Archives | Writing and Healing

If by Joni Mitchell and Rudyard Kipling

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 24, 2008 in Healing Poetry

If you can fill the journey Of a minute With sixty seconds worth of wonder and delight Then The Earth is yours And Everything that’s in it But more than that I know You’ll be alright You’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 cow Rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim But the poem as a whole struck me as not quite 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 you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you But make allowance for their doubting too, Joni Mitchell’s first verse: If you can keep your head While all about you People are losing theirs and blaming you If you can trust yourself When everybody doubts you And 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 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...

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...