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Writing Exercise #27: What Am I Here For? (Part 1 of 2)

Posted by on March 20, 2007 in Writing Ideas

When I trained in healing imagery in San Rafael, with the Academy for Guided Imagery, I learned, on the last day of my training, an imagery exercise that can be used for the discovery of deep purpose. To be honest, when we were first introduced to the exercise, I, along with a friend who I was there with, thought the exercise seemed, well—almost silly. Too simple to be useful, I thought. Or too something. I was wrong. This exercise, which we proceeded to practice in small groups, proved to be surprisingly powerful. Since then, I’ve introduced this exercise to a number of patients. And I’ve begun to see that, at least some of the time, this exercise can point a person toward something. It has the potential to get at something deeper than short-term goals, deeper than the job at which we work, deeper than any salary or accolades we might receive for that work. It has the potential to move a person toward certain core kinds of questions—questions particularly relevant if and when a person finds themselves facing a life-threatening or life-altering illness, or when a person finds themselves facing a life-altering loss. (And one of the things an examination of these questions can do, I’ve noticed, is help a person feel calmer and more at peace—get a glimpse of the bigger picture as it were—and this itself can mitigate a stress response and, in the process, augment healing. Lawrence LeShan, who has been called the father of mind-body medicine, proposes in his book, Cancer As a Turning Point, that getting in touch with one’s purpose—or what he calls zest—can have a significant and salutary effect on the immune and healing system.) What really matters? What will matter when it’s all said and done? I attended a Jesuit college. One of my professors at that college, Father Nesbitt, a Jesuit priest and a the teacher of my first theology class as a freshman, once told us that the question to ask ourselves when we wake in the morning and first look in the mirror to wash our face is this: What am I here for? This is an exercise that looks at that question. So—the exercise, which I’ve translated into a writing exercise: You begin by folding a plain piece of paper in half and then half again, so that when you re-open the piece of paper you have four rectangles. At the top of the first rectangle you write the first heading: WHAT I LIKE/ WHAT I LOVE Then beneath this heading you make a list of all the things that you like and love. These can be small things or big things. Chocolate? Rain? The color periwinkle?   At the top of the second rectangle you write the second heading: GIFTS AND TALENTS Here you make a list of all those things that you happen to be good at. These can be concrete things like fixing cars or gardening. These can also include more abstract things like kindness or listening or seeing patterns. Part 2 of this writing idea can be found here.  ...

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The North Star and A Small Beautiful Boat: Images for Writing and Healing

Posted by on March 18, 2007 in Healing Images

In her book, Reviving Ophelia, which recounts many of her own experiences in counseling adolescent girls, Mary Pipher tells about how she uses the North Star as a metaphor with the girls who come to her. She writes: I tell clients, ‘You are in a boat that is being tossed around by the winds of the world. The voices of your parents, your teachers, your friends, and the media can blow you east, then west, then back again. To stay on course you must follow your own North Star, your sense of who you truly are. Only by orienting north can you chart a course and maintain it. . .’ Even in the Midwest, where we have no large lakes, many girls have sailed. And particularly in the Midwest, girls love images of the sea. They like the images of stars, sky, roaring waters and themselves in a small, beautiful boat. I like these images too—the sky, the stars, the water, that small beautiful boat. I was trying to think of a poem that might resonate with these images and I remembered a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter—Jubilee, a song she wrote herself and which appears on her CD, Stones in the Road. Here are four lines from the song, : And I can tell by the way you’re searching, for something you can’t even name / That you haven’t been able to come to the table, simply glad that you came / When you feel like this try to imagine that we’re all like frail boats on the sea / Just scanning the night for that great guiding light announcing the jubilee. I like the images in her lyrics. The words she chooses. Frail, for instance. That sense that the boats are frail–or sometimes frail. The sense she offers of all the other boats out there on the water. And that image of what the star might be pointing toward. (When I first heard this song, several years ago, I had a vague notion of what a Jubilee might be, but then I looked it up and there was more to it than I thought. According to the Hebrew Bible, a Jubilee year occurred every fifty years and, apparently, during this year, land was returned to original owners, debts were forgiven, and indentured servants were emancipated.) A person could, I suppose, imagine healing as a quest made by water rather than by land. One could imagine traveling in a small and beautiful boat. And then there would be that star in the sky, brighter than all of the others, and holding steady, no matter which way the wind was blowing. One could imagine, if one wanted, that the star has a particular name. And that it’s pointing toward something....

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Toni Morrison on Beowulf and Grendel: Two Very Different Quest Stories

Posted by on March 15, 2007 in Stories

Toni Morrison on Beowulf and Grendel: Two Very Different Quest Stories

The evening before last, I got a chance to see, in Greensboro, a lecture by Toni Morrison, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Song of Solomon, among other novels. I’d never seen her speak before. She’s a natural storyteller—dramatic, funny, pausing in all the right places. She held the audience in her hands. And the stories she happened to tell were, interestingly enough, quest stories. She began with a brief introduction—her belief in the importance and power of story. She then proceeded to retell the ancient story of Beowulf—an epic narrative about a monster, Grendel, who ravages a Scandinavian kingdom. She told, first, the original story in which Grendel is depicted as the epitome of pure senseless evil, devouring the citizens of the kingdom for no reason other than because he can. A hero emerges—Beowulf. His quest entails defeating the monster, and he manages, in battle, to cut off Grendel’s arm. But then the story becomes a bit more complicated. Grendel returns home to his mother and she turns out to be a yet fiercer monster–and vengeful. She launches her own attack on the kingdom, slaying large numbers of citizens and placing their bodies in her pouch. (Here Ms. Morrison added one of her nice touches. “How wonderful,” she said, “How perfect that the mother was carrying a pocketbook.”) Beowulf’s quest continues. He follows the mother to her lair, engages her in battle, and manages to take her sword and, with this sword, defeat her by cutting off her head. The original Beowulf is a bloody quest story—the hero’s quest ends in violence and conquest. But then, as a counterpart to Beowulf, Ms. Morrison offered another story–a shift in point of view—a different kind of quest story. Drawing from John Gardner’s novel, Grendel, she offered a retelling of the story from the monster’s point of view. There’s not enough time or space here to do Gardner’s novel justice—and I haven’t yet read it!–but her comments about Grendel are at the heart of what I took away from Ms. Morrison’s lecture. In the retelling of the story, Grendel has an inner life. He is no longer a beast, Morrison told us. And, unlike the original story, he is capable of some degree of transformation. This transformation occurs, at least in part, via a character in the novel, Shaper, who is a poet. And, she suggested, it is through language—the comprehension and use of language (rather than his former bestial sounds)—that Grendel is transformed. This second story offers what Arthur Frank might call a post-modern quest—a quest that has to do with inner transformation rather than with conquering. Ms. Morrison suggested two things near the end of her talk that separate humans from other creatures—that separate us, she said, from, for instance, asparagus. First, love—namely the ability to care for creatures that are not our own and from which we may not receive any immediate or apparent benefit. And, second, language. Ms. Morrison proposes that language is capable of transformation. As I understand her, she is proposing that language is capable of transforming evil. Of transforming individuals. Of transforming kingdoms. Of transforming countries. Of shifting stories from violent ones to stories in which something new happens. And she said this the other evening with such a confident and august presence—it was inspiring—- ______________________________________...

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Writing and Healing Idea #26: Figuring Out the Shape of the Story

Posted by on March 13, 2007 in Writing Ideas

This writing idea begins with reading and it has to do with the different shapes of narrative that Arthur Frank talks about in his book, The Wounded Storyteller. He talks about three different kinds of narratives: The restitution narrative The chaos narrative The quest narrative The writing idea is this: to begin to explore, in writing, which kind of narrative best fits the kinds of stories you tend to tell—or perhaps like to hear. Or perhaps it makes more sense to write to begin sorting your narratives. Are there some stories you tell that have the shape of restitution? Some that are chaotic? Some that have more of a sense of...

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