Perspective

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 27, 2015 in Blog, Healing Books, Perspective

In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun, tells this story—a story that came to mind as I was thinking about “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. It’s another take on this idea of practicing loss by looking at it differently. By considering that what looks and feels like loss might be something other than disaster. Pema Chodron writes: I read somewhere about a family who had only one son. They were very poor. This son was extremely precious to them, and the only thing that mattered to the family was that he bring them some financial support and prestige. Then he was thrown from a horse and crippled. It seemed like the end of their lives. Two weeks after that, the army came into the village and took away all the healthy strong men to fight in the war, and this young man was allowed to stay behind and take care of his family. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know. I don’t think this means that we don’t grieve. Not that. Sorrow is sorrow. But I think it means holding with at least some tiny part of our mind the possibility that the way things seem might not be the full story. There might be a larger story that we can’t yet see. And it seems like writing can be a way to consider and imagine this larger story. What if the way things seem is not the way things really...

This is Water by David Foster Wallace

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 26, 2015 in Blog, Perspective, Writing and Healing Prompts

I’m thinking of this speech by David Foster Wallace because I’m reading his book, Infinite Jest, this summer, and will be showing the speech again this fall to my students, and because the speech connects so well to the poem by Alison Luterman that I wrote about back in April—Because Even the Word Obstacle Is an Obstacle. The whole speech is well worth listening to and I’m embedding it here. I’m also excerpting a short piece from his speech that connects especially well to the poem. There are so many pieces I could excerpt. But, for now, this one, in which he muses on how a person might consider navigating the ordinary experience of going to the grocery store differently: But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. How well that connects to Alison Luterman’s last stanza: So your moment of impatience must bow in service to a larger story, because if something is in your way it is going your way, the way of all beings; towards darkness, towards light. I feel like there’s a writing idea in here somewhere. Catching a moment of impatience and spinning it. Catching a moment when the water is not as smooth as we would like. And then imagining the story forward. What if the woman in the grocery store is not who I think she is? What if appearances are entirely deceptive? What if the boy in the next lane learning to hold his breath is practicing to save his life? Or—who knows?—what if he’s practicing to save mine? What if we could begin by imagining just one thing that is not what it appears to be? And then writing about that. See also Alison Luterman’s poem: Because Even the Word Obstacle is an...

Because Even the Word Obstacle is an Obstacle by Alison Luterman

Posted by Diane Morrow on April 19, 2015 in Blog, Healing Poetry, Perspective

I appreciate this poem for its first line: Try to love everything that gets in your way. I love that the poem is about swimming laps. Learn to be small and swim through obstacles like a minnow without grudges or memory. I think I recognize the moment this poem might spring from–getting to the pool and wanting nothing more than an empty lane, the smooth glassy surface of the water, and, then, well–obstacles. The poem is so specific about what can get in the way. For instance: the Chinese women in flowered bathing caps murmuring together in Mandarin, doing leg exercises in your lane the teenage girl idly lounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo: Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine, in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep. an uncle in the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephew how to hold his breath underwater, even though kids aren’t allowed at this hour. The poem continues. It imagines the boy grown up and on a wedding on a boat and suddenly washed overboard—but emerging like a cork from the water—alive. I appreciate the poem’s last line: So your moment of impatience must bow in service to a larger story, because if something is in your way it is going your way, the way of all beings; towards darkness, towards light. So your moment of impatience must bow in service to a larger story. As a person who struggles mightily with impatience, I appreciate the possibility of recasting my moments of impatience in a different way. Considering a larger story. Considering, in light of the poem’s title, how if I could get a glimpse of this larger story then the very words I use to interpret and name things might begin to change. An obstacle might become . . . what? Full text of the poem is at Your Daily Poem. The poem originally appeared in Sun Magazine in 2010. See also: Is Shifting One’s Point of View a Healing Habit? Photo of swimming minnow is captured from video at...

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 1, 2007 in Healing Images, Perspective

In a letter about his poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens writes that the poem “is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or ideas, but of sensations.” The poem is made of up thirteen stanzas—thirteen sensations—each marked by a Roman numeral. Each stanza has the word blackbird in it. I like the second stanza. Number II: I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. I also like the ninth. Number IX: When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. I like the way that each way of looking at a blackbird is distinct and complete unto itself. I like the sense in the poem of worlds beyond the landscape of the poem itself—a blackbird marking the edge of one of many circles. In his book, Writing With Power, Peter Elbow suggests a writing exercise in which one follows Wallace Stevens’ example and writes a poem “that looks at or talks about the same thing over and over again.” Elbow writes of how he did this himself with a cherry tree—looked at it in different ways and made this discovery: I see now that it is about missing the house on Percival Street where we used to live. . . If I had tried to write a poem about missing that house, it probably would have been terrible. Being stuck with having to write tiny stanzas about that cherry tree did it for me. The cherry tree gave him a way in to writing what he wanted to write—perhaps to what he was longing to write. The thirteen ways gave him a way in. Gave him more than one way in. I tried this exercise once with a writing workshop I was teaching to women with cancer. I told the women they could choose to write thirteen ways about anything at all and they chose to write about cancer. They wrote as a group, taking turns, the stanzas coming fast, one after the other. They actually ended up writing sixteen ways of looking at cancer. Then one of the women who had been absent came the next week and she added two more ways and they ended up with a poem, “Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer.” What I noticed in that workshop when the women were writing those different ways was that knowing they were writing a lot of different ways had a freeing effect. They weren’t writing the only word on cancer—the last word on cancer. They were just writing one way of looking at cancer, and then another, and then another. You could try it if you wanted. You could become one of the ones looking. You could write seven ways or sixteen ways or eighteen ways of looking at . . . what? The full poem can be found here. Elbow’s Writing with Power here. And here is the poem the women wrote at Cancer Services: Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer...