Writing and Healing: Year 2

Pressing One’s Ear Against the Hive: An Image for Reading and Healing

I came across a poem: "Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins.  It has me thinking (more) about ways in which reading might be healing.  Reading as a creative process akin to—and inter-related with—writing as a creative process.

I especially like the first eleven lines, which are framed as a teacher’s request:

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

All these images for reading:

Holding a poem (a story?  a page?) up to the light
Seeing outlines? Layers?  Seeing the bones like in an x-ray?

Pressing one’s ear against the hive of it
As if it’s still buzzing with life and activity, even now, long after it’s been written.  The words like tiny winged creatures each playing their role.  Worker bees?  A queen?

Dropping a mouse into the poem   
Hmmmm
What about a fish?  Letting it loose to swim between and among the spaces.
Then bringing the fish back out.  A talking fish?

Reading as walking inside the room of a poem 
Or the rooms?   
Turning on the light?  Opening windows?
Finding something inside the refrigerator?

Reading as (first?) waterskiing across the surface of it
And then what?  Diving down?
Which brings to mind Adrienne Rich’s poem, Diving into the Wreck----
Diving down to explore the wreck,
Diving down to discover treasure

And how might this kind of reading be healing?

Could this kind of reading—creative—imaginative—could it—sometimes—coax our minds into becoming flexible—even nimble—in some of the ways that yoga postures can do this same thing for our bodies?

Reading as a kind of focused—(and sometimes playful)—concentration? 
Reading as a form of meditation?

_____________________________________

The full poem by Billy Collins can be found here.

I Stand Here Ironing: A Short Story by Tillie Olson

[the eighth garden]

This story by Tillie Olson is an achingly beautiful story.  It opens with this line:
“I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.”

In the next paragraph, we learn who the “you” is:

'I wish you could manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter.  I’m sure you can help me understand her.  She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping.’

A memo from the school then.  There’s some kind of problem with the narrator’s daughter.  Thus the torment in the first line.  The mother-ache.  And isn’t there in the memo a vague, or maybe not so vague, sense of accusation?  I wish you could manage the time.  And, I’m deeply interested in helping.  The subtext: Are you interested?  Are you interested enough?  Do you care enough to manage the time?

If I were to build that Writing and Healing Center next to the medical park, it would need to have a library of narratives.  And I think this story would be one of those narratives.  It would be there for every parent who has ever received a memo that has left them aching.  For every parent who has ever wanted to respond to such a memo but who’s had trouble finding the right words.

Here is how the narrator responds—the paragraphs immediately following the memo:

‘Who needs help.’ . . .  Even if I came, what good would it do?  You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key?  She has lived for nineteen years.  There is all that life that has happened outside me, beyond me.

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?  I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again.  Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.

The story continues.  An account of the girl’s early years.  A baby who “blew shining bubbles of sound.”  And then the interruption of those shining bubbles.  The hard years.  Several hard years.  Much that couldn’t be helped.  Much that is now regretted.

And then, near the end of the story, the eleventh page of twelve pages, the girl herself enters.  Emily.  “Aren’t you ever going to finish that ironing, Mother?”

I love that moment of the girl entering the story.  Her speaking.  For one thing, the girl speaks with just enough attitude that you think—or I think—maybe she's going to be all right.  (It’s the kind of story where I find myself caring about these characters.  I want for the girl to be all right, the girl and the mother.)  The story continues.  The girl heads up the stairs to bed, speaking over her shoulder on her way up.

‘Don’t get me up with the rest in the morning.’  ‘But I thought you were having midterms.’ ‘Oh, those,’ she comes back in, kisses me and says quite lightly, ‘in a couple of years when we’ll all be atom-dead they won’t matter a bit.’

She has said it before.  She believes it.  But because I have been dredging the past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot endure it tonight. . .  I will never total it all. . .   

This story would be in the library not just for parents but for anyone who has ever felt a sense of regret.  For anyone who has ever, even now and then, felt the past as heavy, as carrying a difficult weight.  For anyone who has ever tried to gather a story together in spite of regret, in spite of a thousand interruptions.

And, who knows, perhaps it could serve as invitation and encouragement to writing one’s own story—writing in spite of interruptions and with the clear knowledge at the beginning that one is unlikely to ever total it all-------One could begin with a line----I stand here----what?

___________________________________________

I Stand Here Ironing can be found in Tillie Olson’s short collection, Tell Me a Riddle.

Exaggerations

[What follow here are some exaggerated statements—an experiment on the way to finding an emerging center of gravity for Year 2 of Writing and Healing]

Authorship—reclaiming authorship—is at the very core of healing.

Writing to heal is a radical experiment.

The world would be a better place if Writing and Healing Centers were as common as hospitals—or medical parks. 

The world would be a better place if Writing and Healing Centers were adjacent to all medical parks.  Maybe a fence between so the Writing and Healing Center could have a nice contained garden.  Blueberry bushes and tall wildflowers growing along the fence.  A fountain.  A bench next to the fountain for watching the water splash.  Koi in the fountain?  Yellow irises at the edge?

The world would be a better place if all medical parks and clinics had two exits.  And before you reached the exits you’d find a kind person at a desk and she’d ask you a single question: Are you satisfied that you and your health care practitioner are doing everything possible to promote your healing?  And she’d be the kind of person who meant for you to give a real answer.  She’d be listening for a true answer.  If your answer was yes, and if you assured her you felt confident about this yes, you’d be directed to the exit that leads out to the parking lot and you could drive away home.  No next step needed.  But say you answered, no, I don’t think so, I feel like I have some questions.  Or say you answered, I have this hunch---I’d like to be doing something more.  Or I’d like to feel clearer about a plan.  Or I feel like there are parts of this issue that haven’t been touched on.  Well, those kinds of answers would win you an invitation to a second exit and that exit would have a path that led over and through a gate in the fence to the Writing and Healing Center. And when you got to the Writing and Healing Center you’d wait in a comfortable waiting room until it was your turn.  And then you’d have an intake with a Writing and Healing specialist.  An intake longer than fifteen minutes.  Say ninety minutes for that first intake.  And you’d be invited, during those ninety minutes, to participate in some combination of writing and conversation.  And the first question would be: What else do you think could be done to promote your healing?  And any answer would be a fine way to begin.  A word.  A hunch.  A list.  A story.  An unfinished conversation.  A haunting dream.  And everything would proceed from that place—that beginning.  Eventually, if you were interested—and motivated—it could all be touched on.  All of the pieces that you feel have been left out.  And you could use writing—and conversation—as a way to navigate and author your own winding and rich path of healing.   

The world would be a better place if the staff at the medical park also had an opportunity for 2 exits.  And perhaps for a staff member there would be 2 questions:  First, do you feel like you and your own health care practitioner are doing everything possible to promote your own healing?  And, second, do you feel like you, as a staff member at the clinic, are able to do everything that you want and need to do to promote healing with the patients who walk through the door?  And a no—or even a hesitation—in response to either question would win an invitation to that second exit—the path through the gate—an opportunity to explore in further detail one’s hopes and dreams for healing, and then to put down, in writing, the kinds of tangible steps that might make these hopes and dreams a concrete reality.

Writing Without Teachers: A Guidebook by Peter Elbow

[the seventh]

I’m revisiting Writing Without Teachers now for a reason.  Looking for a particular term:
CENTER OF GRAVITY

Looking because I feel that’s the question I’m asking now.  What’s my center of gravity?  What are these small pieces I’ve been writing this year adding up to?  What could they be adding up to? 

Because I number these pieces, I know that this week is Week #26.  So, I’m halfway through the year.  Which seems like about the right time to be asking these questions.  Where am I going with this?  Where do I want to be going?

It turns out that finding a center of gravity is the third step in what Elbow describes as a 4-step process of growing writing.  (I’ve listed 3 steps here.  The fourth step is editing.)

1. Start writing and keep writing.   Okay, I’ve been doing that.
2. Chaos and disorientation.     This is why I keep turning back to Peter Elbow as a teacher.  Because he’s not afraid of chaos.  He welcomes it, sees it as a necessary step.  He encourages it.  He links it with richness.  He writes, “You can encourage richness and chaos by encouraging digressions.  We often see digressions as a waste of time and break them off when we catch ourselves starting one.  But do the opposite.  Give it is head.  It may turn out to be an integral part of what you’re trying to write.”
3. Emerging Center of Gravity.

Here’s what Elbow has to say about finding an emerging center of gravity:

The turning point in the whole cycle of growing is the emergence of a focus or theme.  It is also the most mysterious and difficult kind of cognitive event to analyze.  It is the moment when what was chaos is now seen as having a center of gravity.  There is a shape where a moment ago there was none.

Getting order to appear in chaos takes practice.  First you do it badly, gradually you do it better.  If you refrain from doing it badly, you will never learn to do it at all.

What this means in practice is that you must force yourself to keep getting some center of gravity or summing-up to occur.  Let the early ones be terrible.  They will distort your material by exaggerating some aspects and ignoring others.  Fine.  If possible try for contrasting exaggerations.  Exaggerating helps you to think of things you wouldn’t think of if you tried to be judicious.

Hmmm.  Exaggeration as a way to get there.  I think I’ll try it.

Healing a Troubled Mind Takes More Than a Pill: A Washington Post article by Charles Barber

[the sixth]

I found this article via a blog by Liz Spikol.  She’s an editor at the Philadelphia Weekly, a woman with bipolar disorder who writes an informative, well-written, and sometimes personal blog about mental health.  Her blog is well worth visiting, but right now I’m taking a closer look at the article by Charles Barber to which she points.

Each article or story poses its own question.  It’s kind of like Jeopardy.  You read the answer and you have to figure out the question.  The question that Barber’s article is answering?  Or some of the questions?  Here’s what I think:
Who gets to speak about healing?
Who gets to be an author when it comes to healing?
And on what is that authority based?

Charles Barber’s primary source of authority?  He’s been there.  His initiation into mental illness occurred when he was a freshman in college and began developing disturbing and intrusive thoughts.  His other primary source of authority?  He found a way through the disturbance, found a way to make a life. Barber is also a journalist, which means he has writing skills, and investigative skills, and experience.  And he’s done years of work with others who are mentally ill. 

And now he’s telling some of his own story.  Describing it as “a winding, agonizing road to stability.”  That’s what interests me about this article—the winding, agonizing road.  It's a story that’s important to put out there.  Over and over again, it’s important to put this kind of story out there.  Because the counter-narrative—the narrative that we frequently see on television—in programming as well as in commercials—the narrative of the quick fix—this can be so incredibly seductive.

Barber begins his article by touching on this counter-narrative.  The television commercial with the man or woman, first in agony, and then taking a pill: transformed.  A new person.   A person “walking in a park, awash in sunshine, surrounded by grandchildren, a golden retriever nipping at their heels, while lush music plays in the background.”  The restitution narrative that Arthur Frank names and writes so well about.

And then Barber shares something of his own very different and much more real story.

Medication was helpful—as was cognitive behavioral therapy, particularly early on—but what ultimately made the difference, what really made me want to get well, was finding a sense of purpose in my new life, a life that had been reconfigured by illness.

The critical moment in my own recovery was my decision—very unpopular at the time—to work full-time in a group home for people with severe developmental disabilities, young men my age who could not talk.

It’s hard not to think here again of Arthur Frank—his third narrative.  The quest narrative.  The narrative in which some meaning is found through the experience.

What interests me most about Barber’s article is where he lands at the end of it.  What he believes allowed him to find his way to a meaningful recovery. 

He writes:

This leads us to the final lesson I’ve learned: Treatment is most effective when the patient is in charge and the ultimate expert in his or her own recovery.  There is evidence that when patients feel in control, the results of treatment are better.  Treatment works best when the doctor or therapist acts as a kind of expert consultant.  As Home Depot puts it: ‘You can do it, we can help.’

That’s what I found in my own process.  That my journey was a self-directed path, one in which I saw myself as the author of my recovery [emphasis mine] rather than a passive recipient of a pill, made all the difference.

He continues:

But these complex lessons about the arduous realities of attaining emotional health, as told not by doctors or companies but by patients, have received little traction in mainstream health care and the mainstream media.

Perhaps.  And perhaps I’m being overly optimistic here, seeing the cup as more full than it actually is, but my own sense is that these narratives are gaining more traction than they ever have before.  Certainly, they have more traction than they did—or than I was aware that they did—when I went through my own medical training twenty-plus years ago now. 

Narratives which tell a complex story of healing—of a troubled mind and/or a troubled body—these are beginning, I think, to gain more traction.  And I, for one, would like to do my own small part to help coax that process along.

Thus the links above.  And I’ll repeat them again here:
The Trouble With Spikol by Liz Spikol
Healing a Troubled Mind Takes More Than a Pill by Charles Barber

The Magic Land: A Garden Design Book by Julie Moir Messervy

[the fifth garden]

I find myself stopped at the entrance to The Magic Land, at the first two paragraphs, passages in which Ms. Messervy speaks directly to the reader.

I’ve come to look at your property to help you design a garden.  I walk in, shake your hand, and look around, enjoying your house and its contents while getting a sense of you through what you have already created in your home.  We sit at your kitchen table and talk about what you want.  You explain that you’ve lived in this house awhile and have made it your own but you’re completely unsure about what to do with the outside.  You don’t know how to begin.  We stroll around your site while I continue to hear your story and ask questions.

What should your garden look like?  I see it as a place distilled from the elements of your imagination, your memories, and your dreams.  It is my job to help you realize and grow this garden; to help you give birth to it and to give it form.  But first you must supply the seeds that will provide its character and its structure, and you must nourish and love it into being.

The perfect garden designer?
The perfect writing teacher?

The way that Ms. Messervy describes herself working here is entirely reminiscent of the way I was taught to work when I first tutored in the writing center as a teaching assistant, nearly twenty years ago now.  The writing center was a free service offered to undergraduate and graduate students, a service that I believe most universities still offer.  Before we were set loose in the classroom as teaching assistants to teach full classes, we each worked at least one semester in the writing center.  It was there that I began to learn, student by student, how to teach writing.  I was taught, and I learned, to listen, to ask questions, to listen some more, and, above all, to resist the temptation to take a student’s paper over.  To remember, over and over, who was the author of the paper.  And then, over and over, to discover—students always knew more than they thought they did about the papers they were writing.  They said, first, I don’t know.  They said, I have no idea.  But the more we talked, just back and forth, it turned out they did know things.  They had ideas.  They always knew more than they thought they knew.  And, often, there was a particular kind of delight and energy as they began to discover this.

The more we just talked, back and forth—and, in the process, the more I was able to resist stealing authorship—the more, it seemed, that students made their own discoveries------

I’m tempted to paraphrase Ms. Messervy’s introductory paragraphs such that it might work for a writing teacher.  And, well, I’m going to yield to this temptation----thus, Writing and Healing Idea #48----(which can be found below or by clicking on the link).

Writing and Healing Idea #48: The Seeds of a New Writing Project

[with a nod to Julie Moir Messervy, author of the Magic Land]

I’ve come to help you design a new writing project.  I walk in, shake your hand.  We sit at your kitchen table and talk about what you want.  You explain to me about the kind of writing you’ve been doing over the last year(s), but, you also tell me, you’re completely unsure about what you want to do next.  You don’t know how to begin.  You hand me some pages that you’ve written.  I read the pages.  Then I set the pages down and I listen as you tell me more about where you’ve been and where it is that maybe, just maybe, you’d like to go next. Say, for instance, that you had all the time in the world.  I ask questions.  We talk.

What should your writing project look like?  I see it as a project distilled from the elements of your imagination, your memories, and your dreams.  It is my job to help you realize and grow this writing project; to help you give birth to it and to give it form.  But first you must supply the seeds that will provide its character and its structure, and you must nourish and love it into being.

Perhaps I give you an assignment as our time together is drawing to a close.  Perhaps what I tell you is that I want you to write about the seeds.  Just one sheet of paper, one side.  Or twenty minutes of writing if that makes more sense.  What are the seeds to your next writing project?  What seeds deep inside you are watching and waiting, right now, for good soil? What seeds are poised for germination?

The Armful: A Poem by Robert Frost

[the fourth garden]

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once.
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best.
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

I chose this poem this morning because my own arms are full and have been full for the past week.

Here are the lines that strike me especially:

Extremes too hard to comprehend at once.
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.

That seems to me to be one of the tasks of writing---as well as healing---to acknowledge the truth of something, including the extremes of that something, without giving in to the temptation to oversimplify.

And I love the image he leaves there at the end--sitting down in the middle of it all.  Dropping it all in the road.  And then stacking it again---whatever it is----stacking it again in a new way--------and perhaps giving oneself plenty of time and space in which to do so.

Letting everything fall out on the ground---and then re-stacking it.

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

[the third garden]

This book, a memoir, is by a woman, a professor of English, who resigned her post at a university in Tehran, and, out of the void that opened up after this resignation, she created a sanctuary for seven of her women students.  She created this sanctuary in the dining room of her house.  And she did so with a series of novels, including more than one by Nabokov.  Thus, Reading Lolita in Tehran.  Perhaps the book is one with which you're familiar.

It’s 1995.  Outside that dining room, as Ms. Nafisi describes it, the streets of Tehran are patrolled by militia, the Blood of God, men with guns riding in a series of white Toyotas.  The women walking in these streets, are followed—watched—by the men in the Toyotas.  On the streets the women have to be vigilant.  They must wear their veils properly, without a single strand of hair showing.  They must keep their faces free of make-up, and be particularly careful not to be found walking in public with men, unless these men are their husbands or brothers or fathers.

Inside her home, Ms. Nafisi arranges the meetings such that no men are present in the house.  She tells the young women they can remove their headscarves if they like.  Some of them do.  That kind of detail—arranging the meetings such that her husband will not be in the house when they arrive and thus the young women can more freely remove their headscarves—that kind of detail seems important.  There’s a sense throughout the book, a sense that Nafisi is creating a climate.  A climate within which she will be able to create, with and for these young women, a refuge.

How does she do this?

There are clues in her descriptions:

Each would have a private diary in which she would record her responses to the novels, as well as ways in which these works and their discussions related to her personal and social experiences.  I explained that I had chosen them for this class because they seemed dedicated to the study of literature.  I mentioned that one of the criteria for the books I had chosen was their authors’ faith in the critical and almost magical power of literature.

She invites the women to write about the books.
She invites them to make personal connections with the books—to use the word I.
She chooses authors who believe in the critical—and almost magical—power of books.

She chooses, among others, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow and Henry James.

She writes:

I had a frame for the class, and had selected a number of books to read, but I was prepared to let the class shape me . . . .  Often I ask myself: did I choose my students for that class or did they choose me?  It is true that I had some specific criteria in mind when I invited them to participate, yet it seems as if they were the ones who created the class, who through some invisible agency led me to the present configuration in my living room.

She chooses the students with some care.  (or they choose her)
She lets the students shape and create the class.
She offers a frame but lets the students move and grow and speak beyond that frame.

She offers snacks.
She describes breaking the ice and formality of the first meeting by offering “the calming distraction of cream puffs and tea.”

And there’s something she seems to understand intuitively—how talking about the books eventually gave these young women a way to talk about their lives in Tehran—how coming at their lives at a slant—through fiction—allowed them to find language.  As if the novels offered a new context and this new context allowed them a way in and around to their own stories.

Nafisi writes:

Where they opened up and became excited was in our discussion of the works.  The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection, and leave aside our stories about the deans and the university and the morality squads in the streets.  There was a certain innocence with which we read these books; we read them apart from our own history and expectations, like Alice running after the White Rabbit and jumping into the hole.  This innocence paid off: I do not think that without it we could have understood our own inarticulateness.  Curiously the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.

They traveled into the books and back out into their own lives.  They went through the books and out the other side with a new way of looking at—and speaking about—and potentially writing about—their own lives.  They traveled into the books and came back out less speechless—less inarticulate.

The notion that in order to tell or write one’s story one must first find a language with which to tell it.  And for some stories this might require an entirely new narrative frame.  Novels, it seems, can sometimes offer this alternative narrative frame.  And perhaps this is the reason that reading can sometimes release writing----a kind of call and response----

Cathedral: A Book of Stories by Raymond Carver

[the second garden]

In Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer she describes how, as a child, she “loved novels in which children stepped through portals—a garden door; a wardrobe—into an alternate universe.”  Me too.  And there’s a sense in which I’m realizing Ms. Prose’s book has been for me a kind of portal—a series of such—doors opening to books. 

Some of these are books that I read nearly twenty years ago now.  Books that made me want to write:
Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge.
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
Also Raymond Carver’s Cathedral, a book of eleven stories.

I’m wondering this morning—what kind of books might make a person want to write?  What kind of writing invites writing?  Which books and stories and poems have done so for me?  Which might do so for other people?  And how do they do it?

Which are the stories that beckon?  Not only into the process of reading but also into the process of writing? Could it have something to do with the way a story begins?

Here are three beginnings from Raymond Carver’s Cathedral:

Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center.  After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite.  The cake she chose was decorated with a space ship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars, and a planet made of red frosting at the other end.  His name, SCOTTY, would be in green letters beneath the planet.  The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything when she told him the child would be eight years old next Monday.

Carlyle was in a spot.  He’d been in a spot all summer, since early June when his wife had left him.  But up until a little while ago, just a few days before he had to start meeting his classes at the high school, Carlyle hadn’t needed a sitter.  He’d been the sitter.  Every day and every night he attended to the children.  Their mother, he told them, was away on a long trip.

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night.  His wife had died.  So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut.  He called my wife from his in-laws’.  Arrangements were made.  He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station.  She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago.  But she and the blind man had kept in touch.  They made tapes and mailed them back and forth.  I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit.  He was no one I knew.  And his being blind bothered me.

(So much could be said about these three stories.  Each, and the first two especially, is a study in loss.  And what can happen in the wake of loss.  Each of the stories culminates in a conversation that changes things, a conversation that makes loss somehow more bearable.  If I were going to find a spot for these stories on my other site—One Year—I’d put them in the Tenth Month—on healing conversation.  And these conversations are unexpected—they occur between people that are strangers at the outset of the stories.  Between Scotty’s mother and the baker.  Between Carlyle and the sitter he finds for his children.  Between the speaker of that third story and the blind man.  Something happens in each of the stories.  We’re being invited in for a reason.  Look.  Look what can happen.) 

(If this book were a garden it would be a garden with benches and chairs in it for sitting—and talking.  But not ornate benches.  The seating would be both ordinary and weathered.  The garden would be a corner of a park in a neighborhood that had seen better days.  There might well be a trash can next to the bench.  But there might also be something unexpected as well—an unexpected patch of green.  Not formal.  Not planned.  Unexpectedly beautiful----)

But back to beginnings.  The doorways to stories.  The beckoning.  I’m reminded of a poem by Robert Frost, a writer who, like Carver, spoke in a kind of plain language that was ordinary at the same time that it was more than ordinary.  A language that seemed ordinary but had something large in it as well.  The poem by Frost is The Pasture.  It begins this way:

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

_______________________________________________________________

The first beginning above is from A Small Good Thing.

The second is from Fever.

The third is from the title story, Cathedral.