Diane Morrow | Writing and Healing

The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife’s Memoir by Patricia Harman

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 6, 2011 in Blog, Healing Books

Oh, I do love this book. Reading it has been like coming across a lovely song—a voice—that I didn’t know existed. A surprise on a late summer day. This summer I took several crates of books to the used bookstore to trade for credit. Much of my credit I’m saving for when students start putting in their requests off my booklist, but while I was there the other week I idled through the shelves and came across this memoir by midwife and nurse practitioner Patricia Harman. I opened to the first line: I have insomnia…and I drink a little. I might as well tell you. In the middle of the night, I drink scotch when I can’t sleep. Actually, I can’t sleep most nights; actually, every night. Even before I stopped delivering babies, I wanted to write about the women. How can you not like a book that begins this way? I suppose I feel a connection because it’s the kind of memoir I had at one time thought I might write, and then never did. It also takes me back to the summer I spent in West Virginia between my third and fourth years of medical school, working in a clinic and getting to know some of the lay midwives in the county. And then in Washington, DC, when I worked as a family physician, I was fortunate to work alongside midwives. I’ve more than once dreamed about them. At different times during my life, when I’ve been in need of help or company, I’ve dreamt about a midwife and it’s always been such a healing dream. So I have a tender spot for midwives. This the reason I bought the book, and was predisposed to like it. And then I took it out to the porch on a summer afternoon, one of my last summer afternoons before returning to school—I’d been awake that morning uncharacteristically at 4 AM, unable to get back to sleep, anxious like a kid before the first day. I took the book out to the porch and I read beneath the fan and drifted into sleep and it was like spending time with the midwives again. Waking with that kind of calm rested feeling like you’ve just been with someone who knows something and this something that they know—you might not even be able to put your finger on it—but it’s just what you need. I’m realizing something—I’m writing everything about my experience of reading the book, and not so much about the book itself. This is not turning into a book review. But sometimes that’s the way it is with a book. It’s the feel of a book that matters. The voice and the images become what matters. A nurse midwife in West Virginia. The women who come to see her and they strip off their clothes and put on that thin blue cotton gown for the exam—and they tell her things. Stories. And then the midwife and her stories become a kind of good company. See also: Cure Cottage The Blue Cotton...

Tuscany

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 2, 2011 in Blog, Healing Places

Some years ago now, while staying alone in a cabin at Wildacres, a retreat center in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I had a dream about a former patient who I will here call Nora. In the dream I’d gone to visit her. There were several of us visiting, sitting on chairs and couches. She was presenting a slide show. I understood this was a slide show of places she’d been. When I woke, I had the sense, as one does sometimes after dreams, that I was meant to be paying close attention, but on first waking I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember any of the individual pictures. Nora was a teacher, fifty-seven years old, bright, very articulate. She had a PhD in art history, was conversant with entire centuries I know next to nothing about. She also had metastatic breast cancer. She liked, she told me once, to read Samurai novels, these novels, I learned, set in seventeenth century Japan. She told me that she liked the way the setting in these novels was inextricably entwined with the action, so that you were always acutely aware as you read of the slant of light in a particular scene and what flowers were blossoming, and whether, for instance, a particular petal had fallen. Nora, herself, was acutely aware of setting. She had a strong sense of aesthetics, a love of visual beauty. For several years she’d owned an art gallery in Manhattan. She’d come to North Carolina with her husband, taught art history at the School of the Arts here for several years, and then taught Language Arts in one of the middle schools, this until she got her diagnosis of breast cancer, and then got word that it had spread into the liver and into the bone. Two years prior to the dream in which she’d showed me her slides, she’d put no small amount of energy into planning a trip to Commonweal, a retreat center in Bolinas, California considered by many to be the premier cancer retreat center in this country, a stunning place located on sixty acres in the Point Reyes National Seashore. She was very much looking forward to it. But just a little over a week before she was to leave for Commonweal, Nora fell down in the driveway of her home and broke a vertebra, this landing her in the hospital and effectively canceling her trip. The next time I saw her she told me that she knew now that that had been her last window—her last chance to take a trip of this magnitude. Her belly by this point was swollen from the tumors that herd arisen in her liver. Her bones ached. She was, she told me, very very tired. But she also told me this. That not long after she broke her vertebra, and came to realize she was not going to make it to Commonweal after all, she had a series of dreams. These were dreams, she said, about places she’d traveled. Tuscany figured largely in one of them. When this series of dreams ended, she told me she understood now that all of the places were deep inside her, the memories, that she carried these places with her now, and it would no longer be necessary for...

Sakena Yacoobi and the Afghan Institute of Learning

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 23, 2011 in Blog, Healing Corridor

A little over a year ago I read Greg Mortenson’s Stones into Schools, the sequel to his Three Cups of Tea and was very moved by it. An American, Mortenson describes his work collaborating with Afghan communities to provide schools for girls, while, at the same time, weaving his narrative with Afghan history and the role of education in empowering women and transforming communities. I put the book on my independent reading list for my students and ended up telling a number of people that they had to read this book. Then, in April, along with countless others, I was disillusioned when Jon Krakauer (author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air) published an essay exposing fault lines in the Mortenson story. I went online to discover what I could. A piece by Marc Maxson, a teacher who has done some work with Global Giving, caught my attention: The real sad part is that for every Greg that destroys our public trust in non-profits, there are 99 other legitimate organizations doing the same work that suffer from it. The public generalizes their distrust to other organizations. So I am here to tell you that the real Greg Mortenson – by which I mean a leader in Afghanistan who has put over a hundred thousand girls in school and never exaggerated her impact, nor the daily threats she faces on her life for doing so, is none other than Sakena Yacoobi. I happened to be reading Half the Sky at the time and then realized, aha, Yacoobi was one of the changemakers featured in the book. I can’t fully know Greg Mortenson’s story. At best, he seems to have stretched the truth in places as well as perhaps allowed his organization to grow faster than he was able to sustain. What I’ve realized though is that I can take what’s good from his book – his enthusiasm for the role of education as transformative in Afghanistan – and, rather than generalizing my distrust, simply transfer my enthusiasm. Thus far, everything I’ve been able to find about Sakena Yacoobi points to the integrity and wisdom of her work. Sakena Yacoobi is an Afghan Muslim woman, born and raised in Herat, who was able, with her parents’ blessing, to receive an education. She’s been paying this gift forward ever since. Unable to attend Kabul University because of violence, she came to the United States, completing college and then a master’s degree in public health. She was working as a health consultant and college teacher in the U.S. when, in the early nineties, she traveled to Pakistan to visit Afghan refugee camps. Moved by what she saw in the camps, especially among the women and children, she moved to Pakistan, eventually bringing her work into Afghanistan. During that time, the Taliban barred girls from receiving an education. She responded by organizing secret underground schools in people’s homes, eighty in all. In 1995, she founded the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), a grassroots organization whose mission is to provide education, especially to women and children. The AIL provides schools and teacher-training along with legal and human rights workshops. They’ve also expanded into health clinics and the training of nurse-midwives. Throughout, the emphasis is on training women to become leaders so that these centers...

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 16, 2011 in Blog, Healing Places, Healing Poetry

This is a poem for the middle of the night. Here are the first six lines: When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things His words make me want to respond in kind. To echo and borrow his rhythms: When despair for my life and the life of those whom I love grows in me and when I wake in the night and the fear is there like an old visitor, I go out to the kitchen and I make, again, a mug of hot cocoa, and I remember, if only for a moment, the breezeway in my grandmother’s house, the coolness against my bare feet, the way it led out to the patio and the small table there, the fence around the yard, and the flowers against the fence, hollyhocks and four o’clocks and lilac. I feel how that place is still present because I can remember it and with that I come into the peace of my grandmother’s garden. See also: The Peace of Wild Things One Year of Writing and Healing, Chapter 1, Draft: Creating a Healing...

Collecting and Responding to Poetry with Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 9, 2011 in Blog, Healing Poetry

A video arrived in my email box a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of The Academy of American Poets: One excerpt in particular strikes me: I can never imagine how someone would fall in love with poetry and stop reading poems. But I think that people often talk themselves out of a bit of responding, which I also think is as important as collecting. We collect poems that encourage us to think in a way we need to think, or look at the world. But then we also allow ourselves—whatever our circumstances, or whatever our past history with writing—to write a little bit. I love that. The importance of collecting. But then to take it the next step. To write a little. To allow ourselves to write a little. Whatever our circumstances. I think something happens when we write in response to a poem—at least I’ve noticed this in myself. For one thing, I read the poem more carefully. I begin to hear the words and rhythms of it inside my head. The poem becomes more a part of me. I think there are a number of ways that we get “talked out” of responding to poetry. Sometimes we’ve had bad experiences with this in the past (and mostly with teachers, I’m afraid). Sometimes we think the experts own it—or that we could never know enough to respond. But we do know enough. My high school students, for instance, know enough. I know enough. We all do. At the very least, we each contain a storehouse of experiences and perceptions (we’re the expert on those) and we know enough to begin to make connections from the poem to this storehouse. Or we know enough to begin to make connections to other poems—or to books or movies or to a fragment of overheard conversation. We know enough to ask questions. To wonder about a poem. To speculate. I wonder what she was thinking when she wrote this. I wonder what she was feeling. I wonder who she had in mind as she was writing. I wonder why I chose to collect this poem. I think something powerful can happen when we begin to collect and respond to poetry. When we begin to keep notebooks—or folders with scraps of paper. When we begin to intercalate our own words between and among the words of the poets. And then when we begin to share these. See also: A Secret About What A Poem Can Do to Us. A piece about Michelle Bloom’s song, Last Night As I Was Sleeping, which shows what can be created out of a response to a poem. The Academy of American...

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