Healing Images

Green Apple Soap: An Image of Healing Conversation from White Oleander

Posted by Diane Morrow on May 3, 2007 in Healing Conversation, Healing Images, Recommended Books

White Oleander, the novel by Janet Fitch, is a lovely and often heartbreaking story of a girl, Astrid, in search of a mother. Perhaps you’ve read it. (Or seen the movie—Michelle Pfeiffer plays Astrid’s birth mother, Ingrid.) The first thirty-eight pages of the book depict scenes of Astrid with her mother—a poet, extremely gifted, very beautiful, and also exceptionally self-absorbed—a woman who requires her daughter to serve as a kind of audience for her own life. Eventually, Astrid becomes a reluctant and then bewildered audience as her mother plots the murder of an ex-lover, carries out the murder, and then is sent away to prison. This leaves thirteen-year-old Astrid an orphan, a child whose name becomes, in her own words, Nobody’s Daughter. The remainder of the novel is a story of Astrid’s odyssey through the foster care system, her quest to become Somebody’s Daughter. In Astrid’s fourth foster home she finds herself under the care of a woman by the name of Claire. This woman, Claire, is the first foster parent to actually see Astrid as a person separate from herself. She is, at the same time, the first mother who helps Astrid begin to see herself. There’s one particular conversation, very simple, and especially poignant in that it’s the first conversation of its kind that Astrid has ever experienced. Claire asks Astrid if she likes coconut soap or green apple. Astrid finds the question baffling—– She wanted to know all about me, what I was like, who I was. I worried, there really wasn’t much to tell. I had no preferences. I ate anything, wore anything, sat where you told me, slept where you said. I was infinitely adaptable. Astrid goes on to tell Claire that she doesn’t know if she prefers coconut soap or green apple but Claire will not allow equivocation. She presses her to decide. So I became a user of green apple soap, of chamomile shampoo. I preferred to have the window open when I slept. I liked my meat rare. I had a favorite color, ultramarine blue, a favorite number,...

Running: An Image for Writing and Healing from Natalie Goldberg

Posted by Diane Morrow on April 29, 2007 in Healing Images

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg is one of those books that just seems to have had an influence. It was first published in 1986, but still now, it’s one of those books, people seem to find their way to it. Not too many years ago now, I was at my younger brother’s wedding, I was talking to one of his friends, he was beginning to take an interest in writing, I asked him if he’d heard of the book, he said, yes, in fact it was the book right now on his nightstand. I first came across the book myself nearly twenty years ago now. April 1988. I know the month and year because I was on a trip to New Orleans at the time. It was the first time I’d ever been to New Orleans. One morning, while my husband was in meetings, I rode the St. Charles Streetcar (which, I’m pleased to report, is due to be back up and running its old route at the end of this year). In any case, I got off the streetcar at a stop near Loyola University and I went into a small bookshop and I came across Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing Down the Bones. It’s not a long book—as I remember, I read much of the book while I rode the street car around on its loop a couple of times, and I still had time to look out at the city. I was very taken with the book. What I liked most about it, and still like, is this sense she conveys of writing as a practice, a lifelong habit, something that one does, and can continue to do, through different kinds of weather—different moods—the sense that one can stay with it—like with running—or meditation. And that staying with it in this way can lead to something of value. She writes [p. 11]: This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway. You practice whether you want to or not. You don’t wait around for inspiration and a deep desire to run. It’ll never happen, especially if you are out of shape and have been avoiding it. But if you run regularly, you train your mind to cut through or ignore your resistance. You just do it. And in the middle of the run, you love it. When you come to the end, you never want to stop. And you stop, hungry for the next time. But if you run regularly, you train your mind to cut through or ignore your resistance. And in the middle of the run, you love it. I’ve never been a runner, but at different times in my life (not right now—sigh) I’ve been a regular swimmer. And I feel as if I’ve had similar conversations over and over, in the locker room at the University pool in Missouri, at the YMCA in Durham, North Carolina, at the Rockville Swimming Pool in Maryland, and here, at the YWCA and then the YMCA. Conversations with wet hair after swimming. Someone says, I wasn’t going to come this morning. I know,...

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...

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 27, 2007 in Healing Images, Healing Poetry

I recently came across a poem, Diving into the Wreck, by Adrienne Rich. (I found it in Staying Alive, the anthology. You can also find it here.) The poem is a quest poem—but it describes a different kind of quest. Not a quest across the surface of the earth. But down. It begins—the first six lines—with a gathering of resources: First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask It’s interesting to me how just typing these lines allows me to pay a kind of closer attention to the language than I do when I ordinarily read. It slows me down. Especially coming to that last line—the grave and awkward mask. So, then: a book of myths, a camera, a blade, body armor, those absurd flippers, that grave and awkward mask. These are the resources for this dive. And no companions. Not this time. The speaker of the poem announces this at the end of the first stanza: she’s not doing this with a team like Cousteau—but alone. A ladder appears. She begins to climb down. Down through layers. Down through blue, then bluer, green—then black. This is a different kind of quest. A metaphorical quest. A quest down through layers. And why keep going? In the sixth stanza, she names the reason for this particular quest: I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done And the treasures that prevail. The words are purposes. The words are maps. And then those lines naming two companions: the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. It seems to me that when it comes to quests we need to know two things—especially for the difficult quests—the ones that involve some exploration of wreckage, some measure of sorrow. I think we need to know that the exploration itself has some meaning—a purpose. And I think we need to know that there’s some possibility—some hope—even perhaps a promise—of treasure—jewels amid or beneath the wreckage. What Arthur Frank would call the boon of the quest. There has to be some boon. I had a writing teacher once who used to say that stories need to be bearable. One way, I think, of making stories of wreckage bearable is to figure out what the treasure is—to recognize the treasure amid the wreckage. No matter how elusive—or unexpected—no matter that the treasure doesn’t look the way we thought it would look when we finally come upon it. _____________________________________ See also: The wounded...

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

Posted by Diane Morrow 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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