Archives | Writing and Healing

Healing Circle: A Recommended Book

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 22, 2006 in Recommended Books

I’ve read Healing Circle more than once since I first got it several years ago. More than twice. How best to introduce it? It’s such a vast book. Two editors. Fifteen contributors. Fifteen separate and distinct experiences of illness and the recovery from illness. Crohn’s disease becomes material for one essay. Also HIV. Fibromyalgia. Cancer. Migraine headache. Lupus. Rheumatoid arthritis. OCD. Depression. A broken leg. A ruptured cervical disc. Diabetes. Fifteen separate and distinct essays, and within these essays so many telling details. So many of the kinds of details that illuminate not just illness and the process of healing, but well—life. Here is one such detail. In “Back in the Body” by Kris Vervaecke, she describes the room in a cottage in Oregon where she first began to recuperate from a severe flare of rheumatoid arthritis that occurred in the wake of childbirth. p. 130: My hospital bed was in the living room next to the woodstove, where I could look out the double-paned glass at the sparkling river, and when I was too tired to be propped up and turn my head, I lay on my back and watched ripples of light undulating across the shiny ivory painted ceiling, reflecting the river’s surface. Here’s another detail taken from Richard Solly’s “The World Inside,” an account of his recovery from a surgical procedure for Crohn’s disease that left him with an open abdominal wound. This passage begins his description of his work with Annie, the home-care nurse who assisted him in his recovery. p. 92: Annie was not into New Age healing through prayers, meditation, visualization, or even acupuncture. For her, healing would be accomplished only by putting on surgical gloves, cutting bandages, peeling away the soiled gauzes, letting air into the wound, rinsing the wound with saline solution, inserting six-inch Q-tips into abdominal holes. . . Each morning, promptly at nine, she rang the front doorbell and then let herself in. I often left the door unlocked for her. . .” And here’s an image of recovery that Mary Swander offers from a time when she was in recuperating from a ruptured cervical disc and case of myelitis. p. 125: I fixated on the small, the tiny seeds. In my case, the literal seeds of my literal garden. Lying awake in bed at night, I’d worried how I would ever prepare the soil, plant, weed, dig, and harvest. I contemplated making raised beds. I contemplated making trellises. I contemplated not having a garden at all. . . . Finally, I got up one morning, clomped down to the basement with my walker, and started my garden seedlings. Two little seeds in each pot. In this anthology, edited by Patricia Foster and the aforementioned Mary Swander, illness and recovery become material. Not by denying the discomfort and fear and sometimes tedium of it. But by using it—attending to it—the true and actual details of it—and then paying close attention to where those details lead. Paying attention to the images that emerge. The light undulating across the ceiling. The nurse at the door with bandages. And those seeds—two tiny seeds in each pot. I think I just realized one of the reasons I like these essays. The language, yes. The vivid detail. But, more, it’s because these essays feel...

A Featured Piece: On Velcro and Healing the Writing Process Itself

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 18, 2006 in Featured Pieces

[S.A. sent me the following in response to a post of mine earlier this week in which I mentioned the notion that perhaps even someone who had come to dislike writing—someone with a negative experience of writing in the past—could benefit from writing and healing. That perhaps the writing process itself could be healed. I asked S.A. for permission to publish her piece, and she, graciously, granted it. Thus——] ON VELCRO AND HEALING THE WRITING PROCESS ITSELF By S.A. Oh, my. The process of writing itself can be healed! I had a high school English teacher who basically did not like anything I wrote on paper. Mrs. R—. Negative. However, as it happens in a rural community, I had a sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Knapp, who also repeated as my high school English teacher my sophomore year. In sixth grade, she encouraged me to read Oliver Twist and she always made positive comments and seemed to enjoy my written topics, even when grammatically flawed. Mrs. Knapp was a stellar teacher. She read Russell Baker’s New York Times column every day during my tenth-grade year. I just loved her and her sense of humor. And she was quick! I disrupted sixth grade one time with my new Velcro zipper. I had sisters who left the farm for NYC and they brought home all the latest ideas. Velcro was one of the innovations they brought to my mother, who sewed most of my clothes. During the class, I waited until Mrs. Knapp started speaking and then slowly peeled the Velcro apart. After about three or four of these episodes, she nailed me. Her words were perfect, kind and humorous, “So we have Mae West in our midst?” Somehow, I knew who Mae West was and it was enough of an embarrassment to stop my behavior. She did not punish. Today, one of Mae West’s quotes is a favorite of mine: “It is better to be looked over, than over looked!” And I think of Mrs. Knapp. It was not until Andrew, my husband, died and I was in grief therapy that I realized how much I had let Mrs. R— influence me so negatively. My counselor, Betty, encouraged me to write and I told her I was not capable. I had written a short poem that Betty liked and she asked if she could share it with another grief client. It was called, “Who Am I?” I was surprised and, frankly, thought she was patronizing me. I did write more after that and I wrote mostly humorous stories via email to friends. Several were sent to a dear friend of ours who died of colon cancer. People, including one sister (a whole story in itself), complimented my writing, saying that it lightened their day. Healing. I had nurtured another. Writing made me get outside of myself and my misery. Healing. I was writing for me…for friends…. and not Mrs....

Writing and Healing Idea #10: Conjuring New Images and Metaphors for Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 16, 2006 in Writing Ideas

Try this: Look at the word: HEALING Write the word: HEALING Write the word in large letters on a blank sheet of paper: HEALING Say the word aloud: HEALING Then close your eyes and say the word again—HEALING—and notice what comes into your mind. Say the word over slowly until some thing or place or person or creature comes into your mind. What you’re looking for here is a concrete something—a something or someone you can see in your mind. Write down this first thing that comes to your mind, even if it seems silly at first, or surprising, or irrelevant. Then write to describe the image in as much detail as possible. What colors do you see? What textures do you notice? What are its details? If you find it helpful, you can pause in your writing, close your eyes again, and try once more to see or feel this something in order to write about it. Summon as much detail as you can. If more than one something or someone comes, feel free to write about these too, but try, first, to write in detail about the first image that comes. Many people see places when they try this. A canyon for instance. A place next to a river. An island. A ship. Some people see creatures. Horses. Their cat. A particular dog. Some see an activity. Gardening. Skiing. Some see a particular person–or they might see themselves with this particular person. A grandmother. A teacher. A character from a book. Some people see a color. What do you see? Try it. And no matter what you see when you conjure the word HEALING—you simply cannot do it wrong. By the way, if you see nothing at all this can be a beginning. A nothing can be a something. A blank slate can be the beginning of a something. A blank slate can be waiting for something to be written upon...

Looking at the Language of Sickness

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 12, 2006 in Healing Language and Healing Images

When I went back to Visual Thesaurus and entered the word illness I didn’t get much in the way of synonyms. But then I put in the word sick—and here’s what I got: Unlike the graphic of healing which I found appealing—and filled with a sense of possibility—this graphic took me aback. Especially that cluster of words around the word disgusted. And then that cluster of words around the word demented. This graphic got me thinking, not for the first time—but in a new way—about all the meanings and connotations that have gotten attached, at least in some instances, to sickness and illness. Maybe some of these words fit for some people. Maybe some of them don’t. I suspect a person could write an entire book about this cluster of words that radiates from this single word: sick. Maybe one of you will—or maybe one of you will write a poem about it or a paragraph or a something. Or maybe you will revise this graphic–or construct an entirely new graphic that contains entirely new words and new...

So What is Healing? (Part 2): Images and Metaphors for Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 10, 2006 in Healing Language and Healing Images

The World Book Dictionary defines heal this way: “to make whole, sound or well; bring back to health; cure”. At WordNet, an online database developed at Princeton University, healing is defined as “the natural process by which the body repairs itself”. And here is how three women—all in various stages of recovery from cancer—and all participating in an ongoing writing and healing group—pictured healing on one morning in North Carolina a couple of years ago. The following excerpt is from my notes: “Healing is movement,” E. said. “What do you see when you hear the word movement?” I asked her. “What do you see inside your head?” “I’m mulching,” she said. “I’m working in my garden, raking. I’m thinking about this tee shirt I have that says, ‘I’m not getting older, I just need repotting.’" “Healing is the apex,” S. said. “Healing is eureka.” “What do you see with eureka?” I asked. “I see myself throwing my hands up in the air,” she said. “After I’d gotten good news on the telephone. The doctor called. I was so afraid it was going to be bad news, but then it was good news.” Healing is mulching, raking, repotting. Healing is the apex, eureka. Healing is not just one thing. “Healing,” N. said, “is a taskmaster.” There was this pause, I remember, after N. spoke. I could feel a slight shift in the room. N. had stage four breast cancer. The tumor had spread to her liver and bones. In the past couple months she’d become so much frailer than when I first knew her. But, still, the fierce intelligence was there. “Would you mind terribly,” I asked, “If I were to ask you what you see in your head when you hear the word taskmaster?” N. answered immediately. “Ichabod Crane.” Ichabod Crane is that stooped and bony schoolmaster in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” He teaches in a one-room schoolhouse. When students don’t study properly he strikes them with a birch rod, the rod landing with a sharp thwack on their shoulders. Is this what healing is like sometimes? Is this what healing is like sometimes for some people? Is this what healing can be like sometimes for all of us? Healing is therapeutic, sanative, alterative. It’s making whole. It’s making well. It’s the natural process by which the body repairs itself. Healing is repair, therapy, movement, mulching, raking, repotting. Healing is the apex. Healing is eureka. Healing is a taskmaster. Healing is not just one thing. What do you see inside your head when you hear—or say—the word healing? What are the words and images that get at the truth of it?...

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