In 2009, California geology officials released an updated seismic map including more than 50 new fault lines discovered in the previous two decades, bringing the estimated number of fault lines in the state to 15,000.  Although most of California’s fault lines are small and do not generate major earthquakes, those of us who live here are accustomed to feeling the earth move beneath our feet from time to time.  According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there have been 462 (and counting) earthquakes in the California and Nevada regions in this past week alone, although most were too small to be detected by the residents.  Still, the level of seismic activity garnered attention on the nightly news.  I watched as a map of the west coast flashed on the television screen, red dots pulsating to show the strongest of the tremors.  ”Might this mean,”  the newscaster asked, “that a ‘big one’ is about to occur?”

Life has its fault lines too.  Day after day, we deal with the little upsets, the small upheavals:  a parking ticket, a child’s scraped knee, the favorite vase shattering on the floor, an argument with a spouse, or a sore throat and sniffles that mean we cancel our weekend plans.  Little tremors, nothing too upsetting.  Life goes on, and we cross our fingers that we’ll be spared from “the big ones”–the natural disasters, losses or suffering portrayed every night in the evening news.

But life gives us no guarantees, and it can take a turn for the worse without warning.  We experience a  big upheaval, the one we didn’t expect, a kind of emotional earthquake, when everything we hoped for and took for granted is torn asunder.  “Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that change when it comes cracks everything open,” Dorothy Allison said. Whether cancer,  sudden death,  job loss, marital breakup, or other trauma, our psyches’ landscapes are  vulnerable and exposed.  We’re “cracked open,” and other, older wounds sometimes resurface to create tremors of old feelings, emotional earthquakes.

I received a diagnosis of early stage breast cancer several years ago; it came during a difficult chapter of my life.  I wrote, filling  page after page of my journal with disbelief and feelings of  guilt.  Had I  brought my cancer on myself?  But it didn’t take long before my writing shifted.  Memories of old wounds–loss, hurt and betrayals–I’d soldiered through and buried.   In the months before my diagnosis, there were little tremors from time to time.  I was often irritable, easily upset, and, if I admitted it, depressed.  The wounds might have been buried, but they hadn’t healed, and years of stress accumulated along my psychological fault line.  It took a cancer diagnosis to release the pressure and make those old, unresolved wounds visible.   I resigned from a job I admitted I hated, and little by little, I embarked on a journey of  healing.

A cancer diagnosis often unearths other pain or trauma suffered in someone’s life; it’s something I witness frequently in my writing groups.   Od, painful memories are triggered by the most benign of writing prompts, and yet, the stories that get written are as vivid and emotional as if the event happened recently.  But isn’t it human suffering that so frequently provides the impetus for writing?  William Carlos Williams, poet and physician, once stated that writing often begins out of “a disaster or catastrophe…By writing,” he said, “I rescue myself under all sorts of conditions…it relieves the feeling of distress.” According to Ted Kaptchuk, Harvard professor of Medicine, “Healing is not something we do only when we are sick; it is part of the process and journey of life,”

By writing I rescue myself…   Emotions can inspire us or hold us hostage.  Negative emotions–anger, fear or feelings of unworthiness–accumulate, just as the pressure along the earth’s plates.  They weaken our ability to fend off illness, depression or disease.  Writing can help us  translate our emotions into words, connect what we feel to why, and  begin to make sense of our lives.   Writing allows each of us a way to rescue ourselves, to affirm, as Philip Levine describes,  the meaning of our lives.

…my jaws ache for release, for

words that will say

anything.  I force myself

to remember

who I am, what I am, and

why I am here.

(Philip Levine, “Silent in America”)

Write from your  fault lines this week.  Write about what “aches for release.”  Explore how writing can “rescue” you from feelings of distress or sorrow, or how writing helps you affirm who you are, why you are here.

I inhaled, filling my lungs with air, and then exhaled slowly, trying to clear my mind–a perpetually challenging task.  “Gratitude.” I silently repeated the word to myself on each inhale, until it seemed I had actually filled my body, my entire being with gratitude.  I drove home smiling, feeling lighter than I had two hours earlier as I’d combatted traffic and stop lights to get to my class on time. When I reached my house, I sat at my desk, opened my notebook and made a gratitude list.  The page was quickly filled with the names of people who, because of their love, kindness and friendship, have enriched my life.

It wasn’t until this morning that it struck me: my gratitude list was incomplete.  For as often as I’ve tried, over the years, to cultivate a practice of letting the people in my life know how much I appreciate them–with letters, little gifts, thank you notes, or, as February 14^th nears, even valentines–I am remiss at remembering to appreciate  someone in particular.

That someone is a person much like you.  She’s has struggled at different times in her life and sometimes won, grieved but often rejoiced, loved (often too well), and sometimes lost.  Her body has weathered surgeries, early stage breast cancer, heartache and heart failure but it still serves her well, doing its yeoman’s work day in and day out.  Her face shows the tell-tale signs of age, and her joints often broadcast her age when she tries to do a new yoga pose.  But that someone is more often greeted with an exasperated sigh as she looks in her magnifying mirror to put on her makeup.  She sometimes wilts under the harsh words of a fierce internal critic, who trounces all over her writing at regular intervals.  She often forgets to be grateful for the person who stares back at her from the mirror.  Her face, with all its evidence of a life lived, her body, her unique gifts.  That person is me.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

“Love after Love,” by Derek Walcott, in Sea Grapes, Noonday Press, 1976

“I’m gonna’ sit right down and write myself a letter…” For those of you old enough to remember, the song was first written in 1935 by Fred Ahlert and Joe Young but has since been recorded by many different vocalists.   I awakened today remembering my teen-aged self, singing along to Sam Cooke’s recording after being spurned by a teen-aged lover.  My dog eyed me with alarm as I danced around the kitchen performing my much older rendition.  Call it crazy, but thinking about gratitude and appreciation for the person I am—despite all those mishaps and imperfections—triggered the memory of those long ago lyrics.

Perhaps we all need a reminder,  especially after cancer, aging or life hardships, to express gratitude and compassion for ourselves.  What better time than right now?  Valentine’s Day is Tuesday,  traditionally a time we express  love and affection for others.  Why not add yourself to your valentine’s list? Write a gratitude letter to yourself. You could address it to the wounded child who never received the love she needed, or to the adult, weathering a difficult chapter of life, or to your body, struggling to heal from illness or surgeries, even the older, aging body.

Why not sit right down and write yourself a letter?  And while you’re at it, get out the construction paper, the lacy doilies, scissors and glue. Make yourself a valentine and place it over your desk.   Let it be a reminder of your gratitude and compassion  for yourself, for all you have endured and become.   Sit.  Feast on your life.  

“All I want to do today is play,” I whined to my husband over our morning coffee.  “I don’t want to read another student’s paper, teach another class, or go to another meeting.  I just want to walk through Balboa Park—without the dog—linger in the art museum, sit alone in a café and read a novel.  I want to play hooky.”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “What’s stopping you?”

“Well, I…”  I was ready with my standard arsenal of excuses, but I hesitated.  What was stopping me?

As children, we had a familiar repertoire of games, hide and seek, tag, dodge ball, but a perpetual favorite was “Mother, may I?”  Why create a game that was all about getting permission to do something?  “Mother, may I” was a familiar litany for all of us.  We asked permission to be excused from the dinner table, to go out and play, or cross the street.  If we didn’t’ we were subjected to reprimand or punishment.  But the whole point of our child’s game, “Mother, May I?” was to try to get away with something without asking permission to do it.

Mother, may I? Even as adults, those old internalized prohibitions from childhood clamor for attention, keeping us, unconsciously or consciously, from doing things we dream of doing with our lives.  It often takes a whack on the side of the head, like cancer or sudden loss, to make us reassess and change.

“Change, when it comes, cracks everything open,” Dorothy Allison wrote in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.  And change comes when we’ve been given a real wake-up call, when our lives seem to shatter. Life-changing events can be an opportunity take action—to do the very things we’ve always wanted but never gave ourselves permission to do.  If we really pay attention, we might learn to live, now and presently.

… cancer is a wakeup call

that resonates to the cell level…cancer teaches that snorkeling

coral reefs pays greater dividends than a savings account

and mowing summer grass can be postponed

for bike rides past wild flowers and country streams,

and vacuuming the carpet and washing the windows

are low priority items when a friend drops by to visit…

(“The Lesson,” by Judy Rohm, in The Cancer Poetry Project.)

So what’s stopping you?  Maybe you just need a nudge, a bit of permission, as Kaylin Haught’s poem,  “God Says Yes to Me,” reminds us.  Here’s an excerpt:

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

And she said yes

I asked her it if was okay to be short

And she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

Or not wear nail polish

And she said …you can do just exactly

What you want to…

What I’m telling you is

Yes Yes Yes

(From Poetry 180, edited by Billy Collins)

Yes, yes, yes.  Well, I’m giving myself permission to take a break and play today.  What about you?  If you could give yourself permission to do anything you’ve wanted to do for a long time, what would it be?  Try beginning with the words, “yes, yes, yes” and see where it takes you.   What in your life would you really like to change or do?

What’s in My Journal

Odd things, like a button drawer.  Mean

things, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.

But marbles too.  A genius for being agreeable.

Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous

discards.  Space for knickknacks, and for

Alaska.  Evidence to hang me, or to beatify…

Pages you don’t know exist

but you can’t find them.  Someone’s terribly

inevitable life story, maybe mine.

(By William Stafford, in  Crossing Unmarked Snow)

I admit that I didn’t make much headway in our garage cleaning, perching myself on the stairs for a while and reading random passages from one notebook or another.  I remembered another box, stored on the shelves and containing my journals from the early eighties, when my life was defined by loss and grief following the drowning of my first husband.  I pulled a notebook from 1983 out of the box and read a few entries from it, comparing what I’d written then with the notebook entries of this past year. How different they were:  one written during trauma and loss, the other a hodge-podge of creative (and not so creative) notations.  Both, however different, are testimony to the life I have lived.

Why did I write it down?  In order to remember, of course.  But what exactly was it I wanted to remember? … the point of keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking…how it felt to me:  that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. (Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”)

How it felt to be me.  I’ve kept journals since I was a teenager.  They were called “diaries” then. Mine had a blue, faux leather cover, pages gilded with gold leaf, and a small lock and key, impossibly easy to break–something my kid brother did on more than one occasion.  I no longer remember what I wrote in that diary, but I still have a scar on my right leg from the summer I chased my brother as he ran through our campsite near Medicine Lake, California,  laughing and waving  my diary in the air.  He got away, because I sliced my leg on a steel tent stake and was rushed to the nearest town to have it stitched up.  I returned, limping in pain from my bandaged leg, to find my diary lying on my sleeping bag.  My brother was nowhere in sight, hiding behind my father’s pickup truck in tears.

Despite those invasions of privacy, I was undeterred in recording my most important thoughts, often hiking up the hill behind our house to sit under an old oak tree to write.  I suppose I dreamed of emulating Henry David Thoreau, but adolescence interests soon took over, and my attentions shifted from the meaning of life to which boy I “liked” and which boys “liked” me.  In college, my notebooks changed again, full of my musings on  poetry, politics, psychology and theology. When my first child was born, I noted  her every developmental achievement.  But during those tumultuous years after my husband’s drowning, my journals were my refuge, a port in the storm, and I filled the pages with emotional outpourings or questions I could not answer.  I gradually wrote my way out of  sorrow, and as I did, my writing changed once more.  I enrolled in doctoral studies, and my notebooks became my repositories for ideas and observations noted in my research.  They were  invaluable tools as I wrote  my dissertation, and I hung onto them long after I’d finished and earned my degree.  They were evidence I’d found my way out of grief and despair into a new and different life.  Writing, whether through pages of emotion, poetry or even research notes, had helped me find my way out of pain and sorrow.  I wanted to remember how far I had come.

“How it felt to be me.” I’ve  replayed Didion’s words so many times.  Isn’t that–to remember–part of the reason we write?  And isn’t that one of the most important reasons for keeping a journal or notebook?

Journals are … intended to be private: … they are the place where [the writer] is not performing, not showing off. In his or her journals, the writer is… unbuttoned, unguarded… (Mary Gordon, New York Times, October 6, 1991.)

Our journals offer the freedom to write without censoring ourselves.  We write about where we’ve been or what we’ve done; we try out new ideas, or we grieve, write an angry rant, even, sometimes, whine.  It doesn’t matter.  We’re writing for ourselves, and no matter what we write, we are witnessing our lives on the page,  remembering and creating testimony to what we have experienced, felt and endured at different times in our lives.   Writing helps us to make sense of our lives, to write, as author Patricia Hampl described, “ourselves into knowing.”

How has writing helped you write yourself into knowing–into insight and understanding?  Have you turned to a journal during painful and difficult times in your life? If you re-read earlier entries, what changes do you observe in your writing?   What do you learn about yourself?   Write about a time that writing helped you make sense of a difficult life chapter.  Or write about why you keep a journal.  Why do you write?

If  you’d like to refresh your journal habits or begin keeping a writer’s notebook?  Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

• If you’re writing your way through a difficult or painful life experience, it’s important not to keep ruminating (as I did for several months after my husband died, making myself feel worse instead of better), but instead, after you’ve written for fifteen or twenty minutes, put the journal aside.  Come back to it later, maybe in a day or two and re-read your entry.   Underline words or phrases that stand out for you.  Start with a fresh page and one of those underlined phrases, using your own words as a prompt.  Chances are, it will take you someplace worth writing about.
• Get in the habit of writing for five to fifteen minutes a day, giving yourself the freedom to write anything.  May Sarton, who published two of her journals, advised, Remember to be alive to everything, not just what you’re feeling, but…your pets, to flowers, to what you’re reading…what you are seeing every day.  Noticing the world around us sometimes helps us stumble into  insight or a specific memory, something timportant to what we are feeling.
• Use a journal to record or document important events—joyous as well as painful, for example,   surgeries, recovery, a grandchild’s birth, pregnancy, a marital breakup, or a child’s first words.  Journaling is about writing from your life—and our lives are not only made up of pain—although it might feel like it at the time.  Capture the happy moments, the celebrations and achievements too.
• Combine visual with verbal:  photographs, ticket stubs, newspaper clippings, even quick sketches of places or people combined with writing about them.  I do this from time to time, and I admit that these are my favorite journals to return to and read.
• Use your journal to respond to writing prompts, using this site or others on the web or, if you prefer, some of the many published collections of writing prompts, like Judy Reeves’ A Writer’s Book of Days.

I love the stillness of the wood.

I love the music of the rill.

I love to couch in pensive mood

Upon some silent hill…

Here from the world I win release,

Nor scorn of men, nor footstep rude,

Break in to mar the holy peace

Of this great solitude.

(“Solitude,” by Lewis Carroll, `832-1898)

 Our human need for solitude, inspiration or spiritual renewal has a long tradition, whether for religious reasons, to retreat from the demands of the world, or to fully experience nature, as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or to deepen our understanding of our own lives.

In a world where our lives are bombarded by busyness,  the constant ring of cell phones, crowds of people in shopping malls or on city streets, “breaking news” of natural or man-made disasters, political campaigns, and advertisements for some new hot consumer item, it’s easy to lose ourselves in the melee.  Worse, we begin to feel stressed, dissatisfied, rushed or unhappy with our own lives and not know why.  How do we reclaim ourselves?

Whether in the demands of daily living or in the aftermath of a difficult  life event, it’s easy to become overwhelmed   by the many different choices we have, the expectations of others, and the voices of our internal critics, whispering “but you should be…” in our ears.  It’s hard to make time for ourselves, difficult to admit that we just might march to the beat of a different drummer and that we need space and solitude to reclaim ourselves.

Even in the recovery from cancer or other traumatic events, we hear many and sometimes conflicting messages about what it means to be a survivor.  There’s actually something called “survivor guilt,” when we can feel guilty about surviving traumatic or painful events while others have been less fortunate.  We feel lucky, yes, but guilty too, and we drive ourselves to take on goals, to accomplish more than we might normally do.  That’s not necessarily bad, but sometimes, we wake up and wonder how we got back on that treadmill when what we desire is a sense of peace, quiet or simplicity to discover what we really want our lives to be like.

Nancy, a writer from the Stanford Cancer Center group, described her feelings after treatment and recovery:  In the beginning, it was comforting to think of fighting to survive…  I believe that I should have a powerful drive to accomplish something…a goal for which I need to survive.  But I don’t find that drive in me. 

“I should have…a goal for which I need to survive.”  She dismissed the feelings of “should,” and rather than chaining herself to a goal that didn’t honor her true feelings, she found renewal in the ordinary and commonplace elements of her life:  I love the things I do day by day.  I hike with one beloved friend.  I spend time in the wonderful garden of another.  I meet others for coffee and conversation. I meet these friends with pleasure and leave them with a joy and benefit to my mind and spirit…

In a poem entitled “Directive,” Ann, a poet living with cancer, reminds us of those ordinary moments in our lives that offer a kind of sanctuary,  a refuge from the demands  of a busy world that sometimes threaten to overtake our lives:

Remember the commonplace, the wooden chair on the white planked deck,
trees kneeling in the rain and deer prints
leading into elegant rushes. A kinder place
cannot be found: where you sit at the top
of shadowy stairs, the window lifted.
Consider the slight breeze, almost erasable,
the boundless oscillating atom, its radiance
tactile, in the mirror your shining hair.
Let me speak for you: there’s comfort
to be found in fatigue, in letting principles
fall like stones from your pockets.
Let the flesh of your breath relax,
overlook not the spacelessness of
monogamous self-love. Fall into the ordinary,
the rushes, the deer looking up into your heart,
risen, full in the silver hammered sky.

This week, consider the importance of solitude and sanctuary in healing.  What little islands of sanctuary, those common and ordinary moments of life, that have helped you heal and find renewal?