The movie Awakenings showed up for me to watch. I wonder sometimes whether there are celestial influences at play in those algorithms. I had a cloudy memory of having watched it thirty years ago, but all that came up was a doctor tossing tennis balls to patients. Perhaps that amnesia is a nod to the thirty lost years by those catatonic patients. 

Like many people, my attention sharpens when I learn that the story is based on true events. Dr. Sayer sensed that something was flickering within the people who had not spoken for decades. They were frozen in time, and yet he saw them melt, just a little, from music and from touch. 

Such simple keys. Powerful, or perhaps gentle enough, to open the human spirit when it has drifted out of reach. 

The grandmother that I visit told me that when her young granddaughters were little and stayed overnight, one would be snuggled next to her, while the other insisted that her Granny reach her arm over that sister to touch her, too. 

There is a remarkable story of premature twins, separated in two incubators. The girl held her own, but her brother was struggling. A perceptive nurse put them side by side, and when the sister tossed her four inch arm over her brother, his ragged breathing became steady. 

The scene in the movie that moved me deeply was when Leonard, the first candidate for an experimental drug, started to revert to his uncontrolled shaking, it was the kind touch of a woman he had just begun to care for that released him from tremors. 

All of us shake. And thrash. And sleep through important events. 

But even those of us who have been lost for a long time, can be wooed back. 

“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
Will bring her into the wilderness,
And speak comfort to her.
I will give her her vineyards from there,
And the Valley of Achor as a door of hope;
She shall sing there,
As in the days of her youth,
As in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt." Hosea 2