Writing and Healing: Year 2

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?”