“The Coreopsis are blooming in the park,” he said in a flat matter-of-fact tone as if making a scientific pronouncement. The group nodded in agreement, but I’m not from the Sarasota area of Florida. As far as I could tell, he was speaking a foreign language. I had no idea what he was talking about. …Read More
Author: Dr. Joel Ying, MD
Physician-Educator-Storyteller. Integrating the power of story into medicine, healing sessions, workshops, speaking and performance.
Mind and Heart ~ Charles Bukowski
“Drink from the well of your self and begin again.” Mind and Heart by Charles Bukowski unaccountably we are alone forever alone and it was meant to be that way, it was never meant to be any other way– and when the death struggle begins the last thing I wish to see is a ring …Read More
Be Drunk ~ Charles Baudelaire
“Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.” — excerpt from the Dedication of Le Spleen de Paris Charles Baudelaire was …Read More
The Family Doctor ~ Edgar A. Guest
“I take simple everyday things that happen to me and I figure it happens to a lot of other people and I make simple rhymes out of them.” ~ Edgar A. Guest (1881 – 1959) A high school dropout, Edgar joined the Free Press newspaper in Detroit in 1895 and stayed for 60 years. After …Read More
Living a Life of Meaning ~ Norman Lear
Norman Lear brought the marginalized voices of America to television starting in the 1970s as a TV producer. His culture-altering sitcom stories included All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Good Times, … just to name a few. There was time when 120 million people watched his television content every week! Eric Hirshberg sits down with …Read More
One Problem
“The pain of a friend is itself a mountain waiting to be climbed…” ~ Jim Gustafson As I contemplate the words of my friend and poet, Jim Gustafson, I am drawn to the language of poetry to help me uncover how I survived the past week of challenges. One Problem ~ by Dr. Joel Ying, …Read More
Te Ata: Native American Storyteller
The role of the Storyteller goes beyond entertainment. The Storyteller holds the cultural wisdom of the people and keeps it alive for the next generation. Everyone can tell a story, but few are called to the role of Storyteller. Born in 1895 in Indian Territory, Mary Thompson Fisher grew up when Chickasaw children were not …Read More
Motivating lasting change: Fear vs. Efficacy
About 40 years ago, dentists in Connecticut ran an experiment.1 They wanted to know how to motivate people to brush and floss their teeth. They decided to try the well-known tactic–scare them into doing it. They randomized a large group of subjects into two groups. They gave one group an informational video of why and …Read More
Learning from College Jobs
In college, my financial aid package included work-study. There was a list of jobs on campus, and I ended up working in the dining hall. I don’t actually remember how this happened, but this was the “law of least effort.” There wasn’t an application process, just a box to check. There were about a thousand …Read More
Making your own Disney princess
“There was no Korean Disney princess so I decided to make my own,” says 22-year-old Korean American Harvard University student Julia Riew. She wrote “Shimcheong: A Folktale” — a full-length musical inspired by the Korean folktale, “The Blind Man’s Daughter” — as her senior thesis! Since releasing excerpts on TikTok in January 2022, she has …Read More