Months 1&2: Creating a Healing Place
The idea here is to begin the process of writing and healing—to ground the process of writing and healing—in a healing place. But you don’t need to live at the edge of a lake or at the foot of a mountain in order to do this. That’s the beauty of writing: you can begin by creating your own healing place—with words. And you can draw on the healing places of others to do so.
You may want to begin with the very first healing prompt I ever wrote for this site: Designing a healing retreat.
Or with one of the newer pieces below, such as the piece about a cure cottage in the Adirondacks.
Or perhaps with one of these writing prompts:
The Easiest Writing and Healing Prompt Ever
Writing to Discover Needs and Desires
Photo is by Cameraman from Geograph. It’s of a cottage near Snowshill in Gloucestershire, Great Britain
The Cure by Andrea Barrett
I have found a cure cottage come to life in a piece of fiction. Everything, thinks Elizabeth, is in order. Ms. Barrett continues: Everything is as it should be, exactly as she would wish it: nine o’clock, on this December day in 1905, and already breakfast has been cooked and served and cleared, Livvie and Rosellen are at the dishes, and all nine of her boarders are resting, wrapped in blankets and robes, on the lower veranda or the private porches of the upstairs rooms. In the light, airy dining...
Writing and Healing Idea #1: Designing a Healing Retreat
Imagine for a moment that you go to your mailbox. You find there an envelope—a small white square. You open the envelope to find an invitation–to a healing retreat. A sheet of paper accompanying the card offers details: For six weeks, it has become possible for all of your ordinary routines and responsibilities to be suspended. Work schedules have been rearranged. Children will be safe and well-cared for. Any appointments (or medical treatments) have been rescheduled such that they will not interfere. In fact, any and all obstacles standing...
What I Want by Alicia Ostriker
This is a poem about slowing down and it seems like it might be just right for January, for the quiet space that can open up after the flurry of December. And about what can happen in that quiet. It follows nicely on Pablo Neruda’s poem, “Keeping Quiet,” and seems to spring from that same place. It begins: Yes, that’s what I want right now, Just that sensation Of my mind’s gradual Deceleration, as if I Took my foot off the gas And the Buick rolled to a stop....
Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda
I am sharing this poem, “Keeping Quiet,” with my sophomores this week as a writing catalyst. I like the way it has the potential to open up a pool of quiet in the middle of things. It begins: Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still. Not instructions for counting to ten—that common advice for dealing with rising anger before reacting. No, this is longer—just a bit longer—stretching the silence out two beats longer. Now we will count to twelve. The opening reminds of something...
Make Your Mind an Ocean
Continuing with the theme from a couple weeks ago of becoming an ever-larger body of water, I remembered a piece by Lama Yeshe called “Make Your Mind an Ocean.” Here is an excerpt from the piece which I’ve rearranged as a kind of found poem. It has to do with the mind becoming larger and larger and not depending so much on the tiny atoms of the world. The mind becoming larger and larger and in turn not being quite so disturbed by the relentless ripples and agitations of the world. If you’re...
What to do with the salt of suffering?
Sometimes when I’m at a loss for words it helps to come across other’s words, and just this morning I came across a treasure trove of poems at, of all places, a website of the Frye Museum, an art museum in Seattle, where they hold a weekly mindfulness meditation session on Wednesdays, and have published some poems and pieces they’ve used at these sessions. Here is one piece that seems particularly illuminating this morning. It’s not a poem, but it’s like a poem—a healing story as short as any...