Nature is a Temple

Charles Baudelaire's “Correspondences” in An Anthology of French Poetry from de Nerval to Valery, trans. Angel Flores.
 
Nature is a temple from whose living columns
commingling voices emerge at times;
Here man wanders through forests of symbols
Which seem to observe him with familiar eyes. (21)

Spaciousness Inside: Formlessness Spawns Form

Anthony Lawlor's "Re-imagining the Architecture of Healing" from Imagination & Medicine: The Future of Healing in an Age of Neuroscience, eds. Stephen Aizenstat & Robert Bosnak.

Architecture promotes renewal when it reinforces primal connections. By studying how various forces shape and reshape the natural world, we can discover renewing patterns of form and function. These insights can then be translated into architecture that encourages active wholeness in mind, body, nature, and culture. Though spaciousness cannot be seen, heard, or touched, it pervades every aspect of design and construction. “We build the floor, walls and roof of a house, but it is the space inside that makes it livable,” explains the Tao Te Ching. Within spaciousness, formlessness spawns form, darkness sparks light, and silence resonates sound. (202-203)

Remaking Our World; Making the World More Human

Arthur Kleinman, Professor of Medical Anthropology in Social Medicine and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, from The New Medicine, eds. Ronald H. Blummer & Muffie Meyer.

Dr. Kleinman advocates for the opportunity that patients and doctors have to "reaffirm their humanity:"

[With] the understanding that life is important not just for the repairing of our broken bones and the fixing of our broken hearts, but because we deal with what is serious, what is most at stake for us, what matters most in living [...] two people [doctor and patient] have the rare privilege of coming together in the context of that interaction. (111)

This realized interaction is  “a fantastic way of remaking our world, of making the world more human."

The Biology of Hope

Jerome Groopman, Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, from The New Medicine, eds. Ronald H. Blumer & Muffie Meyer

Dr. Groopman advocates that hope is central in the experience of illness and in the path to healing (98):

People often confuse hope with optimism. Hope is different. Hope is clear-eyed. It sees all the reality that you face, all the obstacles, all the problems, all the potential for failure. But through that, it sees as well a possible path to a better future. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s possible. (98)

Hope is realistic because it sees medicine for what it is; as an uncertain art.  When physicians stop cutting themselves off from their patients’ emotions, medicine becomes an art, not just science. (98-99)

Healing means that the patient is made whole again, emerging from the experience of illness having been restored as a person. (98)

There is “a biology of hope” and this has a powerful effect on the body. (99)

Power = to be Vulnerable

Joanna Macy's "Working through Environmental Despair" from Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, eds. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner.

Power, which is the ability to effect change, works from the bottom up more reliably and organically than from the top down. It is not power over, but power with; this is what systems scientists call "synergy." Here power, far from being identified with invulnerability, requires just the opposite---openness, vulnerability, and readiness to change. This indeed is the direction of evolution. (256)

How does power as process---"power with" rather than "power over"---operate in our lives? We don't own it. We don't use it like a gun. We can't measure its quantity or size. We can't increase it at our neighbor's expense. Power is like a verb; it happens through us. (257)