Writing and Healing: Year 2

A Healing Library?

I’m beginning to think, more and more, that this second year of writing and healing is moving me toward creating some kind of healing library for this site.

 

Because I’m beginning to suspect, more than ever, that reading—the act of reading itself—can contribute to healing.  And to writing.

I began this year with ten questions that I was asking and wanted to ask about writing and healing.  I don’t want to forget these questions.  I still want to keep them in mind.

But, at the same time, I find myself, more and more, drawn to writing about poems and stories and books.  Those that might contribute to a healing conversation.  Admittedly, this would be quite subjective.  I’d be choosing the kinds of pieces that speak to me in some way.  The kinds of pieces I’d recommend—and do recommend—to patients. 

I’d like to find a way to write about and then sort these pieces that is meaningful.

Perhaps for a third year of writing and healing.  Perhaps sooner.

Thoughts?  Ideas?  Suggestions?

Writing and Healing in the Waiting Room: A Research Study

The study: Implementing an Expressive Writing Study in a Cancer Clinic by Nancy P. Morgan et. al.
The Oncologist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 196-204, February 2008
[Full article available on-line]

As far as I know this is the first study on writing and healing done in the thick of medical care.  It’s a nice practical study.  Conducted outside the quiet of a laboratory.

Researchers at Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown invited cancer patients to do a brief twenty-minute writing task while they waited for their appointments.  Those who agreed to participate were then randomized to respond to one of two different writing prompts.

The first writing prompt is one developed by James Pennebaker:

Cancer can touch every part of your life—issues of family, love, anger, career, life and death, and even issues about childhood and specific experiences in life.  In your writing, let go and explore your deepest thoughts and feelings about the issues that you feel are most important to you right now.

The second writing prompt is one unique to this study:

How has cancer changed you and how do you feel about those changes?

Participants wrote in the waiting room and, also in some cases, while back in the exam room, waiting to be seen.

49% reported that the writing changed the way they thought about their illness.

35% reported that the writing changed the way they felt about their illness.

At three-week follow-up, those who reported changing the way they thought about their illness experienced better physical quality-of-life scores. 

Perhaps the most important thing to come out of the study was this notion of feasibility—that people could and did write in the waiting room.  This in what sounds like a very ordinary waiting room—noisy and busy and rife with interruptions.  Of 98 people invited to participate, 71 agreed, and 63 completed the 20-minute writing session.

I like this notion—writing in the waiting room.  It’s one way to get around the obstacle that so many people seem to face when it comes to writing—not wanting to add one more task to an overly-full day.  Though one might miss out on the latest People magazine—and though there are certain days when escape inside a People magazine may offer its own kind of respite—there’s something attractive about this idea of using waiting time for writing.

I wonder if this wouldn’t become even more possible in those waiting rooms that pay attention to good design—good comfortable chairs and good lighting and such.  Perhaps an alcove for reading and writing.

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For a glimpse at what’s possible in the design of a waiting room, you might want to take a look at this article in the New York Times about the waiting room at the Jay Monahan Center in Manhattan. 

Here’s a description:

The adjacent waiting area, hugely expanded from a cramped rectangle into a spacious serpentine shape, incorporates two walls of windows. Its modern club chairs, in inviting fabrics and bright, strong colors, are not yoked together in the depersonalizing bus-station style. Instead, they are scattered in conversational groupings that can be easily rearranged.

Bamboo floors provide visual warmth - and can be cleaned with soap and water, so antiseptic-smelling cleansers are no longer required. There are no signs prohibiting eating, drinking or talking on cellphones - all are permitted - and patients can do research or check their e-mail on five iMac computers glowing atop sleek maple-and-walnut counters.

Sounds good to me.  And I can’t help wondering—How might an expressive writing study fare in that waiting room?  How might it be to write curled up in one of those club chairs or on one of the iMacs?

A Healing Corridor

I’ve written here before about Sara Stein’s book, Noah’s Garden, a book about restoring the ecology of our yards and gardens.   Now I’m paying attention to a passage at the very end of the book where she imagines what it would be like if we were to begin to create a network of these restored, and interconnected, gardens.

    Will it work? she asks.
    Will the turtle return?
    Will the fox come by?

She directs these questions to a gentleman at the Bureau of Wildlife Management.  And he responds.  “Yes, if there are corridors.”

Stein writes:

Words are tricky things.  ‘Corridor’ is an ecological term that disarmingly conjures up a stroll along a pathway between, say, Mr. Shneckenburger’s land and ours.  A turtle might, indeed, stroll from his pond, along his stream, over the road that separates our properties or thorugh the culvert below it and, once safely among the skunk cabbages, meander upstream to arrive after a while at our shore. . .  But the ecological meaning of corridors is both figuratively and literally broader.

The movement of animals over longer periods of time than one turtle’s amble after a mate in breeding season is similar to those fireworks that, impelled by pressure from the center, burst outward, then burst again from each spreading fragment.

A corridor as a series of bursts?  Starbursts?

She writes:

What is meant by corridors, then, is not narrow strips along which animals might walk from one remote refuge to another, as our own young these days travel along the highways, but a continuity of living quarters among which movement is generational—by dispersal, not migration—from patch to patch along networks that may well originate in parklands or reservations but that must spread through all of our back yards.

The repopulation of each person’s land therefore depends on neighbors, on whether they stop the flow of breeding—dampen bursts and snuff out sparks that would ignite new life beyond their boundaries—or feed the spread by what they plant and how they plant it.

Corridor—it’s a rich and complex image as she presents it here.

And for me, this image, along with making me want to plant more blueberry bushes, and also butterfly weed, brings to mind a notion I've been carrying around for a while now—a kind of healing corridor—made up of centers of healing—actual places but also virtual places—including books and websites—each spreading out from a center like fireworks, like starbursts.

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Toward this end, I'm finally getting around to putting up some sites on my Resource page on One Year of Writing and Healing.  I’m calling the page Healing Corridor and am posting three sites on it this week.  A beginning--and one I plan to expand on over time.

Wild Parrots in the Library

If I were a poet (which I’m not) I’d write a poem about how wonderful it is that libraries exist and that on any given day (or almost) you can walk inside and find a book sitting on a shelf and think, hmm, maybe.  And you can walk out of the library, book in hand, without paying a cent.  You can take the book home and sit next to the window, clear spring light, and read about a man on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco who makes friends with a flock of wild parrots. 

Sometimes a book can just offer a surprising lightness—a sweetness—and perhaps that has something to do with how reading offers healing.

The book: The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill by Mark Bittner.

Perhaps you have to like birds to appreciate it.  But maybe not.

Here’s a paragraph from Bittner’s book, p. 59, describing the first summer in which he began feeding a flock of wild parrots:

I remember that summer as idyllic.  The experience was still fresh, and my days were bright and relaxed.  Even when the parrots weren’t around, I’d hang out on the fire escape waiting for them.  I was well above any obstructing buildings, and the view was superb.  I felt like I had a box seat at the opera.  I could see for miles and miles across the expanse of the bay to the rolling brown hills on the distant northern horizon.  I learned to spot the parrots from the moment that they were just specks over Fisherman’s Wharf, a half-mile away.  I could detect their squawking when it was just the faintest element in the great background of urban clamor.  As the days passed, the parrots and I became increasingly casual with one another.  I remember one time when Marlon had his back to me and was staring down at something in the garden.  It was his turn for a seed, so I tapped him lightly on the wing—something I’d never done.  Marlon turned around, took the seed, and then looked away again.  A moment like that would satisfy me for days.

I like it that he gives this kind of attention to a single moment.

I like it that he gives the parrots names.  Marlon.  Connor.  Catherine.  Several he names after poets.  Blake.  Ginsberg.  Snyder.  Pushkin.  In all, he names over fifty parrots.  There's  Picasso.  Mandela.  Tupelo, named for the Van Morrison song, Tupelo Honey.  Also Dogen, named for a Japanese Zen Master. 

I like it that the parrots, and his relationship with the parrots, become a kind of turning point for him.  Earlier in his story, p.25, he's trying to get his life on track and nothing is working out for him:

I had no clear path to any of my goals, but I believed that inner struggle in and of itself would bring me what I wanted. . .  Months passed, and there wasn't a single development toward any of the things I wanted.  I responded by increasing the time I spent meditating.  I was very disciplined and utterly humorless.  More weeks went by and still nothing changed.  I started feeling frustrated, and then angry.  Except for going out to do an occasional odd job, I was always alone inside the house.  I started breaking down into tears almost every day--huge, hot drops like I'd never felt before.

Not long after those huge, hot drops he reads something by Gary Snyder, the poet.   Something about learning the intimate details of the landscape in which one lives.

Bittner begins to pay attention to the birds in his neighborhood.  He puts out bird seed.  And then a wild parrot comes to the bowl of seed.  And then a whole flock of wild parrots.  And then he begins to name the parrots.  He develops a relationship with them.  And things begin to change------