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Months 1&2: Creating a Healing Place

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 17, 2015 in

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: Freewriting The Body as a Healing Place The Easiest Writing and Healing Prompt Ever A Shopping Spree Writing to Discover Needs and Desires Buy a Box Conjuring Images for Healing A Scavenger Hunt Who to Bring on the Train Photo is by Cameraman from Geograph. It’s of a cottage near Snowshill in Gloucestershire, Great Britain...

Writing and Meditation

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 12, 2014 in

I’m one of those people who’s been interested in meditation for a long time. But I’ve been mostly interested from a distance–because I also find it really, really hard. I find it hard to hold a thought—or my breath—in my mind, to concentrate on that thought, or to try and work with it. I’m one of those people who finds it easier to focus on a thought—and hold it—work with it—if my fingers are moving on a keyboard, or across a page. I suspect this has everything to do with practice. If I were to graph the hours I’ve logged writing in my life—starting with the alphabet—and compare it to a graph of the minutes I’ve logged meditating, the meditation minutes would be powerfully dwarfed—they would literally disappear. I’ve been interested for a while now in how writing can become a kind of meditation—perhaps a bridge to meditation—or a boat—for those of us who have trouble diving into the deep pool of meditation. In 2014, I had the idea to explore connections between writing and meditation and I feel like I only began to scratch the surface. I also made a decision late in the year to let this thread go for a while. I may pick it up again at some point. I continue to think there may be something fruitful in this connection between writing and meditation . . . Maybe . . . ____________________________________________________________ Photo is of a painting by Leon Wyczotkowski, a Polish realist, from Wikimedia Commons...

Healing Poetry

Posted by Diane Morrow on July 25, 2011 in

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things. ——from The Wild Geese by Mary Oliver There are a large number of poems that could be offered as potentially healing. I’m offering here a handful that I’ve come across, and written about briefly, because they seem to me to resonate especially well with the process of healing, and because any one of them seems like it could be a springboard—a trampoline?—to one’s own writing. Here is lovely encouragement from Naomi Shihab Nye for writing a little as one collects poems. I. Poems that conjure a healing place Last Night As I Lay Sleeping by Antonio Machado The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry The Lake Isle of Innisfree by WB Yeats Island of the Raped Women by Frances Driscoll Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda What I Want by Alicia Ostriker II. Poems about a quest The Journey by Mary Oliver Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich III. Poems that might offer company during a difficult time The Guest House by Rumi Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye Satellite Call by Sara Bareilles One Art by Elizabeth Bishop The Armful by Robert Frost The Spell by Marie Howe Talking to Grief by Denise Levertov Sweetness by Stephen Dunn My Dead Friends by Marie Howe III. Poems for looking at the world in new ways The Wild Geese by Mary Oliver Because Even the Word Obstacle Is an Obstacle by Alison Luterman Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer by a group of women in a writing workshop If by Rudyard Kipling and Joni Mitchell Desert Places by Robert Frost Report from a Far Place by William Stafford The Snowman by Wallace Stevens Notes in Bathrobe Pockets by Raymond Carver A New Path to the Waterfall, a collection by Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher The Summer Day by Mary Oliver IV. A poem about the process of reading Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins V. A poem for considering purpose Every Craftsman by Rumi. Poems recently posted are included...

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