
Notes from a Songwriter
An exploration of life and death through the lens of everyday immortality.
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Jamie Wyman
- Jul 2, 2018
- 3 min
A Million Paper Cranes
As a helping professional, one of the things I have struggled with is the inadequacy of “self care.” The usual suggestions to take a bath or have a cup of tea seem ill equipped to take on the gravity of a week’s worth of suffering. Not to mention that the weeks continue to pile on top of each other and self care is easy to relegate to the bottom of the to do list. This week I was inspired to try something new in the self care realm, something that begins to acknowledge the ef
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Jamie Wyman
- May 4, 2018
- 2 min
The Days Are Getting Longer
David and Jenny have been married for over 30 years. Jenny has Alzheimer’s disease and David cares for her with a tenderness that few would be able to match. Every morning he puts on a record as he prepares breakfast. On this morning, they dance. In “The Days Are Getting Longer,” director Ted Terrenoire captures the beauty and the grief that have woven their way into this relationship. Jenny has changed, and David clearly mourns the loss of the woman he knew, but he stays dev
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Jamie Wyman
- May 3, 2018
- 2 min
What Would Mother Theresa Do?
Mother Theresa was known for her work in the slums, tending to people who were sick, dying, and living in extreme poverty. She was canonized as a saint in 2016. It seems she created the blueprint for how to #LovetheWorld. But even for Mother Theresa, this task was not easy. In fact, she said: “Jesus said love one another. He didn’t say love the whole world.” - Mother Theresa In my estimation, however, we love the whole world when we acknowledge that we cannot "save" it. We lo
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Jamie Wyman
- May 1, 2018
- 4 min
Book Review: Trauma Stewardship
I’m a nerd. I love going to professional conferences to learn new things and get jazzed up about my work. Even so, what usually happens, is that I leave with a head full of new ideas and good intentions. I have learned a lot of things from my conference adventures but most of them did not stick, with a few notable exceptions. The most notable of these exceptions was the time I heard Laura van Dernoot Lipsky speak about “trauma stewardship” at the annual conference put on by t
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Jamie Wyman
- Apr 30, 2018
- 3 min
Love the World
One night I had a dream: I was with a group of people and we were organizing something — like a march or a protest. I think some of them were people I knew from my graduate program in Women’s Studies and my best friend was there. It was the type of gathering I have been part of on a few different occasions in real life, the kind of gathering that was born out of the second wave of feminism: the kitchen table in a small home full of love and the smell of herbs. In this dream,
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Jamie Wyman
- Mar 12, 2018
- 4 min
Welcome! (read this first)
This blog will be useful for anyone who happens upon it. Coincidence? Maybe. But I prefer to see magic, universal guidance, or synchronicity. Books and other resources find their way into my life at the right time. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance showed up as I was in the very early stages of contemplating a move back to Montana (the same route the characters took on the motorcycle). It provided other wisdom that was relevant to the journey as well: “When you try to
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