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HODI: Soldiers of Peace

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 25, 2011 in Blog, Healing Corridor

They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. –from Isaiah, the New International Version of the Bible I’d been intending to feature projects in my healing corridor which primarily promote writing, education and healing, but an email last month prompted me to rethink and expand my definition of healing. After I published my piece on Sakeena Yacoobi at the Afghan Institute of Learning, I got a nice email from Marc Maxson at Global Giving. (His was the site where I’d read a piece on Greg Mortenson’s problematic work in Afghanistan—Maxson was the one to say that Sakeena Yacoobi is the real deal.) In any case, after I wrote about her, he suggested I also take a look at a woman in Kenya, Fatuma Abdulkadir Adan, who runs HODI, the Horn of Africa Development Initiative, a peace center for children in Marsabit, a town in Northern Kenya. She is transforming the lives of young male soldiers in her village AND the lives of young girls kidnapped into marriage by offering them an alternative—football. (or what we here call soccer.) I think the best way to convey a sense of her work is through this excerpt from the Soldiers of Peace video, a documentary which I plan on showing to my students next month. [Update: Alas, the video excerpt from Soldiers of Peace has been removed from YouTube] But I can say that watching the video, I am moved to tears—especially seeing how she navigated when conflict arose among the young men playing soccer. I feel like I have found yet another teacher, and a source of inspiration. If it’s true that a new story can change everything–and I believe it can–then Ms. Adan is changing everything for her village by leading these young people. At the same time, she is leading all of us by example. The old story may be, in many instances, a violent one, but this new story offers a tangible, creative way toward peace. You can learn more about her organization and also donate at Global Giving. You can read about Sakeena Yacoobi’s work with young women in Afghanistan at my healing corridor here. You can read about Marc Maxson’s work with storytelling here and...

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 18, 2011 in Blog, Healing Poetry

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Oh. I didn’t get this the first three or four or five times I read this but now I’m reading you more slowly and I’m seeing this bus ride through the landscape as a metaphor for how endless a time of desolation can feel while we’re in the middle of it. This time I’m reading more slowly. I see the line “between the regions of kindness” and I see the bus ride in a new way. In hindsight we can see it’s just a bus ride—between places—the kindness will return—but in the middle of the desolate time it can seem to last forever. Yes. That’s so often what gets us in trouble. That seeming. And I’m trying to think now what my own metaphor for that desolate time between might be, and I don’t know yet. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Yes, that I see. And it’s like what Marie Howe wrote in her poem in one of my favorite books of poetry of all time, What the Living Do. That poem about her brother who was dying and how he was trying to wake her up: And he said, What surprises me is that you don’t / And I said, I do. And he said, What?/ And I said, Know that you’re going to die./ And he said, No, I mean know that you are. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. These are words that just resonate for me—till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. The size of the cloth. I so love that. How enormous it might be. And how that gives a sense of perspective to each of our own threads. I once dreamed a whale and somehow I understood that I was going to need to digest this whale one bit at a time. So enormous. The size of the whale. The size of the cloth. The size of all sorrows laid end to end and pieced together. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you...

A Dialogue or Conversation Poem: A Prompt for Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 12, 2011 in Blog, Healing Poetry, Writing and Healing Prompts

In a classic dialogue poem, as I understand it, you create two characters and they carry on a conversation—in poetry. A variation on this theme—a conversation poem?—is a writing idea I’ve shared with my students. I’ve been thinking for a while now that this existed somewhere in the world, and it probably does, but then again it’s possible I may have made it up. In any case, the way I’m thinking about a conversation poem is you actually write your lines between the poet’s lines—in a conversation. I think the best way to begin this is to first copy the poem out, leaving spaces after every second or third or fourth line. You could do this on paper or on a computer document. And it could happen that as you were writing you would find yourself stopping to ask a question or to respond—and then you could put your questions and responses in the spaces between lines. Maybe in italics? Or indented? And then you could begin to work your way toward some back and forth and see what happens. It’s yet another way of responding to a poem. Of imprinting a poem. Of making it your own. It could look something like this, using Mary Oliver’s “Journey” as an example: One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice your response . . . something about those voices that are shouting, the voices you imagine and what advice they are actually shouting and what is it that makes the advice so bad or wrong. what is precisely the wrong advice now? though the whole house began to tremble your response . . . what you see what you wonder about when you picture the whole house trembling or whatever it is you imagine when you consider that a single action you make could cause an entire house to tremble. what’s it like to have that kind of power? and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. your response . . . oh, now the voices in the poem are using actual words and they are not just asking they are demanding–they require mending. And what does it feel like not to stop for them? Or maybe would you? Whose voice would cause you to stop? Whose wouldn’t? These are just a couple ideas. Of course you could do it differently. I’m just remembering now where I first got the idea for this. It was when I was teaching writing at Prodigals Community, a residential recovery center. A woman, M., wrote a poem and when I read the poem I was very taken with it and I ended up asking her a few questions about it. She didn’t answer my questions just then, but she wrote the answers to my questions as new lines in the poem! She inserted the new lines into the document in italics—between the old lines and shared it with me the next week. There was something so powerful about this. Like revision happening actively on the page. Like a conversation with me as reader happening inside the poem—or a conversation with her own self. See also Healing poetry The Journey...

Drawing a Map

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 4, 2011 in Blog, Writing and Healing Prompts

When I talk about drawing a map, I’m talking about picturing a kind of path between where you are now and where you want to be. One can make a one-year map. A five-year. A one-month. I also think it’s helpful to picture as a goal something that’s within the realm of the possible. If everything were to go as well as it possibly could, where would you want to be in X amount of time? Then all you have to do is draw it. It’s one of those things that can seem so simple. But it can also turn out to be surprisingly powerful. Find as large as sheet of paper as possible. The first self-portrait, where you are now, is drawn in the lower left-hand corner. The portrait doesn’t have to be skilled. Stick figures are fine. Symbols. Pictures cut from magazines. Photographs. Collage. The second portrait, where you would like to be, goes in the upper right-hand corner. Again, any kind of portrait is fine–literal or figurative. Between these two portraits is the map. You can draw a line that twists and turns between the self-portraits. You can draw branches and detours and obstacles. You can label stations or stepping stones along the way—add titles and notes and paragraphs. You can make lists. When you’re finished, take at least 20 minutes or so and write about what you’ve drawn. What surprises you? What compels you? What place on the map seems clearly to be the next step? And the next? ...

826 Valencia

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 27, 2011 in Blog, Healing Corridor

I believe in the power of writing. I believe magical things can happen when spaces are provided for people to write, and to be nurtured in that writing. I believe something especially powerful can happen when these spaces are provided for young people. And say that you could have a pirate store at the entrance to such a place, a store that sells eye patches and peg legs and vials of “Scurvy Begone”? A place where young people could have fun while they were finding their writing voice. Might that place not be nearly perfect? The place exists. 826 Valencia. A non-profit writing center for young people ages 6-18 in the Bay Area. All their programs, from after-school tutoring to helping young people publish books, are free of charge. Here’s a brief history, taken from their website: Named after our street location in the Mission District of San Francisco, 826 Valencia was founded in 2002 by educator Nínive Calegari and author Dave Eggers, who were looking for a way to support overburdened teachers and connect talented working adults with the students who could use their help the most. Because our space was zoned for retail, we needed to open a store. After briefly considering a hot dog stand, we looked at the ship-like surfaces of the stripped-down space, a former gym, and decided to open a pirate store instead. Behind the store we built a writing lab, designed to be a place kids would want to spend time, with a cozy reading tent, big work tables, and lots of books. Word spread quickly, and soon every chair was filled with students working on their writing with our trained tutors. We currently serve over 6,000 students a year thanks to our corps of over 1,700 volunteers. Here’s a short video, featuring a day in the life of the Writing Center. I’m especially impressed with the comments of the mother–and with the sense of community offered at the center. And here’s a longer video—a TED Talk where Dave Eggers, author and 826 Valencia co-founder, speaks, among other things, about the value of one-on-one attention for students–about shining a beam of light on a student’s writing. Also the value of giving students the gift of seeing their work published. How the pirate supply store became a kind of happy accident that brought donors and volunteers into the center. How the concept has spread to other cities. And his wish for a thousand more inspiring ideas and stories for transforming public schools and education. This is where I first heard about the center. See also: An interview with the Wall Street Journal The Pirate Store Young Author’s Book Project Healing Corridor You can donate to 826 Valencia here. [The photo at the top of this post is taken from the 826 Valencia...

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