Healing Poetry
The Buddha’s Last Instruction by Mary Oliver
During a bittersweet week of graduations, watching a whole flock of students move on, my heart full with their moving, I keep coming back to this poem. Now, only this morning, does it occur to me that the poem describes a kind of graduation speech–a person, in this case Siddhartha Gautama, trying to condense what he learned into a few words. The poem begins this way: “Make of yourself a light,” said the Buddha, before he died. 5 words. Make of yourself a light. The speaker of Mary Oliver’s poem connects this instruction to the rising of the sun itself. I think of this every morning as the east begins to tear off its many...
Read MoreI must go, I will go: Poetry as Respite and Transformation
In the introduction to his poetry anthology, Through Corridors of Light, which I wrote about a few weeks back, John Andrew Denny writes about how poetry came to offer a respite from the cabin fever imposed by illness. He’d been suffering with ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (what is sometimes called CFIDS) when a poem, arriving on a postcard from a friend, catalyzed a shift in his experience. The poem was John Masefield’s Sea Fever. His wife had the genius to blow the poem up to poster size and put it up on his bedroom wall. He writes: Until then I had spent most of my days lying on my back, gazing at the ceiling and half-listening to the...
Read MoreOpening the Door of Mercy
Last week I shared and analyzed an essay with my sophomores: “Opening the Door of Mercy,” an essay by Karen Round published as part of the “This I Believe” series on NPR. I couldn’t resist discovering the vivid language in her essay and rearranging it into a found poem, something I’ve discovered is helping me read more closely—and attend to language and form. So. . . here are her words rearranged on the page, a kind of distillation of the essay. The sky darkening. The silhouette of a woman sagging on our threshold. Our location forces difficult choices. Wisdom advises to act a Good Samaritan is to be naïve, risk terrible...
Read MoreThrough 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, he also writes about a connection between reading poetry and writing, something I find of particular interest: The initial reason I compiled Through Corridors of Light was...
Read MoreIndra’s Net
From The Open Road by Pico Iyer Chapter Four, The Philosopher When the Dalai Lama speaks of interdependence all he is really saying is that we are all a part of a single body. Perhaps it’s not surprising he is famous for his laughter, the sudden eruption of helpless giggles traveling to the point where everything is connected, our fascination with division hilarious. Quarreling over money is like taking a ten-dollar-bill out of your right-hand pocket and then, after a great deal of fanfare and contention, putting it in your left. ____________________________ See also: The Open Road by Pico Iyer, Part One Indra’s net at Wikipedia, the...
Read MoreThe Open Road by Pico Iyer
I am rereading The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Pico Iyer, a journalist and novelist, has known the Dalai Lama for decades, first meeting him with his father when he was an adolescent. In this impressionistic biography he peels back layers of the Dalai Lama to present him in nine different facets. The first chapter—the first facet—is The Conundrum. In it I found this, a kind of poem: We are not talking about God We are not talking about Nirvana We are only talking about how to become a more compassionate human being. At times he pulls out a piece of tissue and polishes his glasses A metaphor He has taken off...
Read MoreMusee des Beaux Arts by WH Auden
“It’s like a whole universe unto itself. That’s one of the reasons I really love it.” I first learned about this poem from an art teacher. I was doing an independent study with her and she was trying to get me to see connections between writing and visual art. This was my first assignment—to look at this poem and the painting that had inspired it. The title of Auden’s poem refers to the museum in Brussels where he encountered a painting by Peter Breugel—Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. (The painting is now believed by the museum to be based on a lost original of Breugel’s.) In any case, here is a larger image: (Do you see the legs in the...
Read MoreAbout Me
I'm a former physician, now a high school English teacher, returning to Writing and Healing because it's one of those topics that just will not let me go. I'm working on a book now, transforming my previous site, One Year of Writing and Healing, into a more coherent form, as well as adding a lot of new material. If you feel so moved, I'd love to have you be a part of it. You can find your invitation under Book above and also on my home page.