Almost three decades ago, I saw firsthand how art saves lives.
On February 27, 1997, three weeks after my brother’s suicide, I joined my first husband’s heavy metal tour. During the early days of this trip, I did nothing but reel from a grief so profound I didn’t think I’d survive it.
On March tenth, the tour arrived in Belgrade, Serbia, and my tears stopped.
At twenty-two, all I knew about this region was the atrocities Serbian soldiers had committed against the Bosnians during the siege of Sarajevo and the recent unrest that had closed Serbia’s borders to tourists. I expected to see carnage when we exited our tour bus in Belgrade. Instead, an eerie calm greeted us, along with signs that life went on.Women pushed prams along the streets. People ordered Big Macs at the nearby McDonald’s. Craftspeople sold their wares at an afternoon bazaar.
Hours later, students leading the uprising against Slobodan Milosevic shattered the veneer of peace I’d witnessed. They told us about the protests they led each night at 7:00 PM and shared stories about friends who’d been jailed or disappeared, never to be seen again. They hurt as much as I did—quite possibly more.
At first, our presence felt trivial. But they saw this show as an opportunity to connect with people and art while bolstering the hope they needed to fight on.
Over the next two days, I spoke with fans who’d saved for months to attend this show. Each one told me how this music healed and saved them. Gathering to revel in its majesty proved that there was something not just to live for, but hope for.
In our current period of turbulence, polarity, and shifting tides in our government and the publishing industry, I often meditate on my role in all of this. Am I supposed to be a rabble-rouser screaming from a soapbox or protesting in the streets? Should I confront the headlines by writing searing op-eds and articles? What does it mean to be courageous and supportive? What is my cause?
During every meditation, I hear the same message: hold the line.
When I first heard it, I imagined battle scenes from movies I’ve watched, where commanders scream this to their troops as the enemy rushes in. “Hold the line” means stand firm, conserve your energy until it’s truly time to respond, and don’t let the enemy through.
But “hold the line” is also what phone operators used to say when they wanted to keep a channel open.
What if, as writers, we keep the channel open by holding the literal lines on a page as sacred, because what we write on them ripples out into the world? What if we see these lines as spaces where we can keep hatred at bay by rendering stories of self-love, compassion, and resilience so clearly, that we hook and open the hearts of the “other” who suffers alongside us? How might that change us and everyone else?
What if we expand this idea further and see the lines someone else wrote as equally precious? What if we held their sentences in our mouths as reverently as our own? What if we did this not just for our published heroes but for the unpublished writers we know? How much love could we create? How would that remind us—and others—that no matter what life looks like, there is love, there is peace, there is hope?
Might a time arise when you must hold another kind of line? Possibly. But even if that day comes (or it already has), holding love in your heart as often as possible makes you stronger. It lets courage in. It builds the compassion needed to transcend your basest instincts to protect and wall off the other and instead open you to the places where creation gives birth to new possibilities.
I have many strategies to help writers do this. I’ll teach some of them this upcoming weekend during the San Francisco Writers Conference. While I’ll likely tread through emotionally deep waters, I’ll do so with dance parties and laughter yoga as my tools of choice. As you prepare to write on, I invite you to ask yourself this question: what do you need right now to hold the line for your nervous system so that your precious words can flow?
Warmly,
Lisa
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