Healing Resources

Writing and Healing and Sweets

Posted by Diane Morrow on October 31, 2006 in Healing Language and Healing Images, Healing Resources

The first time I went to a Bar Mitzvah I loved the part where someone—the rabbi?—scattered candy across the steps at the front of the temple and the children were invited to come forward and retrieve it. The rabbi explained something about making a connection for the children—between Torah and sweetness. Not just telling them the Torah is sweet, but letting them experience the connection: reading the Torah and tasting sweetness. This week I looked this up (Google: Torah child sweet) and found a piece written by a Rabbi Levi Cooper. He explains a tradition in hassidic communities of initiating children into the study of Torah at a very young age—at the age of three—and doing so with a cookie. The teacher offers the child a cookie in the shape of the Hebrew letter, aleph. When the child can correctly identify the letter the cookie is dipped in honey and the child gets to eat the cookie. “Thus,” Rabbi Cooper writes, “we bless our children that their Torah study should always be as sweet as honey.” Wikipedia adds this: This is not just to show the child that learning is “sweet”, nor that Torah study is “sweet”, but also, to learn the sweetness of the Hebrew language. I love that—to learn the sweetness of the language. In my last year of college I managed to schedule my classes so that on Thursdays I had only one class—an eight o’clock. I loved Thursdays. As soon as class was over, at 9:15, I walked out of the classroom, across campus, and down Rockhill Road to the Alameda Plaza. This was in Kansas City, Missouri. The Plaza was, and still is now, this lovely outdoor shopping square with restaurants and shops. Back then there was a restaurant there which was called, simply, The Place. I’d go to The Place on Thursday mornings and I’d order the same breakfast each time. A poached egg. An English muffin. Strawberries with cream. A mug of coffee. The strawberries came in a blue bowl. The coffee was strong and hot. The cream was real. I ate and I wrote. For me, it was the beginning of falling in love with writing. And this falling in love with writing was all of one piece with the egg and the strawberries and the blue bowl that the strawberries came in and the strong coffee, the real cream. A strawberry can be a sweet. A chocolate can be a sweet. A good cup of coffee. A hot cup of tea. A new mug. A blue bowl. A good pen. Pat Schneider, a woman who has taught writing workshops for some twenty-five years, has written a very good and useful book about writing called Writing Alone and with Others. In a chapter on discipline, she suggests that the discipline of writing does not arise best out of obligation but will always arise best out of love. p. 51. “Rather,” she says, “than thinking of going to your writing desk as the ‘ought’ and ‘should’ work of your life, think of it as a longed-for pleasure, as a hot fudge sundae, as that which pleases you, delights you, that which you love” Yes, I agree. Though, for me at least, I sometimes find it’s easier for me to think of writing...

Words as a Resource for Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 26, 2006 in Healing Resources, Recommended Books

In Frederick, the children’s book by Leo Lionni, a chatty family of field mice live in an old stone wall. Winter approaches. All the mice set to work, gathering corn and nuts and wheat, except for Frederick, who sits apart from the others, doing nothing, or at least he appears to be doing nothing. He’s the daydreaming mouse. The lazy mouse? The other mice scold him. Why isn’t he working? He tells them he is working. He tells them he’s gathering sun rays for the winter days. Yeah, right. How does one gather sun rays? They ask him again. Why aren’t you working? He tells them he’s gathering colors. Right. Sure. Finally, Frederick tells them he’s gathering words. Winter comes. The mice hole up in the stone wall. At first all goes as well as can be expected in winter. The mice are well-fed and content. But the time comes when they have used up all their provisions. It’s cold. They’re feeling a bit less chatty. Finally they turn to Frederick. They ask him about his supplies. He tells them to close their eyes. When their eyes are closed he begins: ‘Now I send you the rays of the sun. Do you feel how their golden glow. . .’ And as Frederick spoke of the sun the four little mice began to feel warmer. Was it Frederick’s voice? Was it magic? Next he conjures colors. Blue periwinkles. Red poppies. Yellow wheat. And what happens? “. . . they saw the colors as clearly as if they had been painted in their minds.” And they were nourished by them. Sometimes we forget what nourishes us. The winter comes and we forget. Words are a way to remember. We can write them on index cards, or on the palms of our hands. We can write them on the back page of a notebook, or the front page. We can write them in fall on those days when the harvest feels especially plentiful. We can store them like Frederick, and pull them out on flat winter days when we are most in...

Gathering Resources for Writing and Healing: A Supply List

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 20, 2006 in Healing Resources

Yesterday I decided to make beef stew. My grocery list was straightforward—stew beef, a large onion, red potatoes, one sweet potato, carrots, and a can of V-8 juice. (I make a pretty simple stew.) There’s something satisfying about such clear simple lists. When Harry Potter is preparing to start his first year at Hogwarts he’s handed, by Hagrid, an exceedingly straightforward list. Pages 66 and 67. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. By J.K. Rowling. Three sets of plain work robes (black) One plain pointed hat (black) for day wear One pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar) One winter cloak (black, silver fastenings) 7 course books, titles and authors listed, including The Standard Book of Spells (Grade I) 1 wand 1 cauldron (pewter, standard size 2) 1 set glass or crystal phials 1 telescope 1 set brass scales And, finally– An owl OR a cat OR a toad I love the details—the specificity—in Rowling’s list. And I wish I knew of such a straightforward list—such a specific list—for the process of healing. Or for the process of writing and healing. I don’t. The problem: every person is so different. Or, to put it another way, we’re not all going to the same school. At the same time, there are, it would seem, these common threads. And these common threads can act as a kind of template—a jumping-off place—for a person who might want to develop—or revise—their own individualized supply list. Here are a few common threads I’ve observed over the years in writing and healing supply lists: Paper Something to write with (pen, pencil, crayon, laptop computer, etc. . .) Nourishing food A room of one’s own—or a desk of one’s own (or maybe a chair of one’s own) Green growing things Healing landscapes Rest Time to think and daydream and walk A time and a place to grieve what needs to be grieved People who get it (whatever it is) Animals who get it (dogs, cats, horses, cows, etc. . .) (owls? toads?) A bit of a sense of humor about the whole deal Good books Conversation Some kind of work or activity that matters (though not necessarily one’s day job) A connection to some larger sense of meaning Silence This is not meant by any means to be an exhaustive list. These are merely some common threads—a kind of template. And when it comes to individual supply lists—I think each one is probably different. What might your own individualized list look...

Still Life with Chickens: A Recommended Book

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 11, 2006 in Healing Resources, Recommended Books

I like books that name the concrete things—the resources—it takes to make a life. I also like books about starting over. Thus, The Boxcar Children. And, a more grown-up version of starting over: Still Life with Chickens: Starting Over in a House by the Sea. The memoir, written by Catherine Goldhammer, and published this past May, describes Goldhammer’s move, newly divorced, with her 12-year-old daughter, from a spacious house in an upscale neighborhood to a small cottage on a pond near the ocean. She did not, she tells us at the outset, have a year in Provence or a villa under the Tuscan sun. What she had was her cottage in a town on a peninsula wedged between the Boston Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean, a town she describes thus— Once the home of a large amusement park with a famous roller coaster, it had developed haphazardly, with recreation rather than posterity in mind. Big houses sat cheek by jowl with tiny ones, shoehorned together on tiny streets. Some of them were beautiful and some of them were decidedly not. The seaside lawns tried valiantly to be green, but they were small, and some of them had remnants of the amusement park in them: an oversized pink teacup with bench seats, a faded turquoise bumper car. Goldhammer’s memoir is filled with vivid tangible named things: That oversized pink teacup A large salt pond A new coat of off-white paint Wood floors Dragonflies And, of course, chickens Specific chickens— Rhode Island Reds A Silver Laced Wyandotte A Light Brahma called Big Yellow And then all the supplies needed to take care of those chickens— A brooder light A rope Vinegar Peroxide A refrigerator box Duct tape A utility knife Hardware cloth A handsaw. . . Here’s something else I like about Still Life with Chickens—Catherine Goldhammer is as resourceful as those boxcar children. She makes do. She does not, for instance, have that year in Provence. Nor does she have a table saw. At one point in her story, she sets out to make a particular kind of chicken run—a triangular structure called an ark. Before she builds the ark she names what she needs: a table saw, an electric miter saw, and sawhorses. Then she acknowledges that she has none of these things. What she does have: a dull handsaw, a right angle, a pair of green plastic chairs. She makes do. All in the company of six chickens who cause her at times to question her sanity. But then—the eggs. Page 112. Eventually we got blue eggs and green eggs, pink eggs and brown eggs. We got whitish eggs, speckled eggs, freckled eggs, and eggs with white patches. We had one enormous egg with two yolks, and a wide variety of other sizes: small and oval, big and round, tall and thin. Sometimes I found eggs that had just been laid, warm and slightly damp. Finding a warm egg felt miraculous. Putting a warm egg into someone’s suspecting hand was like handing them the moon. Ah, the eggs. Unlike The Boxcar Children, there’s no rich grandfather who steps in at the end and makes everything easier. That’s one of the things I like about Still Life with Chickens. It’s one of the things that makes it a grown-up...

The Boxcar Children: A Primer on Gathering the Essentials

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 6, 2006 in Healing Resources

I liked the book, The Boxcar Children, when I was a child. I liked the original book in the series, the one that describes how four children survive as orphans by making a home in a boxcar. The children are so competent, and so resourceful. After they become orphaned, the four children spend their small savings on milk and bread and yellow cheese. They pick blueberries in the woods. They discover an abandoned boxcar and they begin to make a home there, carrying pine needles into the boxcar and heaping them into four piles to make beds. They discover a creek that spills over into a waterfall. The water is cold. They find a hole in a rock behind the waterfall and the hole becomes their refrigerator. They’re so ingenious. They haul stones to build a fireplace. They dam the creek to make a swimming pool. They scavenge a dump and bring back treasure—a white pitcher, a teapot, a kettle, a bowl, three cups, five spoons. Henry, the eldest boy, manages to get a job caring for someone’s yard. One of his chores involves thinning the vegetable garden. He saves the vegetables he’s thinned—baby carrots and turnips and tiny onions. He then buys meat with the dollar he’s earned and carries all of this back to the boxcar. The oldest girl, Jesse, takes the meat and miniature vegetables and makes a stew. It’s a bit of a fantasy, how neatly things work out for the children, and it becomes even tidier toward the end of the book when their grandfather finds them, and he turns out to be not only kind but rich and he takes the children into his home. But the fantasy is such a satisfying one. It offers, I suppose, a kind of catharsis. The book opens with the four children standing in front of a bakery, looking in through at the window at the bread and rolls. The children are hungry, frightened. They’re like Hansel and Gretel, children out in the world without parents. And then, bit by bit, they manage to secure precisely what they need. Shelter. Water. Food. Fire. At one point the three oldest children decide they want to teach the youngest child to read and the older children make a book for him using salvaged paper and a stick blackened in the fire. Shelter and water. Food and fire. Paper and a writing implement. The...

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