Writing and Healing: Year 2

September Update

It has happened.  September has arrived.  And, as I’d hoped, I have opened a new section on my website entitled A Healing Library.  It's right now more or less at the embryo stage--eight titles, and with the first seven of these adapted from Year 2.  My plan is for this embryo to grow. Significantly.  Meanwhile, I'd love to have you visit and would also appreciate any feedback that occurs to you.

I am entering a new subscription box on the site and I invite you to sign up there to receive updates weekly in your email box.  This will be my last update on Year 2.

Alternatively, you may want to consider subscribing in a reader like Google Reader, and I’ve placed a link to that information below.

I am thinking of my Writing and Healing sites now as a kind of trilogy.  And, like many trilogies, I think the first and third in the series are going to be its strengths.  I see Year 2 now as a kind of transition year where I discovered what I wanted the third part of the trilogy to contain.

I hope you've had a good summer.  And I hope this library will serve as a resource as you set off on new fall projects, whatever those may be.  Or perhaps it might just give you a few new ideas for reading.

All best-----------------------Diane Morrow

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Links:
Visit the Healing Library
Learn about subscribing via email to the Healing Library
Learn about subscribing to the Healing Library in a reader

Summer Respite

It’s time again.  A recess.  A hiatus.  A suspension.  A bit of rejuvenation.  Which means that, after this post, I won’t be posting here for the remainder of July and through August. 

My plan is to return September 1st with a new addition to the site—a new room—a continuation of what I’ve started here these last several weeks—but hopefully with a new photo and cleaner design—A Healing Library.  I’ll post here in September with the new link and send out an email to those on the subscription list when this happens.  And I will offer you again the option of subscribing via email.

Meanwhile, may the remainder of your summer offer its own kind of recess, hiatus, suspension, rejuvenation, lemon-ade, a bit of hammock or porch time, a shade tree, a stack of inviting books, a splash of water somewhere, all of that.

And perhaps a summer poem?

The Summer Day: A Poem by Mary Oliver

Healing Library Entry #6
[full text available on-line]

She begins—the first six lines:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand . . .

I like the shift between the third and the fourth lines—from the grasshopper to this grasshopper.  The one eating sugar out of her hand.  Who does that?  Puts sugar in their hand to feed grasshoppers?  Did she really do that?  Does she really do that?  Maybe it was accidental.  Maybe she’d just been eating a pixy stick.  But I like to think she—the speaker in the poem—put sugar in her hand with some intent.  Like St. Francis.  Or the guy in San Francisco, Mark Bittner, who put out sunflower seeds for the wild parrots and then stood very very still and paid close attention and then, one by one, they agreed to eat out of his hand.

(Mary Oliver reminds me a bit of Mark Bittner.  That same----something.  An absence of self-consciousness?  A stillness?  A sense of contemplation in the midst of creatures?)

The poem continues.  A defense of such contemplations.  Keeping company with grasshoppers.  Kneeling in the grass.  Solitary walks.

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

And then, finally, opening up and out, like that shift in her poem about the wild geese, the wild entering the poem-----the question with which she leaves us------

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

A good question for summer?

Reading and Healing Idea #3: Locating a Turning Point

I’m always interested in that point during a difficult time when things begin to turn.  I’m interested in that moment when something new happens—when an entirely new possibility begins to emerge out of the chaos.  Even if its only a glimpse—an image—the embryo of an image—or tinier—a single cell.

Once, several years ago now, I had a dream in which I could see for some reason the inside of King Tut’s tomb.  One of those odd dreams—I hadn’t been thinking about King Tut, not a bit.  But in the dream I could see inside his tomb and I could see that his body was bathed in a kind of fluid and the fluid, akin to some kind of primordial soup, was made up of organic molecules.

An organic molecule as an image of a turning point?

In Folly, the novel I wrote about last week, the turning point for Rae, the central character, comes by way of a book.  While in the psychiatric hospital, trying to recover, longing to return to home and work, but at the same time terrified, this happens:

Into this tangle of inchoate yearnings and inexpressible fears had dropped a book, one of those strangely assorted and badly worn paperbacks abandoned by patients or donated by the carton to such places as mental hospitals.  It was missing its cover and the first dozen pages, but the remainder fell into Rae’s confused and heavily sedated mind like a seed into loam.

A book about a man building a house.

And, after reading:

Great-uncle Desmond’s skeletal home came to her as in a dream.  In truth, during those months most things came to her as in a dream, but this one did not fade.  Instead, it blossomed swiftly into full potential:  She would pull herself together, she would go and rebuild Desmond’s house, she would lift his walls and dwell within them quietly all the rest of her days.  Everything that House was lay there waiting for her to take it up: House as shelter, House as permanence, House as continuation and a legacy, comfort and challenge, safety and beauty, symbol and reality joined as one.

House as seed.

I have this notion that if we could become better readers of such seeds—such turning points—if we could see them—and recognize them—in literature—then we might become more skillful at recognizing them in our own lives.  Oh.  I wonder if that could be a seed.

The idea then: to pay attention to a story—or to several stories—and to watch for that moment when things, however faintly, and perhaps even tenuously, begin to turn.
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Of interest:

In March of 2008 the Hubble Space Telescope detected, for the first time, an organic molecule in the atmosphere of a planet outside of our Solar System.

Hubble found the tell-tale signature of methane in the atmosphere of the Jupiter-sized extrasolar planet HD 189733b. Under the right circumstances, methane can play a key role in prebiotic chemistry – the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life as we know it. Although methane has been detected on most of the planets in our Solar System, this is the first time any organic molecule has been detected on a world orbiting another star.

You can read more about this here.

Folly: An Island, A House, and a Novel

Entry #5
Folly: A smart character-driven novel of psychological suspense by Laurie King

In Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book, Women who Run With the Wolves, Estes includes a chapter in which she introduces the image of a Scar Clan, a clan comprised of those who have been through something—and who have been in turn marked by their wounds.  Rae Newborn, the central character of Folly, could serve well I think as the clan’s chief.

Rae is a 50+-year-old woman, woodworker, a creator once of “glorious pieces of usable furniture.”  She’s also a survivor of postpartum depression, of more than thirty years of intermittent depression, of three suicide attempts (complete with scars), as well as multiple psychiatric hospitalizations.  And, as if this weren’t quite enough, a mere fifteen months prior to the novel’s opening she’s suffered the loss of her husband and young daughter, and she’s undergone a terrifying assault.

All that sorrow is in the background—what is sometimes called the back story.  The front story—the first page—finds Rae having just arrived on Folly, an island in the San Juan chain which she’s inherited from her grandfather by way of her great-uncle, Desmond.

Desmond, now deceased, was a WWI veteran, enlisting in the British Army and serving three years as a foot soldier before returning home to eventually become the family’s black sheep, the family secret, a disavowed relative with a kind of shameful injury which Rae only begins to unravel as an adult: “what Desmond left on the Western Front was a portion of his mind; that was the shame for which his family could not forgive him.”

Not surprisingly, Rae feels a kinship with Desmond.  She’s drawn to this island and to the ruins of his house there, also called Folly, a house he built with his own hands but which has since burned down to the foundation. 

What remains?  Two stone towers, the chimney, the foundation, and seven decades of vegetation which, in an image reminiscent of the briar thicket in Sleeping Beauty, has grown over the foundation.

Vine maple, red alder, huckleberry, and madrone had found footholds in the rich humus that resulted from the return of a wooden building’s component parts to nature; nettle, blackberry, thistle, and wild rose wrapped affectionately around the towers and tore at Rae’s skin and clothes. . .

Rae comes to the island with a plan to clear back the vegetation and rebuild the house from its foundation.  A plan to follow Desmond’s lead and engage in what she calls, “recovery through hard labor.”

(Note: at one point early on she dumps all her psych meds into the cove.  A nice symbolic gesture and it works I think in a kind of symbolic fictional way, but in life I’d be, Rae, I respect what you’re trying to do here, but hold on here a minute, you've been on these meds a while now, you need to take this slow, try this as a slow taper, an experiment of sorts, and preferably under medical supervision.  That said, the tossing has a certain fictional power that a taper just wouldn’t quite.)

And so she begins.  She sets up her tent, and an outdoor workspace, complete with a workbench and a French coffee press.  She begins to build.  And things happen.  Among them, rustling and whisperings in the woods.  Real?  Imagined?  It’s part of the mystery that unfolds.  A gradual answer to the question posed by the Tom Wilkinson character in the film, Michael Clayton: What if this is not just madness?

So there’s a mystery that unfolds.  Suspense.  Tension.  There’s also a clear and tangible sense of rebuilding and recovery.

In Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery she names three stages of recovery:

Establishment of safety
Remembrance and mourning
Reconnection to ordinary life

All three stages are well-represented here, and woven together skillfully.  A sense of safety that grows as the structure of the house does.  The acts of remembrance and mourning which arise for Rae, inevitably, amidst the quiet of the island, and which emerge in flashbacks, journal entries, and letters.  And, finally, a sense of reconnection—to the work of the house, to ordinary pleasures, to a small community of people which she comes to know, to her elder daughter, and to the landscape of the island itself.

A landscape which—I couldn’t help noticing—encompasses all seven of the landscape archetypes named by Messervy in the Magic Land.  Sea and Island of course.  And Sky.  But, also, a Cave, a Cove or Harbor where Rae swims, a Mountain (also called the Height of Folly) which she climbs on those rare occasions she wants to get cell phone reception, and a Promontory on which she often sits to drink her coffee in the early morning.  Also, a spring, a pool, and trees—fir and alder and madrone.  I suspect that all of these elements contribute to a sense that this island of Folly—also called Sanctuary—evokes an entire world.

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See also Laurie King's website
for many informative and amusing things, among them-----

The preface to Folly
including 5 definitions of the word folly

And a brief description of Folly as, “The book that nearly emptied Random House, New York, as half the staff came perilously near to deciding that if Rae Newborn could go to an island and rebuild an old house, why couldn’t they? After all, they didn’t begin with her problems, did they?”

Island of the Raped Women by Frances Driscoll: A Poem of Refuge and Reconnection

Healing Library Entry #4

Island of the Raped Women: a poem by Frances Driscoll
[full text available]

 

I’m revisiting this poem, one I wrote about briefly last year.  It’s Yeats’ visit to Innisfree that has me thinking about it again. Ms. Driscoll is here creating another island.  And while Yeats created his island from memory and longing, this one seems to arise from pure longing.  An island imagined because it is much needed.  The title reveals what the stakes are—why the island is necessary.

This is how it begins:

There are no paved roads here and all of the goats
are well-behaved.  Mornings, beneath thatched shelters,
we paint wide-brimmed straw hats.  We paint them
inside and outside.  We paint very very fast.  Five
hats a morning.  We paint very very slow.  One hat
a week.  All of our hats are beautiful and we all look
beautiful in our hats.

Seven lines and a place is created.  The dirt roads.  The pleasant goats.  The thatched shelter.  And the hats.  Like some simple but idyllic summer camp. 

Then, a series of activities—verbs—at this camp.
Mapping.  Napping.  Baking.  Straining.  Whisking. Watching.  Waiting.  Pouring.  Serving.  Ruffling.  Feeling.  Eating.  (We all eat in moderation and there is no difficulty swallowing.)  Sleeping.  Waking.  Chanting.  Painting.

There’s a kind of healing genius at work here.  A reconnection offered to good and ordinary things.  Because it is a hard truth of trauma that one of its most devastating consequences can be disconnection.

Judith Herman, in Trauma and Recovery, devotes an entire chapter to disconnection.  She writes:

Traumatic events call into question basic human relationships.  They breach the attachments of family, friendship, love and community.  They shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others.  They undermine the belief systems that give meaning to human experience.  They violate the victim’s faith in a natural or divine order and cast the victim into a state of existential crisis.

The verbs of trauma: Breach.  Shatter.  Undermine.  Violate.  Cast.  (Cast into?  Cast out?)

What genius then for Ms. Driscoll to offer the antidote—or some part of the antidote—in a single poem.  The antithesis of breach and shatter.

. . . We make orange and almond cake.  This requires
essence and rind.  Whipped cream.  Imagination.
We make soft orange cream.  This requires juice
of five oranges and juice of one lemon.  (Sometimes
we substitute lime for the lemon.  This is also good.)

A reconnection to good and ordinary things.
Oranges.  Lemons.  Limes.
And all in the context of we.  We paint.  We make.  We serve.  We ruffle.  (We ruffle pink sand from one another’s hair.) We talk.

A reconnection in this imagined place not just to good and ordinary things but also to others—to other women—to other raped women—the island of the raped women. 

If there could be, say, in the wake of trauma, a series of stepping stones to reconnection, I think this island, or a place like this island, would be a perfect early stone—wide and safe and welcoming.

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See also:

The Shelter of Poetry--a brief piece about Ms. Driscoll and this poem from last year.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree: A Quintessential Healing Place

Healing Library Entry #3
The Lake Isle of Innisfree: a poem by W.B. Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

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I love that the trigger for the writing of this poem was the sound of a fountain in a shop window on Fleet Street in London.  I learned about this in a footnote, in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, the note containing a brief passage from Yeats’ autobiography:

I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water.  From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.

I love that it sounds here, in his description, almost as if the fountain itself were remembering the lake water—rather than Yeats.

And I love that the poem has its source in a sudden remembrance—but he places the poem in the future tense.  Actually, he begins with the future tense and moves toward the present.

The poem makes me think of Nina, a woman who was one of my teachers in the uses of imagery for healing.  She once told us that when were guiding a person to conjure a healing place we should always call a person back to the present tense.  Call them gently, but still call them.  Not, the lake was blue and cold.  But the lake is blue and cold.

(Say that a person begins to conjure a healing place by remembering a lake.  And say that they remember riding the old rickety bus down to the lake and they remember the dock, the soft wood, they remember walking out to the edge of the dock, sitting down, placing their feet in the water.  The next question could pull a person into the present tense.  What else do you notice?  What does the water feel like?  Not what did it feel like, but what does it feel like?  And what else do you notice?  And what else?)     

Not I heard  lake water lapping.
But now—right now—I will arise and go now—even though the island may be at some distance, or seem to be at some distance---------

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Reading and Healing Idea #2: Seven Archetypes for Reading the Landscape

[from Julie Moir Messervy's The Magic Land.]

The seven archetypes help you begin to see the world as a garden, offering a vocabulary that describes a set of forms that you feel strongly about.

THE SEA: IMMERSION
This archetype is likely imprinted on the body during early experiences of being immersed underwater—in the sea—in a pool—or in the womb.  But, interestingly, in a garden, and according to Messervy, this archetype doesn’t necessarily require water.  It can be recreated with any element that creates a sense of immersion or engulfing. 

She offers Tolstoy’s ancestral home, Yasnaya Poliana, with its apple orchards and groves of birches, as one example of immersion.  It’s an interesting twist.  A nice surprise.  The sea can be recreated with a path beneath trees.  A leafy canopy.  A bench beneath a leafy branch.

THE CAVE: NESTLING
I love the words Messervy uses here for recreating in a garden that sense of security one may have experienced as a small child—or that one may have longed to experience—in someone’s arms or in small tucked away places in the world.  A wealth of words here.  Nooks.  Alcoves.  Retreats.  Eaves.  Cottages.  Pavilions.  Dovecotes.  Snuggeries.  Tree houses.  Bowers.  Summerhouses. 

What characterizes a cave-like place in particular is that it’s both small and snug—and that it has an opening from which to look out at the world.  In this way, it’s a bit different from immersion.  One is contained by a space—but looking out.

THE HARBOR: EMBRACE
The key word here is Enclosure.  Also Encircle.  Sanctuary.  And the garden she offers as illustration?  Shi Zi Lin, a celebrated garden in Suzhou, China, “enclosed by a whitewashed wall punctuated by an elegant plum-shaped door and pomegranate-shaped windows.”

In less celebrated gardens this sense of enclosure can be recreated with a fence or a hedge.  These can be used to enclose a single garden.  They can also be used to create small rooms within a garden.  Or a harbor can be created with something as simple as a semi-circular bench.

Of the seven archetypes, harbor may well be the most essential in creating a garden.  It may also be the first step.  “A magic land,” Messervy writes, “derives its enchanted quality by its distinction from the everyday world; a garden requires enclosure to feel magic.”

THE PROMONTORY: EXTENSION
A promontory has to do with going out to the edge of something.  Adventure.  Exploration.  A peninsula.  A precipice.  A frontier.  A bridge.  And in a garden?  It could be a balcony.  A porch.  A terrace.  A deck jutting out over a ravine.

THE ISLAND: SEPARATENESS
Self-explanatory?  A place that feels remote, surrounded on all sides.  A place perhaps slightly difficult to reach.  In a Japanese garden, rocks are sometimes used to create and suggest island features.  Tortoise islands.  And crane islands.  For good fortune.

THE MOUNTAINS: TRANSFORMATION
This archetype has to do with vision, perspective.  The bird’s-eye view.  Literally, an elevated spot in a garden.  Say a hill, or a treehouse.  But, also, Messervy suggests, any vertical focal point can fulfill this archetype.  A birdhouse.  A particular tree.  A piece of sculpture.

The eye is drawn up.  One climbs in one’s imagination.

THE SKY: TRANSCENDENCE
The challenge here, she suggests, is how to bring the sky down into the garden.  This requires a frame.  For instance, a reflecting pool.

"When its waters lie perfectly still, it mirrors the sky; when raindrops fall, a liquid unity is created between the archetypes sky and sea."

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Seven archetypes.  All kinds of possibilities here.  For creating a healing place.  For reading ideas.  For writing ideas.

For instance:
Choose an archetype you feel drawn toward and look for it in the landscape—in your own landscape.

Choose an archetype and look for it in novels, in stories, in poems.

Notice if there are any connections between what you are drawn toward in the landscape and what you are drawn toward in narratives and poems.

The Magic Land: A Guidebook for Creating a Healing Place

Healing Library Entry #2

The Magic Land: Designing Your Own Enchanted Garden
A small and different kind of guide-book on gardening by Julie Moir Messervy

If I were going to choose a single book as a guide for creating a healing place this, right now, would be the book.

It’s a small book, not much larger than my hand.  And it’s different than any gardening book that I’ve looked at before.  Instead of the lavish photos customary in so many garden books (including Messervy’s own Inward Garden) the text here is complimented by Barbara Berger’s whimsical drawings.  A cottage in a forest.  A castle in a forest.  A girl in a tree.  And there’s something about these drawings—they suggest possibilities.  And not just for grand gardens.  For more modest ones as well.  The text and drawings taken together offer a kind of template for creating a healing place—a way to begin.

At the heart of the book is a kind of vocabulary for creating healing place: seven archetypes or vantage points from which to discover and experience the earth.  These seven vantage points then become a language for creation.

SEA
CAVE
HARBOR
PROMONTORY
ISLAND
MOUNTAIN
SKY

Messervy writes: 

The archetypes represent places of meaning and magic that you occupy, consciously or unconsciously, in which you move, physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually toward wholeness.

None of the archetypes are exactly new.  It’s not that.  It’s that her naming of them, her translation of them, and the style with which she presents them, well, all of this, for me, has made me aware of these elements in a new way.  I find myself looking at the landscape—and its potential for healing place(s)—differently. 

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Next week---more on the seven archetypes--and how they might translate into a garden or healing place.

See also:
Six landscapes designed by Julie Moir Messervy, including Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., which is, it would seem, the first garden cemetery in this country.

 

Reading and Healing Idea #1: Consider a House

It’s common, I’ve noticed, during a time of loss or illness, for a person to dream a house.  This can be a house that has fallen into disrepair—or perhaps some of the rooms have fallen into disrepair.  Or it can happen that the garden has gone neglected, become overgrown.

And sometimes it will happen that as healing occurs the image of the house will transform.  A number of things can happen.  New hardwood floors.  New windows.  New doors.  A new room?  A new addition?  Or perhaps a new tree in the yard.  An apple tree?  A weeping cherry?  An entire orchard?  So many possibilities.

And maybe reading is one way to think about—and even catalyze—this transformation.  Reading as a source of house images.

With that in mind, you can, if you like, consider a house in fiction.  Any house.  A house you remember.  Or maybe one you discover on your bookshelf—or one you happen to stumble across.

Here's a house that I remembered and then went looking for.  A house in The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx.

In Chapter 5—a first glimpse of a house—the house the central characters will be moving into on the coast of Newfoundland and in which they’ll start their new life.  Quoyle, his aunt, and his two young daughters, Bunny and Sunshine.  From the outside of the house: window panes missing, paint flaking, holes in the roof.  And, inside:

Dust charged the air and they all were sneezing.  Cold, must; canted doors on loose hinges.  The stair treads concave from a thousand shuffling climbs and descents.  Wallpaper poured backwards off the walls.  In the attic, a featherbed leaking bird down, ticking mapped with stains.  The children rushed from room to room.  Even when fresh the rooms must have been mean and hopeless.

And this glimpse later.  Chapter 11.  The day they move in, which occurs after some work has been done:

Smooth walls and ceilings, the joint compound still showing trowel marks, the fresh window sills, price stickers on the smudgy window glass.  A smell of wood.  Mattresses leaned against a wall. 

More happens in the novel.  A lot more.  But these are two brief glimpses of the house.  Part of the transformation that unfolds.
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The picture above is taken from the cover of The Shipping News and is part of an etching by David Blackwood, a Newfoundland artist.

See also a New York Times feature on Ms. Proulx from 1994, just after she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Shipping News.  It offers, among other things, a glimpse of her own house in Vermont.

Her house, high on a hill, is three stories, made of unpainted clapboard weathered to gray. Ms. Proulx built much of it herself, and it is tall, strong and unadorned, like her. Wearing blue jeans and a dark green pullover, she opened the door, and her gaze from behind wire-rimmed glasses was at first intimidating. Don't ask foolish questions, it said.

But inside, her house was another world, all cozy and welcoming, full of books and rocks and colors. Ms. Proulx had painted a flock of geese over the kitchen table, a surrealistic tree draped with fish on the cupboard, purple grapes above the tub in the bathroom.