What Bloomed in the Woods
A spring gathering, a virtual book circle, and the relationships we do and do not plan
In a world flooded with input, it is easy to treat connection as extra. Recently, one room at the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine, and another online for the Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle, reminded me that art, books, and conversation do more than fill time. They help create the kinds of relationships that make life feel larger and more alive.
Within the past two weeks, daffodils have begun appearing in the woods near our house on Littlejohn Island.
We did not plant them. No one in our family tucked those bulbs into the ground in some long-ago autumn moment, hoping for this exact burst of yellow months later. Yet there they were, bright against the brown leaves and bare branches, visible before much in the woods had yet opened to meet them.
Other spring flowers feel more intentional. For the past few years, we’ve had lupines on the slope in front of our stone wall. We know where we placed them. We have watched for their return. In Maine, especially, where spring arrives in its own order, there is satisfaction in recognizing the blooms we planned for and patiently awaited.
Relationships can be like that, too.
Some are planted carefully over time, tended with consistency and intention. Others arrive more like daffodils in the woods: unexpected, vivid, already rooted before we fully understand how they got there. Both matter. Both can become part of the landscape of a life.
I found both on display, in different settings, during these weeks of blooming daffodils.
First, we held Radio Maine Live Emergence and Light at the Portland Art Gallery last week. We were surrounded by the gallery artists' work, including those featured at the recent opening: Ryan Kohler, Bibby Gignilliat, Sarah Verardo, and Willa Vennema.
Dr. Emily Isaacson, Christopher O’Connor, Heather Shields, and Dr. Deirdre Heersink joined us for the panel presentation in front of a room filled with friends, family, and colleagues. Some of these people have been part of my life for decades. Others I have come to know more recently. The room held both kinds of relationship at once: the carefully tended and the newly unfolding.
Before the formal conversation even began, people were already gathering in little clusters in front of the art. They came early. They found one another easily. When the evening ended, many stayed. That is one of the surest signs that a gathering has worked. People keep talking at the edges of the room long after the program has formally concluded, because the real exchange is still happening.
What the room asked of people
I was struck, as I often am, by the courage of our speakers.
Some people are very comfortable speaking in public when the topic is business, mission, or expertise. Radio Maine Live was something else. The questions occasionally took people to tender places in their lives.
During the conversation, I asked one of the panelists about her father, who had passed away not long before my own father. My mother was in the audience. I felt myself growing emotional as I asked the question, and I suspect my mother did too. We were speaking about two deeply loved fathers, two very large presences in our lives, and what it means to continue building a life after that kind of loss.
Another panelist’s parents were seated in the front row, both very much alive, watching with eager attention. The room held grief and gratitude at once, and absence and presence with them.
Some relationships are planted carefully. Others arrive like daffodils in the woods.
A good room can hold that kind of complexity.
The Maine connections we do not plan
Much of the evening felt distinctly Maine, though with just enough Ireland sprinkled in to be interesting.
One woman came to the gallery because she was familiar with Dr. Emily Isaacson’s organization, Classical Uprising. As the evening unfolded, it turned out that this woman had grown up in the same town as my mother, and her sister had been in the same high school class as Mom. I never tire of these discoveries. A connection you did not see coming is suddenly uncovered, and the room feels both larger and smaller at once.
That, too, felt like the daffodils in the woods.
Unexpected and entirely perfect.
An evening like Radio Maine Live is also built on forethought. We think carefully about whom to invite as speakers. We try to create a panel with enough range to be interesting and enough overlap to be coherent. We nearly always include an artist because the creative life changes what becomes possible in a room.
This time, Christopher O’Connor spoke about his work with the plain fluency of an artist who has lived in more than one landscape, drawing on Ireland and on the way the place continues to shape how he sees.
The family of one of the panelists ended up taking home a piece of Christopher’s work. We had planted the bulbs, in a sense. Something was indeed gathered in.
What books and art make possible
As a physician, I have long been interested in how connection shapes health, though we do not always treat it with the same seriousness as sleep, movement, or food. The more I read in this area, the more convinced I am that relationships, beauty, and shared experience are not extras. They are part of what holds us up.
The American College of Lifestyle Medicine includes positive social connections among the pillars of health. Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s work on loneliness and social isolation helped bring greater attention to the importance of our relationships. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has spent decades arriving at a similarly grounded conclusion: relationships shape health and life satisfaction in lasting ways.
Books and art seem to do adjacent work.
In 2019, Daisy Fancourt and Andrew Steptoe published a study in The BMJ that tracked more than 6,000 adults in England over 14 years. Adults who attended museums, galleries, concerts, or theater at least once or twice a year had a meaningfully lower risk of dying during the study period than those who did not, even after accounting for income, education, and underlying health. Literary reading points in a similar direction. Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar have shown that readers of literary fiction tend to score higher on tests of empathy and social cognition than non-readers. A novel gives us time inside the thinking of someone who is not us. We often come back out changed, even slightly.
None of this turns a painting into a prescription or a novel into an elixir.
What it does suggest is that attention, beauty, story, and shared experience are not ornamental. They shape the lives we are able to live.
Relationships, beauty, and shared experience are not extras.
We felt some version of that in the gallery.
We felt it in the willingness of panelists to speak honestly. We felt it in the front row attentiveness of family members. We felt it in the conversations that continued after the formal program was over. We felt it in the simple fact that people came early and stayed late.
A second room
A few days later, we met again online for The Bountiful Path Spring Virtual Book Circle. I’ll return to this in the upcoming Books on the Boat post. It belongs here, though, because it carried a similar spirit to Radio Maine Live. Some of the participants were people I have known for decades. Others I was meeting in the moments after their faces came up on the screen.
One person joined us from across the ocean in a different time zone and brought a TEDx talk rather than a book, which was perfectly welcome. English was not his first language; he listened to all of us and spoke back in his own register. We all welcomed one another.
Books do this. Rooms do too.
A good book read in company becomes more than a book. It becomes a place where people can meet one another a little differently.
Civility and attention can change the feel of a room. Books and art often help create that same condition.
Why this may matter for you
If you have felt recently that your circle has narrowed, or that the sound of a full room asks more of you than it once did, you are not alone. The past few years have left many of us feeling more uncertain, and at times more tentative in rooms full of people. Part of the antidote is to keep moving, gently, toward community. Connection is not what we do after the serious work of the day is done. It is part of the serious work itself.
It is as serious as the daffodils, daring to show their frilly faces on a cool Maine morning in spring, and as hopeful.
Pause + Reflect:
What in your life feels more like daffodils in the woods than a bulb you knowingly planted?
✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.
Lisa
The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.
More from The Bountiful Path
Featured on Radio Maine: Cameron Kelly Rosenblum — on turning personal tragedy into powerful storytelling.
Bountiful Path Solo Reflection: Run-Shine — on how movement helps us return to ourselves in transition.
Off the Wall: Sculpting Sound, Form, and Flight — Maine artist Andreas von Huene breathes vitality into stone and wood, animating his sculptures with imagination and precision.
From the archive: Do As I Say And As I Do — Health care providers on the practices that keep them moving.
Continue on The Bountiful Path: The Treehouse in April — Embracing the Wood phase, and what the bare branches let us see.