Healing Images

All the Pieces Laid Out on the Table: An Image for Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 1, 2007 in Healing Images

A couple of years ago now, a woman in one of my writing workshops at Cancer Services, Rosetta, a breast cancer survivor, was writing about healing place. One of the things she ended up writing about was trying to find a place where it might become possible to put all of her questions out on the table. Questions like: What now? What next? Where do I go from here? I like her table image. I can see it. And her image seems to me now a fitting image for writing and healing this month: all of the pieces laid out on the table. Pieces perhaps of your own story. Pieces of your own writing. Some of the pieces may be jagged. Some may be worn by the elements, like sea glass. And perhaps a pattern has begun to emerge out of the fragments—a clear shape—a lovely mosaic. But who knows? It may have fallen apart again. As far as I can tell, that’s the way it goes with forms and patterns—they come together and fall apart. Say you wake up one morning then—you make your way to the table–there’s a clear slanted light. Or maybe it’s late, the rest of the world gone to sleep, the room quiet, there’s just the one lamp. Maybe you find yourself touching the pieces. And maybe as you are touching them, and maybe only for a moment, it becomes possible to ask the next question. Among all these pieces— What was the good part? What is the good part? (Is there a good part?) (Is there more than one?) [Note: The picture for this month was taken last August when the black-eyed susans were blooming in my yard. It seems to me that one of the good parts of January, when the garden may be a bit brown and sodden—it’s very sodden here now after several days of rain—one of the good parts is remembering those perennials that may be lying dormant, waiting for the right time to break the...

Listening & Collecting

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 13, 2006 in Guest House, Healing Images

Over twenty years ago now, when I was in medical school at the University of Missouri, I wandered over to the main campus looking for a writing class, and, in a stroke of good fortune, found an excellent writing teacher, Janet Desaulniers. She was all the good things you want a writing teacher to be—smart, funny, attentive, encouraging, dexterous with language and form. She teaches now in the MFA program in writing at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Last year she did an interview with Alex Shapiro which appears in the on-line magazine, Identity Theory. The entire interview is worth taking a look at, but the bit I want to draw attention to here is the bit, about halfway through, when she begins to talk about writing the story, “After Rosa Parks,” which appears now in her fine collection, What You’ve Been Missing. She talks about how when she was first trying to write “After Rosa Parks” she would start with a piece of something—a strong something—a moment or a snatch of dialogue—and then she’d find herself forcing it, trying to make it into a scene, trying to make it become a story. She says this: It was so utilitarian. Not to mention agonizing. I kept killing each spark of promise because I kept pushing each one past what I knew for sure. And that’s how you end up telling the kind of lies fictions cannot tell. Anyway, enduring the pain of failing and failing that story, which I very much wanted to tell, opened me up to seeing early composition in new ways. Now I start with collecting things. I don’t try to know anything and lead anything. Seeing early composition in new ways. Collecting. And she goes on to tell how she started this process of collecting with one of her students. He was a talented writer, had been in the writing program at Chicago for three years, and he was feeling this kind of suicidal desperation because he hadn’t yet written anything he felt was good enough. And she made this deal with him—1666 words a day. For a month. That was the deal. Not trying to make these words be anything yet. Not trying to write a story—or a poem—or even an essay. Just collecting things. She describes it like this: . . . once you start collecting things you come to respect discrete units of significance for what they are. You don’t say, Oh, I own this really good interlude, now how can I hook it up with something else? Because you’re not making. You’re collecting. So it’s all about listening to the sound of matter. Of significance. It might be an observation; it might be a piece of dialogue. If you have to write 1,666 words a day, everything’s game. At breakfast my husband would say, “You know, I think this sweater’s going to change my life.” And after I finished laughing, I thought, Right, I’m taking that. Discrete units of significance. I like that. Later in the interview she talks about the next steps—taking these units and using craft to create and discover form in these units. But I’m interested now, and first, in the units themselves. The early stage of composition. And I’m writing about this here because...

Mosaic: An Image for Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 3, 2006 in Healing Images

J., a patient, was telling me one morning about these dishes that she’d bought and she loved them. This was a couple of years ago now. Each of the plates was a different color—primary colors mostly—yellow, blue, red, green. Each plate was also painted with different shapes—stars and spirals—so that a red plate might be covered in yellow stars, a green plate painted with blue spirals. She really liked the plates, she told me, but already one of them had broken. She didn’t intend for the plate to break. She didn’t want it to break. It wasn’t even her fault that it broke. It just, well—broke. She was disappointed at first, but after a while, she told me, she’d begun to give in to it—the inevitability. Plates break. She’d begun saving the pieces, she told me, and when she collected enough of them she was going to make a mosaic...

Pensieve: An Image for Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 26, 2006 in Healing Images

The end of a holiday weekend. Shirt-sleeve weather here. Garden weather. November light. I’ve been thinking some about containers. Pots. Bowls. Baskets. . . . If falling apart creates pieces—fragments—shards—then it stands to reason that we might sometimes need containers in which to place all of these pieces. Week before last a young woman, a patient, was telling me that she wanted to find a place or a something in which she could put her stress and anxious thoughts. I asked her what this place or something might look like and her answer was immediate, spontaneous, the way images sometimes are: A PENSIEVE. This is an image that I’ve seen emerge before, and one, that when I first came upon it, seemed to me a nearly perfect image for writing and healing. For those not already familiar with the image, I’ll describe it briefly here. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth book in J.K. Rowling’s series, there’s a moment when Harry finds himself alone in headmaster Dumbledore’s office. Beckoned by a silvery light, he opens a cabinet, and discovers a stone basin filled with a silver and vapory substance. Harry peers deeply into the basin and then—in that moment—finds himself transported into another world—a scene from the past in which Dumbledore figures as one of the characters. When he returns, called back by Dumbledore’s voice, the headmaster proceeds to tell him that the basin is called a pensieve, a device useful when one’s thoughts become overcrowded or overwhelming. Dumbledore explains: One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them in the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form. I love this notion of siphoning. I also love the notion of having a place to put thoughts and feelings—and perhaps other kinds of fragments. A basin—and perhaps a beautiful basin—a basin with a touch of enchantment—when it feels, for instance, that the mind and/or body cannot hold another speck. Or when it feels that what remains (after breaking or loss) are all these pieces—fragments of things. The possibility, then, of placing some of these pieces into a basin. And the possibility of seeing links and patterns in such a basin— A notebook as a basin? A...

On November and Breaking and Holding that which is Breaking in the Light

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 7, 2006 in Healing Images, Healing Language and Healing Images

I was raised a Catholic but for the past ten years or so, since joining a Friends meeting, I have considered myself a Quaker. One of the things I like about the Quakers is their potential for inclusiveness. Another thing I like is their use of language—the turn of certain phrases. And one of my favorite Quaker phrases is this one: holding something or someone in the light. This phrase took on a personal significance for me one November, six years ago now. During that November I’d been seeing a patient, A., a man in his fifties, a member of our Quaker meeting, who had previously been entirely well and then had discovered that he had metastatic colon cancer. I’d worked with A. a little over a year, and during that year, while receiving treatment for his cancer, he’d done a great deal of work with healing imagery, including imagery with light. Perhaps, because his imagery was illuminating in and of itself, and because I have received his permission to do so, I will write some about his imagery here later. But for now, what I want to say is that six years ago now, in November, his wife, S., had decided to gather a small group in their home for a Quaker meeting—a meeting whose purpose was, in the language of Quakers, to hold A. in the light. I’d been invited to come to the meeting, but had been unable to attend because I was flying back to Missouri that week to visit my mother who was suffering (and who, unfortunately, continues to suffer) with a rather severe mental illness. That trip to Missouri was, for me, a difficult one. But this is what I remember—and why I am writing about this now: Before leaving southwest Missouri in my rental car to drive back up to Kansas City to catch a plane home, I checked my messages at work and found a message from S.—A’s wife. She reminded me that the meeting in her home would be that day, and she told me what time it would be—at eleven I think. And she told me, at the end of the message, that they would hold me in the light. I am not a person who talks frequently or easily about religion, or of spiritual matters for that matter. I was raised Catholic, but, the way I remember it, most of the language for things of the spirit stayed inside the church; it resided in the liturgy and in formal prayers. I’m the kind of person who tends often to think that spiritual matters are so large—or so something—it is difficult to find language for them. But that morning—driving back to Kansas city—one of those lit-up November days and the landscape is very flat there and the sky is very large—on that morning I felt the beauty of the Quaker language—of S’s language—and the comfort of it—to be driving away from a difficult time—a difficult place—and while I was driving to carry the sense—that knowing—that for this one drive—this hour—I was being held in the light. When I think about what’s possible with writing—and, in particular, writing that has to do with breaking—or with grief—this is one of the images I hold for writing: that writing is a way...

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