At deeper levels, conventional analytics and conventional wisdom are, at once, coercive and liberating. We’ll leave this apparent paradox for another day. But before we leave, let’s stake out a position: within, and outside of, the boundaries of the sciences and humanities and transcending (or indifferent to) the border between them resides poetic imagination: the imagination expressed in, and offered to us, by, through and in, our engagement with the poem.  The imagination planted by another and that kindles our own.  The imagination that takes optical microscopy into the nanodimension. What other human expression animates our imagination by inviting us, gently and with no expectation of reciprocity, and when our spirit moves us, when we stir, to engage and explore and bring what we find, in the introspection and through our self-inspection, to enrich our appreciation of ambiguity, frailty, insecurity, fear of the unknown and craving for sustenance in the face of our mortality. To displace our fears and harness the energy of displacement to foster and fortify resolve.

In a recent post we encouraged health care providers to develop, to practice, imaginative empathy. To minister to the patient with an acute awareness of, and compassion for, the person, the person who is, or will be, us, the person who has moved from the island of health to the island of illness. The person whose movement will soon have moved him to the past.

When the surgeon has left, when the lights have been dimmed, when the birds have flown, where will the dying find comfort?  How will the care-giver who has not looked deeply into himself, who has not explored and made peace with, death and the fear of dying, soothe the soul and fortify the spirits when fortification and sustenance are all that we ask for and what we need most?