I’ve always liked poetry. And I’ve written before about Mary Oliver being my favorite poet. And when I was in Brussels, I participated in reading a poem out loud at a dinner party. The host had divided the poem up perfectly by the number of people that he knew would be seated at the table.

We took turns, and in clockwise order when it was each of our turns, pushed back our chairs, and stood, and read from the piece of paper that was placed in front of us. It was electric and inspiring, profound, and yet so simple. I was struck by the fact that I had never done this before and what an incredibly effective way it was to bring together the diverse group of people seated around the table for an immediate shared experience!

I went first. None of us knew the title of the poem or who had written it or what it would feel like to participate. I read: “Freedom.” My husband, seated on my left went next and read the name of the poet and the title of the poem. And then each guest read stanza after stanza each one ending in: “I write your name.” The power of the repetition was significant. Where do you write freedom? Here it was everywhere. “On my notebooks from school.” “On each breath of the dawn.” “On the brows of my friends.”

That night I felt like I was part of something that mattered. And the thought has come back to me multiple times since.

Am I speaking enough about freedom? As if to remind me to keep asking myself a few weeks later, I was on a plane and I selected a biopic of Lee Miller to watch. She was a model and then the photographer who was brave enough to travel to the concentration camps as World War II was ending and to record the horrors there that we probably would not otherwise have ever seen. She was also a very close friend of Paul Éluard (and Picasso and Man Ray) and I never knew anything about her before I watched that film.

So, I’m struck again about the importance of art history, of recording culture, of reading poetry – alone and together. No one and nothing are immortal, and some people’s creations should probably be.