Archives | Writing and Healing

Emotional Baggage Check: Song as Medicine

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 25, 2015 in Blog, Healing Corridor, Healing Poetry, Writing and Healing Prompts

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 briefly about it–or you can “carry it”–carry someone else’s baggage for a moment. The way to carry someone’s baggage is simply to read what they’ve posted–the problem they’re dealing with–and then send them a link to a song that you think might help them with whatever they’re dealing with. Song as antidote. Song as medicine. Not unlike a poem as medicine. This not a cure-all, of course. But a beautifully simple idea. You can also send along a few encouraging words with the song link if you like. Choosing either path could lead to an opportunity for writing and healing: condensing one’s most pressing problem into a brief description (no more than 1000 characters) or responding to someone else’s baggage–choosing the song–and composing a response (again no more than 1000 characters). What might your emotional baggage look like in 1000 characters or less? What response would you long to hear? What response to someone else’s baggage could itself become a kind of medicine? For me, hearing that this thoughtful young woman in my class had found the website useful–and was now moved to give back–gave the site some credibility. So this morning I decided to try it out. I clicked on “Carry it,” and read a brief and moving story by a young woman in England. There’s a surprising and appealing intimacy about the site. An opportunity for positive, if fleeting, connection–sending a bit of medicine out into the world. The story the young woman checked in is confidential. But here’s the song I sent: “When it Don’t Come Easy.” Emotional Baggage Check is here. A brief article from 2011 about the original history of the site, which was founded by Robyn Overstreet, can be found at Wired. Lyrics to Patty Griffin’s “When It Don’t Come Easy” can be found...

What I Want by Alicia Ostriker

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 11, 2015 in Blog, Healing Places, Healing Poetry

This is a poem about slowing down and it seems like it might be just right for January, for the quiet space that can open up after the flurry of December. And about what can happen in that quiet. It follows nicely on Pablo Neruda’s poem, “Keeping Quiet,” and seems to spring from that same place. It begins: Yes, that’s what I want right now, Just that sensation Of my mind’s gradual Deceleration, as if I Took my foot off the gas And the Buick rolled to a stop. I can feel that—the quiet after the engine ceases its noise. And I love in this poem what she later suggests can emerge out of the quiet: Let’s try to listen to the announcements Of the inner mind And its committee of guides. They require silence, They demand respect, like teachers In a rowdy classroom—the kids Are in the cloakroom throwing galoshes But the teacher wants to introduce A visitor, a foreign child who waits With downcast eyes, lashes like brown feathers On his flushed silk cheeks. What does my inner mind have on its mind? Ah, the inner mind could emerge—but it might be shy at first—and it might need to wait for the kids to quit throwing their galoshes—for them to look up and realize this visitor might have something interesting—and even important—to say. The full poem can be found at Poetry Foundation. (It spreads over two pages so you need to navigate to the second page to see the full poem.) In a note at the end of the poem, it states that it was written at the beginning of a week-long retreat. The photo of a gray cheeked thrush can be found at Audubon. The bird is described on the site this way: “All the brown-backed thrushes can be shy and hard to see, but the Gray-cheek is perhaps the most elusive. During migration it hides in dense woods, slipping away when a birder approaches. On its far northern nesting grounds it may be more easily seen, especially in late evening, when it sings from...