I first watched the Boston Marathon on a cool, bright spring day from the side of the road in Wellesley, Massachusetts where my college was located. We were just a few miles from the starting line in Framingham, so most athletes had plenty of kick left in them by the time they reached us. First came the men and women in wheelchairs built to eliminate air resistance. They wore mirrored Oakley sunglasses and tight fitting shirts that hugged their enormous arms. I turned around for a second and almost missed the Kenyan men, their long legs propelling them faster at the start of a marathon than I could ever hope to run a hundred yard dash. The women from Eastern Europe seemed to be working hardest, but kept a rhythmic grace, their bodies shuttering with each footfall. Then there was the rest, moms and dads, teachers, business owners, grandparents–all of them digging it out for a particular cause or to top their personal best.

In the years that followed, I would see the race a few more times, most often downtown near the finish with college friends now working as investment bankers and managers at Frito Lay and Reebok. We were always waiting to cheer on someone in the race we knew. This was the best part of the race. Everyone cheered on everyone whether they were a professional athlete or not. You immersed yourself in the benevolent atmosphere.

At the end of the day the TV news would share a story about the men or women still out on the route near dusk. They’d hit the wall on heartbreak hill and now told their story to the cameraman in thick Beantown accents. There was another sort of news story out of Boston this week.

As I searched for an idea or memory to help deal with the grief that story caused, I thought of the Global Aliance for Arts & Health conference that I attended a few days earlier and the hopefulness I felt on the last day of the event. This year’s was hosted by the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. I enjoyed watching the presentations from artists and clinicians doing important work all over the world. Writer/physician Danielle Ofri, gave a particularly insightful keynote on Thursday about the importance of the humanities in the practice of medicine. She used narrative to remind healthcare workers that they are part of their patients’ stories—their dramas—and suggested that this realization ought to inform their delivery of medicine.

But the highlight for me was Friday morning, when three American Indian men played a drum. It was as big around as a large pizza and as thick as two stacked pizza boxes. The men stood beside and facing one another. Each grasped a handle attached to the drum with one hand and rapped the head with a long mallet with the other. They wore their hair long. One man’s was tied in two black braids that rested against the inside of his shoulders and chest. He started each song with a scream that at times called to mind the mournful notes John Coltrane produced with his sax during Civil Rights. At other times, especially when all the men joined in singing, their cadences brought tranquility and rest. And always the rhythm of their drum, like a heartbeat, evoked tenderness.

Between sets of drumming, the men spoke. Most of what they said is lost to memory now, but do I recall love as a theme, despite the tremendous suffering their people had endured. They wanted us to remember that we are all members of the human family regardless of race or religion.

After they went back to drumming together, holding and playing, it occurred to me that we artists often have practices that isolate us. It doesn’t have to be that way. We tend to think of the artist as a solitary being expressing herself or presenting an idea to the masses out of someplace remote. There is the natural connection embedded in art making, but the practice itself can be lonely. It has been that way for me, unless I notice and consciously reach out to others. Many creatives need space. I’m not begrudging anyone that, including myself. I’m merely advocating balance between one’s unaccompanied work and one’s collaborative work, between the work we make for ourselves and the work we share. Artists are members of communities—of artists and non-artists. They are meaning makers who need to support and to be supported. The drummers relied on one another to hold that handle. If one of them let go, they were lost and so were we.

Later, we were all given the chance to work together. The Indians asked us to dance with them and many went to the stage—so many, in fact, that we had to form two circles, an inner and outer surrounding the drummers. The dance was a sideways shuffle. You held hands with the people standing next to you, your arms across your body as if hugging yourself. One hand was connected to your neighbor’s low near your waist and the other up high near your shoulder; and you moved around and around in time with the beat. You held onto each other that way, circling, while the drummers screamed their beautiful screams and pounded their hearts out. You laughed and you danced and you held on and the circle remained unbroken.