Healing Web
This is room dedicated to touching on some of the healing work being done around the world—and includes a few posts on such. This room is in its infancy. So many possibilities for expansion. Meanwhile, please feel free to explore the bits I’ve managed to collect so far.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons
Emotional Baggage Check: Song as Medicine
A young woman in my sophomore class shared this website with me–and then with the whole class. She told us how the website had helped her during a difficult time–how she was able to check in some difficult baggage and receive some genuine help–and now she tries to go onto the site on the weekends and carry baggage for someone else–pay it forward. First, it’s a visually attractive site–simple and elegant–with few choices. You can “check it”–that is check in a piece of your own emotional baggage by writing...
The Dalai Lama in Williamsburg
I had the opportunity last week to see the Dalai Lama speak in Williamsburg. He’s currently making a tour of small colleges and he was appearing at William and Mary, where my daughter is a student. It made for a delightful visit. Tickets for the event had sold out within 15 minutes. More than eight thousand people attended. The line into the arena began two and a half hours before the event—and these were all people with tickets. So interesting. The student who introduced him said we would likely...
Through Corridors of Light: Poems of Consolation during Illness
I have just become aware of a new poetry anthology published in the UK for people who are dealing with illness. The anthology is edited by John Andrew Denny, who writes, at his website: I was ill for more than twenty years with ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. For most of that time I was bedbound, in pain and at times deeply depressed, and I was helped to an extraordinary degree by reading and meditating on poetry that addressed my own thoughts and feelings about my illness. In an email conversation,...
KIVA: Extending the Healing Corridor
This month I’m posting the fourth chapter of One Year of Writing and Healing: Gathering Provisions. It has to do with figuring out what’s essential for healing—what tangible objects, what words, what stories—and then beginning, perhaps rather deliberately, to gather them. And of course writing along the way to question and reflect on the process. It seems somehow appropriate then to also post this month a piece on Kiva, an organization that allows people like you and me—people with perhaps only 25 dollars or so to spare this month—to...
HODI: Soldiers of Peace
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...
826 Valencia
I believe in the power of writing. I believe magical things can happen when spaces are provided for people to write, and to be nurtured in that writing. I believe something especially powerful can happen when these spaces are provided for young people. And say that you could have a pirate store at the entrance to such a place, a store that sells eye patches and peg legs and vials of “Scurvy Begone”? A place where young people could have fun while they were finding their writing voice. Might...