Diane Morrow | Writing and Healing

Enough: A Poem for a November Morning

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 8, 2011 in Blog, Healing Poetry

I like this poem by Jeffrey Harrison for its apparent simplicity. For its timeliness—a warm cloudless November morning. For its honesty—that surprise toward the end of the first stanza when the speaker of the poem admits to a mind that is not quiet but is instead roiled with personal grievance. It’s a gift, this cloudless November morning warm enough for you to walk without a jacket along your favorite path. The rhythmic shushing of your feet through fallen leaves should be enough to quiet the mind, so it surprises you when you catch yourself telling off your boss for a decade of accumulated injustices, all the things you’ve never said circling inside you. I love the way the wind picks up in this poem—and it shifts and changes everything and it’s as if the whole day is sighing its wise advice. It’s the rising wind that pulls you out of it, and you look up to see a cloud of leaves swirling in sunlight, flickering against the blue and rising above the treetops, as if the whole day were sighing, Let it go, let it go, for this moment at least, let it all go. I love the way the speaker of this poem goes on a walk and how it’s while walking that the thorny problem emerges—an entire decade of problems—but it’s also while walking that the problem is lifted up and carried on the wind. And I love that the poem is entitled “Enough.” Enough of that personal grievance circling around and around in a loop like all our old obsessions. And then there’s that other sense of enough that seems so right for November—that sense of plenty. In this moment—no matter who we are and no matter what we are and no matter what we’re doing—in some very real sense that is enough. A full text of the poem, “Enough” by Jeffrey Harrison If you scroll down on this page you can read the poem as a Text Flow. This is also available as an app–a month of free daily poems that are formatted in a Text Flow pattern (animated, with one line or word appearing at a time). It looks like after the first month of free poems that a year of daily poetry costs three...

November Update: Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 2, 2011 in Blog, Book

I’ve just now posted my third chapter of One Year of Writing and Healing: Healing as Quest. I’m trying in this chapter to get at this notion of once one begins to consider that anything along the way might be part of the quest–instead of just pure chaos–something begins to shift. Chapter 3 OYWH Yesterday I posted an excerpt from the chapter, in which I write about Jonathan Shay’s fine book, Odysseus in America. The project I’m featuring in my Healing Corridor is HODI: Soldiers of Peace. This is an inspiring project a woman has begun in Kenya where young men and women are offered healing alternatives to violence. There’s a moving video about young men from different tribes playing soccer rather than destroying each other. Well worth a look. I also did some close reading of the poem, Kindness, a couple weeks ago. It’s a poem I’m trying to keep in the back of mind–and sometimes the forefront–as I go into the month of November. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. Wishing for you kindness in this month....

Odysseus in America: A Book for Healing and Writing

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 1, 2011 in Blog, Healing Books

Let me begin with a story about Bear. Bear served one tour in Vietnam as a sergeant in the infantry. During that single tour he was ordered to slit the throat of a wounded enemy soldier. He followed orders. He saw close friends die, including one particularly horrific incident when his platoon, after a night ambush, discovered two headless bodies of their own men; a ways out they came upon the two heads set up on stakes. His platoon went berserk after the incident, cutting off the heads of enemy soldiers, collecting ears. They became known as the headhunters. Back home, a full thirty years out from military discharge, Bear is afraid he’s “losing it”. Bear sleeps on the couch, separate from his wife, with a knife under his pillow. He “walks the perimeter” of his land at night, looking for snipers and ambushes. His job at the post office is in jeopardy because of numerous incidents of violence. He attacks people, sometimes without any provocation. More than once, he’s had to leave work in order to keep himself from killing someone. Jonathan Shay, author of Odysseus in America, looks at this violent man and sees a deep and resonant connection with the Greek hero, Odysseus. I teach high school English now. When I was first starting out, two years ago, I found myself looking for ways to take classic works that are taught in high school—works like The Iliad and The Odyssey and Oedipus Rex—and make them relevant for fifteen and sixteen-year-olds. My search yielded more than I’d hoped for. It led me to the work of Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who works with war veterans in Boston and who has won for this work the prestigious MacArthur award. Shay was forty years old and conducting research in neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital when he suffered a stroke that left him temporarily paralyzed on his left side. While recovering, he decided to read classic works that he’d never gotten around to. He read, among others, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Following his recovery, and with his research stalled, he took a temporary position filling in for a psychiatrist at an outpatient clinic, counseling troubled vets. Connections became apparent—and then multiplied. Shay began to see Achilles in every soldier who’d ever felt betrayed by a commander. He saw Odysseus in every soldier who was having difficulty returning home. Odysseus, Shay reminds us, is the last soldier to make it home from Troy. It takes him ten full years, and for at least some part of the journey he, like Bear, remains in “combat mode.” His first act following combat is a violent one in which he and his men raid the coastal city of Ismarus. Odysseus subsequently travels to Hades, the underworld, where, walking among the dead, he must confront his sense of loss and guilt. He is forced to maneuver between the twin dangers of Scylla and Charbydis. What Shay came to realize is that this ancient story could make a soldier who was struggling with readjustment to civilian life feel less alone—part of something much larger. Shay speaks to this in an interview. “One of the things they appreciate,” he says, “is the sense that they’re part of a long historical context—that they are not personally deficient...

HODI: Soldiers of Peace

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 25, 2011 in Blog, Healing Corridor

They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. –from Isaiah, the New International Version of the Bible I’d been intending to feature projects in my healing corridor which primarily promote writing, education and healing, but an email last month prompted me to rethink and expand my definition of healing. After I published my piece on Sakeena Yacoobi at the Afghan Institute of Learning, I got a nice email from Marc Maxson at Global Giving. (His was the site where I’d read a piece on Greg Mortenson’s problematic work in Afghanistan—Maxson was the one to say that Sakeena Yacoobi is the real deal.) In any case, after I wrote about her, he suggested I also take a look at a woman in Kenya, Fatuma Abdulkadir Adan, who runs HODI, the Horn of Africa Development Initiative, a peace center for children in Marsabit, a town in Northern Kenya. She is transforming the lives of young male soldiers in her village AND the lives of young girls kidnapped into marriage by offering them an alternative—football. (or what we here call soccer.) I think the best way to convey a sense of her work is through this excerpt from the Soldiers of Peace video, a documentary which I plan on showing to my students next month. The excerpt here is about seven minutes long. Watching this video, I am moved to tears—especially seeing how she navigated when conflict arose among the young men playing soccer. I feel like I have found yet another teacher, and a source of inspiration. If it’s true that a new story can change everything–and I believe it can–then Ms. Adan is changing everything for her village by leading these young people. At the same time, she is leading all of us by example. The old story may be, in many instances, a violent one, but this new story offers a tangible, creative way toward peace. You can learn more about her organization and also donate at Global Giving. You can find out more about the documentary, Soldiers for Peace, at Telegraph 21. You can read about Sakeena Yacoobi’s work with young women in Afghanistan at my healing corridor here. You can read about Marc Maxson’s work with storytelling here and...

A Conversation with the Poem, Kindness

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 18, 2011 in Blog, Healing Poetry

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Oh. I didn’t get this the first three or four or five times I read this but now I’m reading you more slowly and I’m seeing this bus ride through the landscape as a metaphor for how endless a time of desolation can feel while we’re in the middle of it. This time I’m reading more slowly. I see the line “between the regions of kindness” and I see the bus ride in a new way. In hindsight we can see it’s just a bus ride—between places—the kindness will return—but in the middle of the desolate time it can seem to last forever. Yes. That’s so often what gets us in trouble. That seeming. And I’m trying to think now what my own metaphor for that desolate time between might be. I don’t know yet. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Yes, that I see. And it’s like what Marie Howe wrote in her poem in one of my favorite books of poetry of all time, What the Living Do. That poem about her brother who was dying and how he was trying to wake her up: And he said, What surprises me is that you don’t / And I said, I do. And he said, What?/ And I said, Know that you’re going to die./ And he said, No, I mean know that you are. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. These are words that just resonate for me—till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. The size of the cloth. I so love that. How enormous it might be. And how that gives a sense of perspective to each of our own threads. I once dreamed a whale and somehow I understood that I was going to need to digest this whale one bit at a time. So enormous. The size of the whale. The size of the cloth. The size of all sorrows laid end to end and pieced together. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have...

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