Diane Morrow | Writing and Healing

The Origami of Re-Membering by Lorraine Hedtke

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 1, 2008 in Uncategorized

A brief essay. A new way of looking at the after-life? [full text available online] What speaks to me in this piece is the title—the juxtaposition—origami and remembering. What speaks to me are certain passages. Like this one. The ancient Japanese art of folding paper has fascinated me since childhood. . . Now as a I speak with people after their loved one has died, I recall the beauty of the folding metaphor. I like to think of each person’s life as having the posthumous potential to become an elaborate folded work of art. With each retelling of the stories of someone’s life, especially when these are being told to a new person—someone who never met the deceased—it is as if the deceased person’s stories are being folded into seams and creases that give contour and texture to the lives of the living. I like to think of each person’s life as having the posthumous potential to become an elaborate folded work of art. A pink lily? A crane? A white swan? There are so many ways, it would seem, of talking about the after-life. What happens after. For me, this one—the after-life as a new shape here—in the process of becoming folded and re-folded through stories—this feels to me like a new way of looking. A way potentially rich with possibilities. A pink lily.A crane.A white swan. And who knows? One shape could be folded and refolded into yet another. Anything could happen.________________________________________________ Of interest:The pink lily and blue crane and how to fold them can be found here. The white swan can be found...

If by Joni Mitchell and Rudyard Kipling

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 24, 2008 in Uncategorized

Lyrics from the final song on Joni Mitchell’s CD, Shine2007[full text available on-line] If you can fill the journeyOf a minuteWith sixty seconds worth of wonder and delightThenThe Earth is yoursAnd Everything that's in itBut more than thatI knowYou'll be alrightYou'll be alright. Just one minute. Sixty seconds. That’s all. But first, for just a moment, a note on a poem I didn’t choose. It’s November, not long before Thanksgiving, and I was trying to think of a poem that speaks to gratitude. The first poem that came to mind was the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins about dappled things. I was thinking how naming might have something to do with gratitude. Naming being the first step. I found the poem. It’s called Pied Beauty. And it’s a nice poem with truly lovely images: Skies of couple-colour as a brinded cowRose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim But the poem as a whole struck me as not quite as inclusive as what I was looking for— And then I was listening to music the other day and came upon this rendering of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, If, which begins as he does but with a few slight changes. Rudyard Kipling’s first stanza: If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt youBut make allowance for their doubting too, Joni Mitchell's first verse: If you can keep your headWhile all about youPeople are losing theirs and blaming youIf you can trust yourselfWhen everybody doubts youAnd make allowance for their doubting too. So the men in the first stanza of Kipling’s poem become everybody. And the line breaks change, and some punctuation. I went looking for something that might speak to Ms. Mitchell’s thoughts in adapting Kipling's poem and found a nice piece at the library on her website. About this particular song, If, she writes: My friend called me up and read this Rudyard Kipling poem to me over the phone. As soon as I heard it, it resonated with me, and I wanted to set it to music. I love the opening line: 'If you can keep your head/While all about you/People are losing theirs and blaming you.' So, I wrote down the words, went to my house in Vancouver and made a song out of it. It's the only song that I wrote up there on the guitar. The poem is written from a soldier's perspective, so I rewrote some of the poetry. Kipling wrote, 'If we can fill the journey/Of a minute/With 60 seconds worth of distance run/Then you'll be a man, my son." I disagree with him, philosophically speaking, that endurance gives you the inheritance of the earth. My experience tells me that the earth is innocence, with wonder and delight, which is renewable. The blue heron on my property flies overhead, and I'm a 3 year old. I'm filled with wonder and delight. So I rewrote that part of the poem as 'If you can fill the journey/Of a minute/With 60 seconds worth of wonder and delight.' Kipling's version is macho; I wanted to get the feminine principle into the poetry. This morning I’m grateful for many things and one of them is poetry, this poem in particular. I'm...

When I Am Asked by Lisel Mueller

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 17, 2008 in Uncategorized

A poem on poetry as a place for grief 1989 [full text available on-line] The poem begins: When I am asked How I began writing poems,I talk about the indifference of nature. Ms. Mueller’s poem is set in June. This indifference of nature is felt, we learn, because her mother has died, and because it’s this brilliant summer day. Everything’s blooming. The outside world looking so drastically different from the way the inside world feels. Nothing was black or brokenand not a leaf fell Is it easier to grieve when there’s a streak of black in the landscape?When something in the outside world is broken?Is it easier to grieve what needs to be grieved when the air is gray?Or maybe when the world’s not celebrating a holiday? I went looking for this poem, When I Am Asked, after I wrote about Frost’s poem, My November Guest. And at first I thought, oh, maybe better to save this one until June. But then I started thinking about how brilliant holiday decorations can be—or golden maples—the brilliance of colored lights—and how all of that, for a certain person at a certain time (and all of us have likely been there at one point or another—or we will be)—how all of that could have the potential to feel indifferent. Where can grief find a place during an American Thanksgiving? Where can it find resonance?Solace?Or where in the world can grief find a place when the world all seems to be celebrating Christmas? (They’re not actually. A lot of the world isn’t Christian. And of those that are, many—more than we think—find Christmas a difficult time. But it can seem as if everyone is celebrating Christmas. Everyone else whooping it up.) And all of this complicated by the sensory qualities of the holidays—all the very particular smells and music and the sound of that Salvation Army bell—and the way any one of these might trigger memory and emotion, unbidden. I’m interested in where the speaker of this poem finds her own resonance for grief amid outer brilliance. I sat on a gray stone bench. . .and placed my griefin the mouth of language,the only thing that would grieve with me. Language as good company. I’ve had this notion for a while—certainly not mine alone—that if one person or creature gets it—really gets it—if grief finds its true company and recognition—then it can begin to be carried—and perhaps released. I think any one of us can bear grief—or bear it better—say, with less suffering—if just one creature in the world really gets it well. For Chekhov it was his horse.For Lisle it's language itself—poetry.___________________________________________________ See also: A piece from One Year of Writing and Healing on Chekhov’s story, Grief An interview with Ms. Mueller from 1997, the year that she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry The poem Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden, so memorably and beautifully recited aloud in the movie, Four Weddings and a Funeral. A poem that also speaks to resonance. And here is the actor, John Hannah, on YouTube reciting the Auden poem. Good company, I...

My November Guest by Robert Frost

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 10, 2008 in Uncategorized

A poem in which Sorrow appears as guest and companion 1913 MY Sorrow, when she’s here with me, Thinks these dark days of autumn rain Are beautiful as days can be; She loves the bare, the withered tree; She walks the sodden pasture lane. Her pleasure will not let me stay. She talks and I am fain to list: She’s glad the birds are gone away, She’s glad her simple worsted gray Is silver now with clinging mist. The desolate, deserted trees, The faded earth, the heavy sky, The beauties she so truly sees, She thinks I have no eye for these, And vexes me for reason why. Not yesterday I learned to know The love of bare November days Before the coming of the snow, But it were vain to tell her so, And they are better for her praise. Sorrow as feminine? A companion with a name? And it would seem that she doesn’t just tolerate the gray dark days that November can bring. She thinks they’re beautiful. She seems to love the grays and silvers. Not just endure. She loves them. She loves the bare days. The bare trees. Even the desolation. She praises it. Seems to even find in it a kind of balm. Not long ago I read a piece in a blog I read regularly, Furious Seasons. The blog is written by Philip Dawdy, a journalist in Seattle who writes critically, and quite well, about mental health issues. In the piece of which I’m thinking, he writes about the onset of fall and winter in Seattle, the beginning of a long gray season. He speaks to what has worked for him in his own ongoing, and periodic, acquaintance with depression. He writes of how critical it is to remember to eat. To remember to sleep. To get outside when he can. To make some time to socialize. And then he writes about this other subtler part—not becoming depressed about getting depressed. Which I think gets at the heart of something. He writes: My experience is if I am not falling into despair over the possible onset of depression then I don't get depressed. Which I suppose proves something about all this mindfulness talk you read in depression recovery circles. Reading this, I found myself thinking of Pema Chodron, the Buddhist teacher. She has this wonderful image for negative emotions—or emotions that we’ve come to think of as negative or unpleasant. She calls them Wisdoms in Disguise. One place she talks about these wisdoms is in a conversation with the author Alice Walker, a conversation that was recorded and which is readily available (links below). She says this, referring to the work of one of her teachers, Chogyam Trungpa: So when I read Rinpoche what he basically said was, he said there’s nothing wrong with negativity, he said that there’s a lot you can learn from it, it’s a very strong creative energy. The problem is negative negativity—you don’t just stay with negativity, you spin off into all the endless cycle of things you say to yourself about it. . . For instance, in Vajayana Buddhism, they talk about how each of the powerful negative energies such as anger, envy, lust, jealousy,...

Beautiful Boy by David Sheff

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 3, 2008 in Uncategorized

A journalist’s memoir of his son’s addiction 2008 My favorite thing about David Sheff’s book is his ability to hold two entirely different thoughts in the same paragraph—even in the same sentence. There’s nothing to be done, we have to do everything we can do. We have done everything we can do, we have more to do. Vicki and I agonize over it. Paradox is at the center of this book. And agony. The catalyst for this paradox? Nic, the author’s son, a kind of golden boy—bright, privileged, a surfer, a gifted writer, who, as a young teenager begins trying drugs and who, by his late teens, is trapped in a horrific and destructive addiction to crystal meth. This can be agonizing to watch, even as a reader. Especially agonizing when the bursts of recovery don’t last—when Nic relapses. Again. And again. (I have this memory, years ago, working with addicts, sitting at a meeting, after one of the best and brightest, a young man a full year sober—he’d just relapsed. I remember his friend standing to speak, saying how easy it would be to be furious at him. But then he remembered—his own relapses—how long it took—how long the process took. And he recited one of those lines that people in recovery sometimes use: It takes what it takes. That line has always stuck with me. Recovery as a process. Not just getting sober once. But again—and again—and again. It takes what it takes, even if part of what it takes is another relapse.) Beautiful Boy is about recovery as a process. Not just one treatment facility but several. For this particular family, insurance and other resources allowed them to make repeated treatment a reality. And it’s hard, while reading, not to think of all the families in similar situations who are without such resources for recovery. But that, I think, is another book. In this book, David Sheff, a skilled journalist and an eminently readable writer, is able to give us a feel of the process, his process, as it is happening. In the middle of it. How many times have I promised myself never to do this again, never again live in a state of panic, waiting for Nic to show up or not show up, to check himself in. Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. I will not do it again. I am doing it again. It’s this kind of immediacy that makes the book powerful. And I see this book as good company for any parent who has ever agonized over how much to help when an older child is in trouble. Or for any person who has ever been called an enabler, and who has said now, hey, wait a minute, what’s the difference between enabling and helping, how do you know? And when do you know? Isn’t it sometimes, well, kind of complicated? This book is, among other things, about such complications. Can it be of use to the next person in some kind of similar situation? Maybe. A little. In the introduction, Sheff writes: Why does it help to read others’ stories? It’s not only that misery loves company, because (I learned) misery is too self-absorbed to want much company. Others’ experiences did...

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