM with the ubiquitous THINK slogan font of mind. Tom Watson isn’t the only business superstar who paid obeisance to the worth of formalized thinking. Here’s what Warren Buffett—arguably history’s most successful equities investor—has to say: "I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business." I wish he had shared that thought with me a long time ago. To quote Thomas Merton, that most famous Trappist monk: “What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?” In my novella, Billy of the Tulips, a teenaged boy, tormented by a brutish father, finds peace in “an inner room, in his mind and in his heart, where he hid his thoughts and where he kept his affections. This room was always with him, wherever he was, and it was always a secret place, where only God entered.” During the coming week, I will try to cross that abyss and find my inner room.

A five-legged, faceless, spider-like alien, Rocky became a pop-culture icon within days of his Hollywood introduction to America – a sidekick some movie viewers say they'd “take a bullet for.” As someone who saw the flick yesterday, I say, “Just shoot me.” Rocky (pictured above) stars in the new sci-fi flick, “Project Hail Mary,” the highest-grossing movie opening of 2026, with a worldwide take already totaling $157.3 million during its first week. Have we lost all sense? No. it’s not us to blame for our headlong rush toward escapism. It’s the non-stop stress, anxiety, and emotional trauma afflicting us wherever we turn. Our screens are tending toward wall-to-wall video reports of combatants “blowing stuff up.” No mention of the concern that the “stuff” being blown up includes human beings – most of them innocent civilians just like us, who want no part of what’s going on. Then there’s the price of gasoline, and the price groceries, and the price of . . . . During World War II, audiences flocked to movies that helped them forget – at least for a few hours – their ration books, air-raid drills, and casualty counts. If you didn’t know: Bambi was born in 1942, the height of the war. One way to soften our despair is to engage in doing things that give us a sense of accomplishment and completion, writes poet James Crews. “At a time of chaos and uncertainty, what is most medicinal may be for us to control the flow of our attention. When we are talking with a good friend on the phone, raking the yard, or watching a bird cross from tree branch to feeder, we give ourselves the gift of inner space and the kind of deep stillness that seems extinct these days.” Inconsequential, perhaps, but essential. Because according to poet Mary Oliver, paying attention is akin to devotion – a kind of praying. She writes: I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Lucille Clifton was another poet who summoned us to persist in the face of our personal challenges – in her case, being black, female, and poor. In what is perhaps her most famous poem, she pictures our current dilemma as being stuck between the starshine of noble aspirations and the clay of corrupt governance that stomps our craved nobility into the ground. She writes: . . . i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. She defined her life as a daily call to survive against a world out to erase her. She answered by insisting on simply being. On persisting.

They say we die twice: once when we stop breathing, and again when our name is spoken for the last time. Today, on the anniversary of my wife’s birth, her friends, family, and I will speak her name yet again. Jo Anne. My daughter, Julie, captured this idea in a birthday reflection she wrote after Jo Anne’s death in December 2015: A year ago, Mom called to wish me a Happy Birthday, as usual. And she started telling me the story of the day I was born: how she was at Woolworth’s on a beautiful spring-like day (like today), buying buttons for a sweater she had just finished knitting, and felt a little something like she’d need to go to the hospital soon. She waited for Dad to come home from work, and made all the arrangements for someone to watch Wendy while Dad took her to the hospital. And just a little while later, there I was. And I started to tease her, telling the story along with her, because she’d told me the same story every year, on my birthday. Then she told me why she kept telling the story: because when Grandpa had died (many years after Nana), she felt that no one in the world was left to remember the day she was born. In our high-speed culture, grief is too often treated as a disorder to be rid of. We’re expected to “get over it” and return to normal productivity within days. This is where the wisdom of the yahrzeit can apply – for everyone, regardless of faith. Observing a deceased beloved’s annual date of death was first practiced in the Middle Ages. It melds three aspects: 1. Ascent. Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, holds that on the anniversary of a death, the soul reaches a higher level of spiritual elevation. Actions of the living – praying, doing something charitable in the deceased’s name, lighting a candle – fuel this ascent. 2. Prayer. In reciting the Kaddish prayer – which praises life and the Divine in the face of loss – the mourner testifies that their loved one’s death has not led to despair, but to continued faith. 3. Light. Burning a twenty-four-hour Yahrzeit candle comes from the Book of Proverbs: "The soul of man is the candle of God." In my nuclear family, we put more significance on the day of birth over the date of death. But our observances are amazingly similar to the Jewish yahrzeit. 1. Ascent. We pray for the deceased, offer a charitable donation in their name, that they find rest with the Divine. 2. Prayer. Just as the Kaddish is a public sanctification, we sanctify the memory of the deceased through the celebration of the Eucharist. On November 2 each year, Catholic churches offer Mass in remembrance of all our departed. 3. Light. We light a votive candle before a statue or icon. Like the yahrzeit candle, it doesn't just represent the soul that left – it also lights the path for those of us who remain behind. It is our way of saying: “You are still making our world brighter.” Among us Ukrainians, we seldom use the word dying. Rather, we say someone has fallen asleep in the Lord. This phrase was used by Christ and his early followers as a direct reflection of belief in resurrection. This concept must have rung true to Jo Anne because among her last words were: “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

You might find this hard to believe, but I just got around to watching the 1990 classic movie, “Misery.” I have news for you. It’s not all that far from reality. The plot: Best-selling novelist Paul Sheldon is on his way home from his Colorado hideaway after completing his latest book when he crashes his car during a sudden blizzard. He’s critically injured, but is rescued by former nurse Annie Wilkes, Paul's "number one fan," who takes him to her remote house in the mountains to care for him until the blizzard clears (without bothering to tell anybody). Unfortunately for Paul, Annie is also insane. When she discovers that Paul has killed off the heroine in her favorite novels, her reaction leaves Paul shattered (literally). Among the macho screen idols who declined the role of Paul Sheldon before it was offered to James Caan: Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, Morgan Freeman, Mel Gibson, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, William Hurt (twice), Kevin Kline, Al Pacino, Robert Redford, Denzel Washington, and Bruce Willis. The buzz is that these A-list actors refused the role because it cast them in a passive, subservient role, spending most of the movie abed, being tortured by Nurse Wilkes. A pivotal scene in the movie comes when Kathy Bates, who won the best actress Oscar for her portrayal, forces Paul Sheldon – under threat of death – to burn the only manuscript of his just-completed new novel because the dialogue is too coarse for her Christian sensibilities. As you can imagine, the writer is anguished to see his irreplaceable pages go up in a ferocious blaze. But it’s only a movie, you say. Awful things like this could never happen in real life. Ah, but they do. I’ll tell you about two. The first involves the late Lucille Clifton, who was poet laureate of Maryland. Clifton’s mother was a woman gifted with a poetic bent. She wrote poems despite a home life dominated by the demands of a harsh husband, who saw her writing as a threat to her wifely duties. He eventually forced her to burn her manuscripts, silencing her creative voice and turning her art into ash. Lucille Clifton often spoke of this moment as a trauma that shaped her own work as a poet. She wrote, she said, in honor of her mother’s forced poetic silence. Clifton’s entire body of work can be seen as a response. "I write to keep my mother from being forgotten,” she said. Here is Lucille Clifton’s "fury," from her 1987 collection, Next. fury for mama remember this. she is standing by the furnace. the coals glisten like rubies. her hand is crying. her hand is clutching a sheaf of papers. poems. she gives them up. they burn jewels into jewels. her eyes are animals. each hank of her hair is a serpent's obedient wife. she will never recover. remember. there is nothing you will not bear for this woman's sake. The second demonstration of man’s inhumanity to woman was told to me by one of the patients in my poetry class at New York City’s Hope Lodge, operated by the American Cancer Society. She was a middle-aged Puerto Rican woman who had been writing poems for years in a notebook she prized. During an argument, she said, her husband wrested the notebook from her and burned it. It’s always a man threatened by a woman’s creativity or independence who strikes at the most vulnerable and irretrievable fruit of a woman of soul. This situation is reversed in “Misery,” with the woman ordering the destruction of the man’s creative product. But there’s a happy Hollywood ending to the movie. It’s the woman who lies on the floor open-eyed dead. The man goes on. What did you expect?

I never referred to my wife as my best friend. I thought it was an odd phrasing to apply to a spouse. “Friends” were Vic and Chuck and Bill. My wife was, well—my wife. An intimate connection far beyond friendship. Now, long after her death, I understand that perhaps our marriage endured precisely because she was my best friend. I’ve come to see that friendship is like holding a bird in your hand. Squeeze too tightly and you will smother it. Pay it too little heed and it will fly away. Writer Simone de Beauvoir asked women: Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen. My wife was nineteen when we met, both of us students at Fordham. And, for better or worse, she found herself involved with me for life. All this was on my mind when I attended a day-long seminar titled, “Pursuing Relationships that Enlighten our Lives.” The presenter was Sophfronia Scott, a novelist, essayist, and contemplative thinker. The first thing she did was introduce us to the concept of anam cara . This is a Celtic description of a “soul friend,” defined as someone who tells you something about yourself that changes you. Vic Dougherty was the first person outside my family circle who did this for me. When I became an altar server at about the age of nine, I was paired with Vic, three years older than I and a “veteran” altar server who would teach me the ins and outs of hand bells, thuribles, and the proper hierarchical order of processions. But he did more than mentor me in the ways of sacristies and sanctuaries. Vic shaped my early years by teaching me things about myself: • My company is enjoyable • I am likeable • I am trustworthy He’s been my friend through my entire life, no matter where job, wife, or geography took us. But. There’s always a “but,” isn’t there? I never told all this to Vic. This blunder on my part came crashing down on me as Ms. Scott unveiled her primary principle in nurturing relationships. It is a plain-spoken directive articulated so memorably in Arther Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman: “Attention must be paid.” The mother in that famous play was speaking to her indifferent sons about the way they needed to treat their father. At the seminar, however, many of the other participants at the seminar described relationships with “best friends” that began in youth and endured for decades – just like my friendship with Vic. And to a person, they each answered “no” to Sophfronia’s question, “Did you tell them?” Her other questions were equally probing: • Where am I inattentive in a relationship? • What would disciplined attention look like? • Do I reach out to my friends to listen to them? All this is a far cry from the Bud Light “ I Love You, Man ” campaign during the mid-to-late 1990s. The commercials centered on a guy named Johnny who would go to overly emotional lengths to suck up to people — all in a desperate but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get them to share their beer. "You're not getting my Bud Light," they’d all say, seeing through his phony affection. Hey, Vic, if you’re reading this blog, this Bud’s for you, man!

In Manhattan last week, I talked to a woman from Alabama who said her book club had read a Billy Collins poetry collection, and it was not a good meeting. “They don’t like poetry,” she explained. I don’t think the fault for the bum book club session lay with Mr. Collins. For the past two decades, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has been considered the most popular poet in America. His collections regularly become bestsellers, sometimes breaking sales records for poetry. But the Alabama woman’s comment about not liking poetry speaks truth. Poetry too often feels like an insider’s club. Which vexes me, what with National Poetry Month coming up in April. Because for the past three years I’ve been guiding people in writing poetry to ease the stress, anxiety and trauma of emotional pain – especially cancer patients and their caregivers. We talk about: • What poetry is, how it’s different from prose and journaling, how to write a healing poem • Ways to use poetry to intentionally move our feelings toward acceptance, gratitude and empowerment • How writing poetry helps overcome loneliness During the retreats, workshops and Zoom meetings I lead, I’ve witnessed the power of poetry to affect lives for the positive in near-magical ways. Why do people say they don’t like poetry? Here’s what we’re told: • It’s pretentious, because poetic language isn’t how people speak • It’s obscure, as if the author is intentionally trying to hide the meaning • It’s boring, in a whirlwind world of scrolling and skimming I myself blame high school English teachers, many of whom made us read centuries-old poems and then tortured us by asking over and over what the poet “meant.” Collins, a college teacher himself, agrees with me, saying high school is often "where the love of poetry goes to die." He believes that "interrogating" poems in the classroom is exactly what makes students hate them. He wants poems to be "listened to" like a song. So as Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 he launched "Poetry 180" to reintroduce poetry to high school students not as a subject to be studied for a grade, but as a welcome daily experience. "Poetry 180" ground rules: • One poem is read every day over the school’s public address system or in a homeroom (the name comes from the 180 days of the school year) • There’s no discussion, and the teacher isn’t allowed to ask, "What does the blue sky mean?" • There are no tests, and students aren't required to write essays about them Collins personally selected the initial list of 180 poems, choosing poems based on accessibility: • Most are by living poets, avoiding the “dead poets” barrier that alienates many teens • They start with a recognizable situation (like a breakup, a car ride, a grocery store) • They are short enough to be read in about a minute, and clear enough to be understood on the first listen The first poem chosen to kick off the program was one of his own: Introduction to Poetry By Billy Collins I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means. The original list of "Poetry 180" poems is available from the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/ The Current Schedule for My National Poetry Month Outreach April 10: Healing poetry workshop at Mount Sinai Health System’s “Art Friday” in New York City April 14: One-day healing poetry workshop at Wisdom House Retreat and Conference Center in Litchfield, CT April 2, 9, 16, 23, 30: One-hour healing poetry classes at the American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge in New York City April 15 and 29: My “Healing Verses” regularly scheduled Wednesday workshops via Zoom May 8, 15, 12, 29: Healing poetry workshop series via Zoom and onsite at Wisdom House Retreat and Conference Center in Litchfield, CT To join me in person or participate via Zoom, email me for details: peterwyaremko@gmail.com

Her words struck me like the crack of a whip against my naked back. "I'm going to see more sick kids come into the emergency department having asthma attacks and more babies born prematurely.” That assessment came from Dr. Lisa Patel, a pediatrician and head of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, adding that her colleagues will see more heart attacks and cancer. She was talking about the repeal last week of the Supreme Court’s 2009 endangerment finding, which could erase limits on greenhouse gas pollution from cars, factories, and power plants. I’m old enough to remember the stench emitted from the tailpipes of the pre-catalytic-converter cars of the Fifties. I’ve been to Cairo and Bangkok, where the pollution hung so heavy I could almost taste it. I’ve suffered through eye-stinging smog episodes in Los Angeles. The Getty Images photo up top, by the way, is from a Los Angeles Magazine story updated last August, headlined, “LA Leads the Nation in Smog, As Usual.” A Lung Association “State of the Air” report released last year found that nearly 120 million people live in areas with unhealthy air quality, and more than half of them are people of color. People of color were sixty-four percent more likely than white people to live in a county with a failing grade in at least one of the study’s pollution categories. So, in light of last week’s repeal, I guess things will only get worse. Which is sad, because there’s always been an inexplicable connection between humankind and nature. We all know people, for example, who claim they find the Divine quicker in the woods than in church. Most repellent about the attack on our environmental protection regulations is that it comes precisely as we commemorate the eight-hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi, who is famous for his unique relationship with the natural world. Dana Gioia, who served as poet laureate of California from 2015 to 2018, says this about the famous “Canticle” written by Francis: “This poem is the beginning of modern Italian poetry. It is the first great poem written in the language of everyday people. It is therefore the foundational text of all subsequent Italian poetry. The worldview expressed in this poem is radically innovative. You will not see any poem which expresses these ideas before this point. Francis looks at the universe and the world not as abstract entities that are governed by physical principles but as a single family united by love.” Gaia translated the poem beautifully from medieval Italian: The Canticle of All Creatures Most high, all powerful, and most good Lord, Yours are the praises, glory, honor, blessings. Only to you, Altissimo, do they belong. And none are worthy to pronounce Your name. Praise to You, my Lord, for all creation, Most specially our noble Brother Sun, Bringing the day by which You grant us light. He shines, so fair and radiant in his splendor, We recognize in him, Most High, your likeness. Praise to You, my Lord, for Sister Moon And all the stars You set among the heavens, Which are so precious, bright, and beautiful. Praise to You, my Lord, for Brother Wind, And for the air, both stormy and serene. In every clime, You give your creatures sustenance. Praise to You, my Lord, for Sister Water, Who is so helpful, humble, prized, and pure. Praise to You, my Lord, for Brother Fire, Illuminating night for us. He is Robust and cheerful, beautiful and strong. Praise to You, my Lord, for Mother Earth, Who feeds and governs us. From her we gain All luscious fruits, all colored herbs and flowers. Praise to You, my Lord, for those who pardon who prompted by your love bear sickness and disaster Blessed are they who suffer these in peace, They shall be crowned by You, Altissimo. Praise to You, my Lord, for Sister Death, From whom no mortal body can escape. Doomed are those she finds in mortal sin. Blessed are those found faithful to Your will. The second death will pass them by unharmed. Praise and bless the Lord and give Him thanks. And serve Him in supreme humility. Mystic Thomas Merton lived in a one-room, cinderblock dwelling deep in the woods behind the Trappist monastery of Gethsemane in the hills of Kentucky. He wrote this: “Living away from the earth and the trees, we fail them. We are absent from the wedding feast.”

It began a few weeks ago after I drove home from Litchfield, Connecticut, where I had led a poetry retreat. I couldn’t find my reading glasses. I searched all the usual places around the house where you might lay your spectacles. I even went out to the car in the biting cold to run my hands under and between the seats. Nada. Niente. Rien. I contacted the director of the conference center and told her I must have left my glasses behind, probably in my room. In due course she got back to tell me Housekeeping had searched my sleeping room, the meeting room in which we held our poetry sessions, even the laundry room to see if my glasses had been swept up with the bedlinens and towels. Zilch. It was about this time I opened a drawer in my office to get a paper clip or something. The glasses were nestled exactly where I had put them when I unpacked after my trip. This incident was fodder for my daughters, who have been making veiled references lately to confiscating my car keys. The tipping point might have come a few days ago – the case of the purloined spoon. It’s not just any spoon, but a stainless steel beauty with a one-tablespoon measuring scoop at one end and a stirrer at the other end. It’s long, too, a good ten inches, designed specifically for tall French Press coffee pots, what the French call a cafetière à piston . It’s been in my possession more than a decade. Why do I refer to it as the “purloined” spoon? Because it went missing after my housekeeper’s last cleaning. Now, my housekeeper and I have a relationship going back at least three years. Maybe four. She cannot abide anything out of place or left in the open when it could be secreted in a drawer or cabinet. So I texted her and asked where she had put the spoon. “In the drawer to the right of the fridge,” she replied promptly. You know what’s next, don’t you? I tore the kitchen apart at least three times. Every drawer, every cabinet – even the cabinet above the fridge that I need the stepstool to reach. Nichoho . (That’s Ukrainian, by the way, not Russian) I could only deduce that she either threw the spoon out with the trash or clipped it. I couldn’t believe my sweet young housekeeper would pilfer something as trivial as a spoon. Then again, as the father of two daughters, I know how young women are attracted to shiny things. You know what’s next, don’t you? On her next cleaning day last week, as we stood talking in the kitchen, she asked if I had found the missing spoon. “No,” I said forlornly, “I had to buy a new one.” “Hmm,” she answered, going to the drawer to the right of the fridge. “I put it in this drawer.” As she spoke, she opened the drawer, lifted out the missing spoon, and handed it to me. “Now you have two spoons.”

Yesterday I marked three years to the day since my last taste of alcohol. Here's the post I wrote last year about being sober: I don’t think of it as sobriety, just as I didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic. So marking two years without a drink doesn’t seem much to celebrate. Then why do I feel as proud as I do today? Just as I vividly remember my final smoke, so I vividly remember my final vodka, quaffed at my daughter’s house. We had come through the Covid scare intact, but my family had missed our traditional Christmas gift-giving gathering. We finally got together to celebrate the holiday on Sunday, February 5, 2023. It was dusk when I drove to Wendy’s house to join the others, and I remember driving up I-95 in Connecticut – speeding, really, because I was hankering for my end-of-day buzz. At the same time, I was anxious because I did not want to drink that night, just as much as I wanted to. Deep inside I had already surrendered to the notion that this was going to be another instance when one more of my innumerable resolutions to stop drinking would fail. How many times had I promised myself – swore to myself – to eliminate booze? And I did drink again that night. And driving home with two cups of coffee masking the several vodkas I’d downed, I resolved again to stop drinking. When I filled in my calendar before bed that night, I wrote in “Last Drink.” With a question mark. As it turns out, the question mark should have been an exclamation point. But as a professional writer, I’m allergic to exclamation points! When my son-in-law was killed more than twenty years ago by a drunk driver, I wrote the eulogy I would offer at his funeral Mass. I was so angered by his undeserved death – leaving my daughter a widow – that I wanted to proclaim in the eulogy that I would never drink again, as a continuing memorial to him. But I didn’t have the nerve to make that commitment. Anyone who’s wakened to a hangover is familiar with the havoc alcohol wreaks on your body. They didn’t name it “demon rum” for no reason. Doctors today tell us alcohol is nothing but poison with no redeeming physical or emotional value. According to the World Health Organization, 2.6 million deaths annually are attributable to alcohol consumption. Beat Generation writer Jack Kerouac, for example, intentionally drank himself to death at forty-seven because his Catholic faith prohibited outright suicide. Along with the head-achy lethargy that comes with alcohol overindulgence is the need for carbs and fats. What’s better for a hangover stomach than huevos rancheros? Or maybe some cold pizza? When I deleted alcohol two years ago, my hands stopped trembling. I was able to control my diet. With no morning misery, I was able to exercise. It added up to an eighty-pound weight loss. I’m told I look like a different person. I certainly feel like one. Perhaps the biggest benefit of life on the wagon is that there’s less chance of me causing emotional harm to someone. As I look back over my life, I can say that whenever I’ve hurt someone – usually someone close who deserved only my love – it’s when I was drinking. Author and poet Maya Angelou: "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." I’m at the point where my relationship with alcohol is the same as with smoking, which I stopped in 1986. I no longer have physical cravings for either of the demons. I can’t explain why. But I can say this: You know you’re an alcoholic when your use of it causes you to violate your values, as was my case. There is no one-size-fits-all explanation or intervention, experts say, no universal truth here. Only gratitude!