Healing Places

Lake Isle of Innisfree by WB Yeats

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 28, 2008 in Healing Places, Healing Poetry

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. _________________________________ I love that the trigger for the writing of this poem was the sound of a fountain in a shop window on Fleet Street in London. I learned about this in a footnote, in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, the note containing a brief passage from Yeats’ autobiography: I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I love that it sounds here, in his description, almost as if the fountain itself were remembering the lake water—rather than Yeats. And I love that the poem has its source in a sudden remembrance—but Yeats places the poem in the future tense. Actually, he begins with the future tense and moves toward the present. The poem makes me think of Nina, a woman who was one of my teachers in the uses of imagery for healing. She once told us that when were guiding a person to conjure a healing place we should always call a person back to the present tense. Call them gently, but still call them. Not, the lake was blue and cold. But the lake is blue and cold. (Say that a person begins to conjure a healing place by remembering a lake. And say that they remember riding the old rickety bus down to the lake and they remember the dock, the soft wood, they remember walking out to the edge of the dock, sitting down, placing their feet in the water. The next question could pull a person into the present tense. What else do you notice? What does the water feel like? Not what did it feel like, but what does it feel like? And what else do you notice? And what else?) Not I heard lake water lapping. But now—right now—I will arise and go now—even though the island may be at some distance, or seem to be at some distance——— I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. Photo from Wikimedia...

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 29, 2006 in Healing Places

Ernest Hemingway was a genius at creating healing places with words. Here are two. The first is set in Michigan. Hemingway’s family had owned a cottage on a lake in Michigan and he spent summers there as a boy. Consider this place which he recreates in a story called, “Summer People,” one of his Michigan stories. Halfway down the gravel road from Hortons Bay, the town, to the lake, there was a spring. The water came up in a tile sunk beside the road, lipping over the cracked edge of the tile and flowing away through the close growing mint into the swamp. In the dark Nick put his arm down into the spring but could not hold it there because of the cold. He felt the featherings of the sand spouting up from the spring cones at the bottom against his fingers. Nick thought, I wish I could put all of myself in there. I bet that would fix me. It’s the details that bring the place alive. The water lipping over the cracked edge of the tile. The close growing mint. The featherings of sand. A second healing place that Hemingway created is a more famous one—a clean well-lighted place in a story by the same name: In the story an old man sits on the terrace of a café at closing time. It’s late, but the old man, the last customer of the night, is reluctant to leave. A waiter wipes off the old man’s table with a towel and shoos him out. This waiter is eager to get home to his wife, his warm bed. But a second waiter, older than the first, is sympathetic to the old man’s need to linger. First, he tries to explain this to the younger waiter, and then, when the younger waiter loses interest, he tries to explain it to himself, or to whoever will listen—what it is about this particular place that is important: “It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music.” This waiter is very clear about what is necessary for him. This is something writing can do—allow us to become very clear about what is necessary for us. What kind of place? What kind of light? Music?...

Terabithia and Tangalooponda: Healing Places in Books

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 24, 2006 in Healing Places

I never had a fort when I was a kid. Maybe that’s why the fort in Bridge to Terabithia holds a particular pull for me. Or maybe it’s the details that Katherine Paterson, the author of the novel, lends it. Jess and Leslie are eleven when they find the perfect place to build their fort—a clearing among dogwood at the edge of the woods. They build the fort out of scrap board. They lay in provisions—clean water in old Pepsi bottles, a coffee can filled with crackers and dried fruit. Then at some point the fort and the land around it become a kingdom—and they give it a name—Terabithia. Such a lovely name. There’s a passage in the novel where Katherine Paterson describes what it feels like for Jess, the boy, to cross over into Terabithia: Just walking down the hill toward the woods made something warm and liquid steal through his body. The closer he came to the dry creek bed and the crab apple tree rope the more he could feel the beating of his heart. He grabbed the end of the rope and swung out toward the other bank with a kind of wild exhilaration and landed gently on his feet, taller and stronger and wiser in that mysterious land. That’s what interests me—right there—the change possible in the body upon entering certain places. And there’s another place, in another novel—A Map of the World, by Jane Hamilton. The central character, Alice, is looking for her bathing suit one summer morning when she comes upon a series of maps she had drawn as a child. Her mother died when she was a young girl and the maps carry her back to a place, Tangalooponda, that she conjured in the wake of that loss: I took out the sheaf of papers and knelt down, spread them on the floor, ran my fingers over the lime-green forests, the meandering dark blue rivers, the pointy lavender mountain ranges. I had designed a whole world when I was a child, in secret. I had made a series of maps, one topographical, another of imports and exports, another highlighting mineral deposits, animal and plant species, another with descriptions of governments, transportation networks, and culture centers. My maps had taken over my life for months at a time; it was where I lived, the world called Tangalooponda, up in my room, my tray of colored pencils at my side, inventing jungle animals, the fish of the sea, diplomats and monarchs. Although there were theoretical people in my world, legions of them, all races and creeds, when I imagined myself in Tangalooponda I was always alone, composed and serene as an angel in the midst of great natural beauty. When I imagined myself in Tangalooponda I was always alone, composed and serene as an angel in the midst of great natural beauty. Is it possible then? Can being among natural beauty effect a change in the mind? Can drawing a map of a place with natural beauty effect this kind of change? Can writing about natural beauty do this? Bridge to Terabithia can be found here. A Map of the World can be found here. Image from...

The Shelter of Poetry

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 22, 2006 in Healing Places, Healing Poetry

Several years ago now, in the May/June 2001 issue of Poets and Writers magazine, a series of articles appeared on the topic, “Writing as a Healing Art.” Among these, perhaps the most compelling was a feature by Felicia Mitchell on Frances Driscoll, the author of a volume of poetry, The Rape Poems. Driscoll was working as a poet, beginning to publish her work, when in 1987 she was raped. She stopped writing after the rape. She believed, she said, that she would never write again. And then, gradually, poems began to come. One such poem is entitled, “Island of the Raped Women.” It contains these lines: We all sleep through the night. We wake eager from dreams filled with blue things and designs for hats. At breakfast, we make a song, chanting our litany of so much collected blue. We do not talk of going back to the world. We talk of something else. . . In the article in Poets and Writers, Driscoll speaks about the responses she gets to this particular poem: Little girls barely out of their teens ask. Sometimes college women ask. The question is always whispered. The question is desperate and urgent. The question always breaks my heart. The question is, ‘Where is the island? Where is the island? It’s such a moving question, such a poignant question. It also points to what is possible: words powerful enough to create an island. Words powerful enough to create shelter. If you were to imagine an island for healing, what details might it have? What colors would recur? A full text of “Island of the Raped Women” can be found here. Another article from this site about the poem can be found here. Pictures from Paris in Color via...

Emily’s Healing Place: A Place to Heal from Anorexia

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 18, 2006 in Healing Places

[Please note that, as with any patients I write about here, unless otherwise stated, names and certain identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.] Writing about a healing place can offer the kind of moment that changes things. In fact, simply imagining a healing place can sometimes change things. I’ve seen this happen. One particular place that comes to mind is a place that a woman named Emily imagined. Emily was twenty-seven years old, and weighed, when she first came to see me as a patient, fifty-two pounds. She’d tried and failed at several different treatment programs for anorexia and was under the care of an internist who was monitoring her physical condition. She was referred to my practice of mind-body medicine by a family friend who suspected that her condition might also benefit from being considered at the interface of mind and body. Emily concurred. And so we began. After a few weeks Emily began keeping a journal. It was, I believe, a few weeks after this that I invited her to imagine a healing place. One of her fears about beginning to eat again was the risk that any food she took in would make her stomach protrude—something she’d come to believe was ugly. She told me she’d like to imagine a place where it would be okay to have a stomach—a place where she wouldn’t feel ashamed of having a stomach. When she began to imagine such a place—a place where it might be safe to gain weight—she began to imagine herself at a barn among horses, this a place she’d loved as a young girl. She imagined brushing the horses, stroking them, placing her cheek against their flanks. She imagined mucking out the stalls. She wrote about this place in her journal. As with most good writing, it was the details that brought the place alive. The stroke of the brush against the horse’s hide. The warmth against her cheek. The horse’s breath. The sharp sweet smell of the stalls. The place became real through the details. With practice, she became able to summon the barn in her imagination when she felt anxious. She imagined stroking the horses, and brushing them. She imagined—and then experienced—the feeling in her body of her body being accepted. “The horses,” she told me, “they wouldn’t judge me if my stomach was pooching out. They wouldn’t care if I had a stomach or...

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