(Video link here.) Shrink is a compelling series of videos in which really smart, creative people tell what they learned in therapy in under two minutes. We were amazed at how very different and insightful the takeaways were from Sarah Silverman, Susan Orlean, Lena Dunham, Gary Shteyngart, and Kimberly Peirce. Our favorite though is Natasha Lyonne, who doesn’t really like therapy.

They all made us think of Galway Kinnell’s astonishing poem Saint Francis and the Sow. The first half describes in a nutshell what we are all doing here, not matter what form our quest for wisdom and healing.
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Galway Kinnell, Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin, USA; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2001)