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Writing and Healing Idea #33: Imagining Refuge

Posted by Diane Morrow on April 22, 2007 in Writing Ideas

Imagine for a moment that you are at a point in the arc of healing when momentum is carrying you forward. There are positive signs, whatever those might be. There’s a feeling of hope. Of possibility. Of forward movement. And then imagine that just as you are beginning to consider it’s possible—healing is possible—imagine that you receive news of a reversal. Perhaps the reversal is felt in your body—pain, as bad as before, or worse. The fatigue has returned, and you’re mired in it. Or perhaps the reversal comes by way of a lab test or an x-ray. The tumor has grown. Or perhaps you encounter a rejection of some sort. Perhaps you are discouraged by the violence and heartache in the world—- Or perhaps you simply have one of those no-good awful terrible hopeless days. Perhaps it’s raining, hard, and you find yourself without an umbrella, the car parked another three blocks away, and maybe you’re carrying a paper bag, filled with groceries, and it’s wet, it breaks, the contents spilling down the sidewalk. . . . Imagine now—at this very moment—in the wake of a sharp, and potentially devastating reversal—imagine that a figure appears. Perhaps an old woman? She has a kindness about her, and, also, she’s been through some things, she seems to know things—there’s something about her eyes. She can see, for one thing, the obvious—that you are cold and wet and tired. But she can also see that you have come to an abyss. A place of frustration. A dashing of hope. She knows that this is a particularly difficult juncture for you. And she also knows that the first step out needs to be of the most basic kind. She invites you to come back with her to her cottage. She leads you back, ushers you inside. She shows you where you can take a hot bath. She lays out towels. A clean robe. When you come out of the bath she’s laid a place at the table for you—a bowl of soup, a basket of bread, a pitcher of water. You eat and drink, and, after you have done so, she shows you to a bedroom with a clean soft bed. You sleep and sleep, and she lets you sleep. When you wake you find her out in the kitchen. She offers you a cup of tea, or perhaps a mug of coffee. She asks you to sit at the table. And it’s only then, after you are warm and fed and rested, that she asks you to tell her all about it. About all that has happened and what your hopes were at the beginning and how, at least in some ways, those hopes have been dashed. She has, she tells you, plenty of time. She has all the time in the world. What would you tell...

The Handless Maiden: What Happens Next?

Posted by Diane Morrow on April 19, 2007 in Uncategorized

I finished up with appointments this afternoon to find two e-mails in response to the piece of The Handless Maiden story that I posted yesterday. “I can’t bear it if this is the end of the story.” And, “So what happens next?” The responses (as always) were welcome. And they led me back to Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves to pick up the story where I left off: at that moment when the king’s mother instructs the queen to flee for her life. So what happens next? The queen does flee, and then wanders into a large, wild forest. There, a spirit in white guides her to an inn run by kindly woodspeople. She stays there seven years and finds happiness there with her child. Her hands grow back. Meanwhile, the king returns home from the war, believing what his mother first tells him in her anger–that she has killed the queen and his child as instructed. (At this point, she doesn’t know how twisted the messages have become. She believes at this point that murder, in fact, was her son’s instruction.) The king weeps and staggers in his grief before the old women relents and tells him in fact what has happened–the queen and the child are gone. Estes writes what happens next: The king vowed to go without eating or drinking and to travel as far as the sky is blue in order to find them. He searched for seven years. His hands became black, his beard moldy brown like moss, his eyes red-rimmed and parched. During this time he neither ate nor drank, but a force greater than he helped him live. Finally, he comes to the inn. He is exceedingly tired, and he lies down to sleep. He wakes to find a lovely woman and a beautiful child looking down at him. The king and queen embrace. They feast. They return to the king’s mother, celebrate a second wedding, and go on to have many more children, all of whom, Estes writes, “told this story to a hundred others, who told this story to a hundred others, just as you are one of the hundred others I am telling it to.” Ah, the happy ending. I do like happy endings. But I also can’t help noticing that, in this story at least, it takes seven years or more to get there. And it involves more wandering, that deep dark forest, hunger, thirst, extreme grief, black hands, a moldy brown beard, and those eyes red-rimmed and parched. I’m reminded of a book title that is on my reading/to buy list but that I haven’t gotten to yet: The Impossible Will Take a Little...

The Handless Maiden: A Story for Difficult Times

Posted by Diane Morrow on April 18, 2007 in Stories

In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a Jungian analyst and storyteller, retells a story about a handless maiden. It’s a story that seems to me a kind of ideal story for a month in which I’m writing about ways in which a person can sometimes get stuck–hit obstacles–get bewildered. The story is one that I’ve found beneficial at crucial junctures in my own life, and it’s a story I have at times told in turn to patients or students when it seems that the labor that began so well—the first giddy success of creativity and vitality—has come to a grinding halt. The story begins when a maiden loses her hands. She really does lose them—her entire hands. They’re cut off. It’s a moment of initiation. A loss of innocence. Her first serious loss. She has these stumps where she used to have hands, and she wanders, grieving, for many years. Eventually, she comes upon a pear orchard. Here, she encounters a beautiful pear—then a king. He’s a good king. He makes her a pair of silver hands and he fastens them to her stumps. They fall in love. It’s a particularly sweet kind of love for the maiden, coming as it does in the wake of grief, when she had only these stumps for hands and when she had all but given up hope. And this moment could serve, in one particular kind of story–say, a romantic story–as an ending. The king and the maiden have fallen in love. Happily ever after. Those exquisite silver hands. But this, as it turns out, is not the ending. Estes writes: . . . this is still not the lysis, resolution. We are only at the midpoint of transformation, a place of being held in love, yet poised to make a slow dive into another abyss. And so, we continue. Complications arise. The king is called to fight in a faraway kingdom. While he’s away it happens that the queen gives birth to their first child. The baby is beautiful. It’s another one of those promising moments, a joyous moment, and, in her joy, the king’s mother sends a message off to the king. The baby is well. The baby is beautiful. But, as can happen, the messenger falls asleep on his way to the king and the Devil comes and intercepts the message, twists it to his own purposes: The queen has given birth to a child who is half dog. The king, on receiving this message, is horrified. But he is a good king. And, in spite of his horror, he sends back to his mother a message of compassion, and entreaty. Please care for the queen and the baby during this difficult time. Yet once again the messenger, overly complacent, falls asleep, and, once again, the Devil intercepts the message. The king’s mother receives this twisted, and tragic, directive: Kill the queen and the child. This is the abyss. This is the time of the twisted message: The writing (or some other creative endeavor) is malformed. It’s ugly–without worth. It’s time to kill it—whatever it is. These kinds of twisted messages can arise inside one’s own head or they can arise out in the world. If such messages do arise out in the world, in...

Writing and Healing Idea #32: Keeping a Process Journal: A Long-Term Solution to Writer’s Block

Posted by Diane Morrow on April 15, 2007 in Writing Ideas

Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff, in their text, A Community of Writers, suggest that each writer keep something they call a process journal. It’s a way of learning from the ups and downs of one’s own process. It’s a way of learning more about what works for you as an individual—and what doesn’t. In a sense you are beginning to write your own very personalized, and individualized, textbook of writing. Elbow and Belanoff suggest, for instance, writing for a few minutes about the writing process itself whenever you have completed a significant piece of writing. What facilitated flow? What impeded it? “The goal,” they write, “is to find out what really happens—the facts of what occurred on that particular occasion. Don’t struggle for conclusions; trust that they’ll come.” Another way to use a process journal is to turn to it before you finish a piece of writing—when you’re right in the middle. This can be of particular benefit if you’re stuck. Sometimes what is happening when we get stuck is that our thoughts are too complex and convoluted to write the next line. In a process journal it becomes possible to hit this problem head on—to write about it. For instance: I have too much to say. . . It’s too complicated. . . And then, having said this, you can begin the process of untangling the complicated threads. It’s too complicated because. . . You can begin a process journal any time, including any time that you are stuck. You can begin it on a new sheet of paper or you can create a new document on your computer and begin there. You can begin a process journal by writing, I have too much to say. . . Or, I have nothing to say. . . Or, I wish I had something to say. . . Or, I wish that I wish I had something to say. . . Or I wish someone would bring me a sandwich because more than anything else right now I am hungry. . . And then you can keep going. I am hungry because. . . I have too much too say because. . . It’s too complicated because. ....

The Woodland Garden: An Image for Writing and Healing?

Posted by Diane Morrow on April 8, 2007 in Healing Images

One of my favorite tasks in the garden is brushing back oak leaves—and finding out what’s come back—new spring growth— Here are two things I uncovered in the garden in the past week. The first is bleeding heart, or dicentra spectabilis. I didn’t really have to uncover this one at all. It just popped up—and then started blooming its pink delicate hearts. The second one I did have to uncover, brushing back oak leaves. For the last few years now, I’ve had it in my mind that this one is bear’s breeches—but I was wrong—it’s sweet woodruff. It comes back each spring—and it spreads. I like its tiny delicate leaves—and that green. And I just learned from the UBC Botanical Garden site that it has all these other wonderful names: hay plant, kiss-me-quick, mugwet, rockweed, sweet grass, woodruff, bedstraw, sweet-scented bedstraw, May grass, our lady’s lace, and sweet white...

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