Writing and Healing: Year 2

Robert Frost’s Christmas Trees

Winter solstice tomorrow (at 1:08 in the morning Eastern Standard Time) and, before taking a break until January, I’m offering a seasonal poem here by Robert Frost: Christmas Trees.

It begins this way:

The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited til he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.

The stranger has come to inquire if he can buy Christmas trees.

He ends up offering three cents per tree.  Three cents!

And the poem ends up being a good poem, I think, for contemplating the value of things—
and what that value might have to do with what Frost calls “the trial by market that everything comes to.”

I like the poem most for two lines that arise in response to the stranger’s visit:

My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.

A different kind of value.

And then come the last two lines of the poem:

I can’t help wishing I could send you one, [a Christmas tree that is]
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

And this I suppose is what I'm attempting to send herewith----an image of those woods with the trees like spires------

Writing the Sacred Journey: A Recommended Book

I’m adding Writing the Sacred Journey to my Box of Books.  And I’m adding it because of something the author, Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, a writer and teacher in Minneapolis, does very very well.  She manages to honor the process of writing and the crafted product that comes through and from writing, and she manages to do so with a particular balance—and wisdom—that I find rare.

This is a book—small but not too small—just the right size and shape for carrying around in a backpack or purse and then when you find yourself with an unexpected twenty minutes—say, in a waiting room—you open the book, and potentially lost time becomes found time.  Or say you’re starting to write one morning (or evening), and let’s say it’s one of those times—not a clear morning lit with energy but one of those fuzzier mornings, foggier, and say you read over what you wrote the day before or the week before and you find yourself thinking good grief, who cares?  Who in the world cares about this?  Who in the world will ever care?

Instead of letting such questions loop around and around, over and over, you can, if you like, pull out Andrew’s book, turn to page 35 and find this:

Every story has inherent worth.  Even knowing this, too many writers are haunted by the question, Who cares?  Some never begin writing because this question, unanswered, stops them cold.  Too many of us have given our validation rights over to others.  Someone else (the market economy, the publisher, the grant review board, the neighbors, readers, a parent) has been given the authority to determine your worth—
. . .  The ‘Who cares?’ question assumes writing to be a product, valuable inasmuch as others are willing to consume it.  But writing is a product only at the tail end of a long and arduous process.  The writing process, like any spiritual journey, is worthwhile for its own sake.

That’s the kind of balance I’m talking about.

And it’s not that this is entirely new territory that she’s exploring—this valuing of process.  Others have been this way.  I’m thinking of Peter Elbow’s work, especially in Writing Without Teachers, Natalie Goldberg’s work, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.  Also the article, Writing Well by Mark Robinson that I wrote about last year.  And there are others.  But my sense reading Ms. Andrew is that she’s of the next generation in this work; she’s benefiting from those who have come before.  She’s standing on their shoulders and seeing further out on the horizon—and with a clarity and confidence that I find refreshing.

Consider her reflection on a common niggling question that can arise in the process of writing for healing—or in any kind of personal writing for that matter.  Is it selfish to write about the self?  Is it too self-absorbed?

In response, Ms. Andrew, who has done her own share of personal writing, who describes her journey as one in which she’s written herself, “out of the closet, out of depression, out of regular employment, and into work that fosters a simple passion for writing in others,” here she conjures the character, Janie, from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.  And she does so with a line from Hurston's novel: "She didn’t read books so she didn’t know that she was the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.” 

What a line.  And then Ms. Andrew carries the line forward: “The universe is packed into your very cells; the molecules of your body are made of stardust flung from the Big Bang.  Think of yourself as holographic, every fragment of your being containing the whole universe.”  The self as holographic.  She’s in Sogyal Rinpoche’s territory here.  She’s touching on that Net of Jewels.  She’s talking about personal writing as something with the potential to go very very deep, and, in so doing, the potential to encounter something very very large.

Well, I could go on.  But let me simply offer one more thought.  I haven’t yet mentioned the subtitle of her book—The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir.  This is a good book if you are considering or are currently writing a memoir.  But I would also add that even if you’re not writing a memoir, of any sort, but are simply looking for a calm and wise companion, if you’re in this writing thing for the long haul, and are on the lookout for good company along the way----consider this one.

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If you’d like to learn more about Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew you can visit her website.  Here  you’ll find an excerpt from the above book, information on her other books—two memoirs—one with the wonderful title, On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, and Holiness—and you can also find 5 excellent writing exercises.  (The writing exercises can be found under the heading Writing Resources.)

Five Images for Waiting and Healing

I. An Advent Wreath

2. Penelope in the Odyssey---weaving and waiting.

3. A Rose Garden in Winter

4. A Waiting Room

5. Expecting---the sculpture by Emily Yates (from the Love Your Body show):

Writing and Healing Idea #46: Waiting

Consider these lines from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Write about a time when you waited.

Write about what has sustained you in waiting.

Write about what you are waiting for.

Noah’s Garden: A Book for Creating a New Landscape

When we first moved to North Carolina fourteen years ago our yard had the distinction of being the only yard for blocks in any direction that did not boast a single flower.  All right, we did have one azalea bush and two daffodils—but neither of the daffodils ever bloomed.  The man who lived in the house before us had owned a landscape company.  His approach to this landscape—our yard—at least as I understood it from our neighbor, involved uprooting everything under twenty feet tall and laying down grass from the sidewalk right up to the foundation, so that when we first moved into our house we had tall sturdy oak trees and beech trees and wide expanses of grass but no flowers except for that brief burst of azalea bloom.  Our children were young then.  When I bemoaned the lack of flowers to my neighbor she told me I didn’t need the work of flowers.  Grass and children, she said, that’s plenty to take care of.

I wanted flowers.  Perhaps it had something to do with memories of my grandmother’s garden.  A memory of the way her yard smelled in early summer—not just fresh-cut grass, but lilac too, and honeysuckle.  And it was while I was imagining this garden, dreaming about it, that I came across Sara Stein’s book, Noah’s Garden, a book that changed forever the way I think about yards and gardens.

Sara Stein’s story begins when she and her husband bought a home on six acres of undeveloped land in Maine, land covered in brambles and tangled vines and tall grasses.  They moved onto the land and they began then to do with it what they understood to be the right thing to do with undeveloped land—they developed it.  They tamed it.

We cleared brush and pulled vines and hauled rocks and broke ground and dug beds until, after years of high hopes and hard work, we had an expanse of landscaped grounds and gardens that seemed to us like Eden.  Then it hit.  I realized in an instant the full extent of what we had done: we had banished the animals from this paradise of ours.

One by one, as she tells it, the animals had left their land.  Grouse.  Fox.  Woodchuck.  Toad.   As the landscape became developed, habitats began disappearing, and the animals responded to this absence by taking flight.  Woodpeckers left.  Mockingbirds.  The plethora of grasshoppers.  Butterflies.  I can’t help but wonder if there weren’t days—or a even one long single day—of grief or regret when she recognized what had happened.  She doesn’t quite say.  She doesn’t linger over this moment of recognition.  It’s not that kind of book.  She simply names it.  The loss of Eden.  How it had taken, “only a few summers of straightening up the place to degrade or destroy the habitat of most of the animals that had previously lived there.”

Then she begins to describe a long—and at times untidy—process of reclamation.

It began, first, by imagining a different landscape.  In the wake of the animals’ exodus she began to imagine just what kind of landscape might welcome the creatures back.  And then she and her husband set about embodying this image, creating it.  Began to create what she describes as a “new landscape.”  Not the original wild landscape—this was no longer possible.  There was never going to be, she realized, any turning back the clock to get to some original Eden.  But she no longer wanted to settle for a traditional suburban landscape either—wide expanses of neatly mowed lawn dotted with dandelions and starlings.  What did she do?  She began, along with her husband, to plant bushes that bear fruit—blueberries and blackberries and huckleberries and a berry with the wonderfully utilitarian name of a serviceberry.   And the birds, welcomed again, began to return.  She and her husband mowed less, thus providing cover for small animals.  They planted wildflowers and native grasses and watched as the butterflies returned.

Her story goes on.  It’s a story I highly recommend, one of those stories that has, I think, implications beyond itself.  It’s a well-told tale of re-imagining and reconstruction—of trial and error—of gardening as a process.  A process, it seems to me, not terribly unlike writing—or healing for that matter—where you’re trying new things all the time and often not knowing what will work until you’ve planted it and then there’s the morning you walk outside and it’s born fruit----or blooms---and a hummingbird has found it.
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Writing about this book reminds me of a dream I had while I was working on Emily’s Story—her story of trying to find a new landscape in which to heal from her eating disorder.  While I was working on that piece I had a dream—just a fragment of a dream—that I was working with Habitat for Humanity.  Helping to build a house or building of some sort.  (Working on a Habitat for Humanity?)  And not alone in the dream, but working with a number of other people, some of whom I recognized and some of whom I’d never seen before in my life.