ABSTRACT
Metaphor is quick, discreet, and spacious, uniquely suited to witnessing, naming, and containing complexity. In hospital settings, these qualities are invaluable to both patients and medical professionals. When encounters are data-based, hurried, anguished, or all three, the full arc of a person’s story can be unwieldy. “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another”. From its Greek and Latin roots, metaphor is generative, active, transformational: to transfer, to alter, to change. Meta gives us “over, across, and between:” a sense of bridging. The Greek pherein gives “to carry over,” and “to bear,” and even to bear children: a sense of offering, continuity, or, in author personal etymology, magic. Of course, the quality of the self-reflection-as-poetry is never meant to be judged, but the quality of the listening that takes place is, and it is invariably high.
