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Writing and Healing on the Radio

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 20, 2011 in Blog, Healing Resources

Last month I had the good fortune to get an invitation from Anne Hallward, a psychiatrist in Portland, Maine, who hosts a weekly show called Safe Space Radio. She was doing a series on writing and healing and invited me to participate in a phone interview with her. The show aired last week and is now available: Writing and Healing on the Radio I have to admit—I was initially wary of listening to it. It’s not as if I didn’t feel the interview had gone well. Anne has a gracious style of interviewing (she reminds me a bit of Terry Gross from Fresh Air) and I felt during the interview that she’d made a wonderful space for me to talk about a subject which I love. But I was still wary. I’m sometimes not so crazy about the sound of my recorded voice. So this past Sunday, I listened to it for the first time. I put the 30-minute interview on my iPod and took it with me on a walk. Maybe it helped that it was a beautiful day. And it definitely helped that Anne has skills with interviewing and editing. I walked and listened to the podcast and I realized something. It isn’t really so much anymore about my voice or how I sound. The interview isn’t really about me—and I love this. It’s about writing and healing. It’s about these experiences I’ve had and these things I’ve learned in different places and somehow it became this opportunity to try to weave them together to make something. This felt at the time of the interview—and feels again now—like a gift. To be able to try to make coherent, however imperfectly, some of my thoughts on writing and healing—some of which have been simmering for years. To weave together some of what I’ve learned in all these different places, going back—yikes!—to when I was in my twenties. I’m grateful for the generous space Anne made, the easy conversation within which I was able to share these thoughts and stories. And it’s nice too to think that someone might hear one such story and find it of use. The radio show itself is a great resource on a range of topics. I’ll write about this more soon. Meanwhile, here, again, for convenience, is the 30 minute podcast—thoughts and stories on writing and healing on the radio with Dr. Anne. Writing and Healing on the Radio If you click the link, you’ll notice it will open a flash player to hear the podcast. If you right-click the link you will have an option to save as an mp3 and make it portable. See also: Safe Space Radio: A Live Forum for Courageous Conversations [Image on post is a clip from banner photo at Safe Space Radio]...

Like a Desert Flower

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 14, 2011 in Blog, Healing Poetry

Because this month I am featuring Sakeena Yacoobi’s work at the Afghan Institute for Learning, I went looking for a poem out of Afghanistan. I was delighted to find this one, “Like a Desert Flower,” by Parween Faiz Zadah Malaal, a former journalist and popular woman poet, who lives and writes in the Pashto region of Afghanistan. Like a desert flower waiting for rain, like a river-bank thirsting for the touch of pitchers, like the dawn longing for light; and like a house, like a house in ruins for want of a woman – the exhausted ones of our times need a moment to breathe, need a moment to sleep, in the arms of peace, in the arms of peace. I read this poem as a plea. A poet speaking for the people around her – the exhausted ones of our times. In Afghanistan, but perhaps not only in Afghanistan. All the exhausted ones of our times who live, for whatever reason, without peace. And who need it, who wait for it. Like that parched riverbank waiting for water. Or like that house waiting for a woman to restore it. When I become aware of some of the exhausted ones of our times, even as simply as by thinking of them, or reading a new poem, it places my own intermittent exhaustion (more common now that school has begun again) into a larger perspective. Something about this seems important. It doesn’t necessarily dwarf my own exhaustion – though it could. It’s more like it connects it to something larger than me. I also feel a connection between this poem and the Machado poem, Last Night As I Was Sleeping. His poem contains some of the water that this poem longs for. And it occurs to me how difficult it must be to connect with any kind of aqueduct of water inside when one lives in the absence of peace. There are so many different ways to become parched. And I’m so grateful for water – in all its forms. Some years ago now, I saw the poet and peace activist, Daniel Berrigan, speak. He kept saying, over and over, that peace is not a quick fix. It takes time. And I’m thinking this morning how the work of Sakeena Yacoobi is not about the quick fix but is about a deep and long-term investment in her country. Like a woman coming upon a house in ruins and deciding to begin the long patient work of doing something about it? Like a woman bringing water to her people? See also: Last Night As I Was Sleeping [The literal translation of “Like a Desert Flower” was made by Dawood Azami and the final translated version of the poem is by The Poetry Translation Workshop.] [Photo of a house in ruins in Herat is from The Telegraph via Associated...

The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife’s Memoir by Patricia Harman

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 6, 2011 in Blog, Healing Books

Oh, I do love this book. Reading it has been like coming across a lovely song—a voice—that I didn’t know existed. A surprise on a late summer day. This summer I took several crates of books to the used bookstore to trade for credit. Much of my credit I’m saving for when students start putting in their requests off my booklist, but while I was there the other week I idled through the shelves and came across this memoir by midwife and nurse practitioner Patricia Harman. I opened to the first line: I have insomnia…and I drink a little. I might as well tell you. In the middle of the night, I drink scotch when I can’t sleep. Actually, I can’t sleep most nights; actually, every night. Even before I stopped delivering babies, I wanted to write about the women. How can you not like a book that begins this way? I suppose I feel a connection because it’s the kind of memoir I had at one time thought I might write, and then never did. It also takes me back to the summer I spent in West Virginia between my third and fourth years of medical school, working in a clinic and getting to know some of the lay midwives in the county. And then in Washington, DC, when I worked as a family physician, I was fortunate to work alongside midwives. I’ve more than once dreamed about them. At different times during my life, when I’ve been in need of help or company, I’ve dreamt about a midwife and it’s always been such a healing dream. So I have a tender spot for midwives. This the reason I bought the book, and was predisposed to like it. And then I took it out to the porch on a summer afternoon, one of my last summer afternoons before returning to school—I’d been awake that morning uncharacteristically at 4 AM, unable to get back to sleep, anxious like a kid before the first day. I took the book out to the porch and I read beneath the fan and drifted into sleep and it was like spending time with the midwives again. Waking with that kind of calm rested feeling like you’ve just been with someone who knows something and this something that they know—you might not even be able to put your finger on it—but it’s just what you need. I’m realizing something—I’m writing everything about my experience of reading the book, and not so much about the book itself. This is not turning into a book review. But sometimes that’s the way it is with a book. It’s the feel of a book that matters. The voice and the images become what matters. A nurse midwife in West Virginia. The women who come to see her and they strip off their clothes and put on that thin blue cotton gown for the exam—and they tell her things. Stories. And then the midwife and her stories become a kind of good company....

Sakena Yacoobi and the Afghan Institute of Learning

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 23, 2011 in Blog, Healing Corridor

A little over a year ago I read Greg Mortenson’s Stones into Schools, the sequel to his Three Cups of Tea and was very moved by it. An American, Mortenson describes his work collaborating with Afghan communities to provide schools for girls, while, at the same time, weaving his narrative with Afghan history and the role of education in empowering women and transforming communities. I put the book on my independent reading list for my students and ended up telling a number of people that they had to read this book. Then, in April, along with countless others, I was disillusioned when Jon Krakauer (author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air) published an essay exposing fault lines in the Mortenson story. I went online to discover what I could. A piece by Marc Maxson, a teacher who has done some work with Global Giving, caught my attention: The real sad part is that for every Greg that destroys our public trust in non-profits, there are 99 other legitimate organizations doing the same work that suffer from it. The public generalizes their distrust to other organizations. So I am here to tell you that the real Greg Mortenson – by which I mean a leader in Afghanistan who has put over a hundred thousand girls in school and never exaggerated her impact, nor the daily threats she faces on her life for doing so, is none other than Sakena Yacoobi. I happened to be reading Half the Sky at the time and then realized, aha, Yacoobi was one of the changemakers featured in the book. I can’t fully know Greg Mortenson’s story. At best, he seems to have stretched the truth in places as well as perhaps allowed his organization to grow faster than he was able to sustain. What I’ve realized though is that I can take what’s good from his book – his enthusiasm for the role of education as transformative in Afghanistan – and, rather than generalizing my distrust, simply transfer my enthusiasm. Thus far, everything I’ve been able to find about Sakena Yacoobi points to the integrity and wisdom of her work. Sakena Yacoobi is an Afghan Muslim woman, born and raised in Herat, who was able, with her parents’ blessing, to receive an education. She’s been paying this gift forward ever since. Unable to attend Kabul University because of violence, she came to the United States, completing college and then a master’s degree in public health. She was working as a health consultant and college teacher in the U.S. when, in the early nineties, she traveled to Pakistan to visit Afghan refugee camps. Moved by what she saw in the camps, especially among the women and children, she moved to Pakistan, eventually bringing her work into Afghanistan. During that time, the Taliban barred girls from receiving an education. She responded by organizing secret underground schools in people’s homes, eighty in all. In 1995, she founded the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), a grassroots organization whose mission is to provide education, especially to women and children. The AIL provides schools and teacher-training along with legal and human rights workshops. They’ve also expanded into health clinics and the training of nurse-midwives. Throughout, the emphasis is on training women to become leaders so that these centers...

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 16, 2011 in Blog, Healing Places, Healing Poetry

This is a poem for the middle of the night. Here are the first six lines: When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things His words make me want to respond in kind. To echo and borrow his rhythms: When despair for my life and the life of those whom I love grows in me and when I wake in the night and the fear is there like an old visitor, I go out to the kitchen and I make, again, a mug of hot cocoa, and I remember, if only for a moment, the breezeway in my grandmother’s house, the coolness against my bare feet, the way it led out to the patio and the small table there, the fence around the yard, and the flowers against the fence, hollyhocks and four o’clocks and lilac. I feel how that place is still present because I can remember it and with that I come into the peace of my grandmother’s garden. See also: The poem at...

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