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For the Week of May 12, 2013: “Mommy, It’s Your Happy Day!”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on May 12, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

“Mommy! It’s your happy day!”  My four-year old grandson said as he greeted my daughter at the bottom of the stairs in their Okinawan home this Mother’s Day morning.  He held out a little box with four cookies inside, ones he had decorated the day before, and offered her one–before sitting down to eat the rest himself!  His two-year old sister, not to be outdone, gave her a half-eaten jelly bean.  “I love my family,” she wrote on her Facebook page.

In years to come, the jelly beans and cookies will likely be replaced with cards and flowers, like the ones my daughters sent to me, but these first childish gestures of celebrating mothers are often remembered with the greatest fondness.  Among my cherished keepsakes, there is a box devoted to the handmade cards and love notes scrawled across the page in my daughters’ childish handwriting.  My mother kept a few of those little notes too.  Shortly after her death, I found a crude watercolor painting of Mount Shasta tucked in between the pages of one of her books.  I’d painted it for her in third grade, writing at the bottom of it, “I will always love you, Mommy.”

And I did, although our relationship was tested as I grew into adulthood and rebelled against what I perceived as her unrelenting and unnecessary control.  Many years later, when I navigated the turbulent years of adolescence with my two daughters, I became much more understanding and forgiving of my mother’s unintended misdemeanors.  Motherhood is complicated:   tender and loving, challenging and at times, frustrating.    Even if our feelings about our mothers are sometimes conflicted, like it or not, their voices echo in our minds long after they are gone.

It’s no wonder that mothers have been the inspiration for more than one poet or writer.  Type in “mother” in the advanced search on www.poets.org, the site of the Academy of American Poets, and no less than 611 poems are listed.  Read works of fiction or memoir, and a full range of mother characters emerge as, for example, in this vivid portrait of Russell Baker’s mother in his 1982 memoir, Growing Up:

In that time when I had known her best, my mother had hurled herself at life with chin thrust forward, eyes blazing, and an energy that made her seem always on the run…Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid, the slugabed, the drugstore cowboy, the libertine, the mushmouth afraid to tell people exactly what was on his mind whether people liked it or not.  She ran.

Anne Sexton remembers her mother with bitterness as she describes her “little childhood cruelties”:

I will speak of the little childhood cruelties…
of the nightly humiliations  where Mother undressed me,
of the life of the daytime, locked in my room,
being the unwanted, the mistake
that Mother used to keep Father
from his divorce.

(“Those Times,” The Complete Poems, 1982)

And it’s a mother’s love that Carl Sandburg recalls in “Home:”

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
to a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness.

(In:  Complete Poems, 2003)

Motherhood. The huge task of nurturing and caring for our children, of guiding them through childhood, weathering the inevitable storms of adolescence, and hoping we’ve done right by them.  I, like every mother I know, did the best I could, but I learned as I went, and I made my own mistakes along the way.  Now, so many years later my heart swells with pride when I watch my daughters with their children.  I sometimes see a shadow of myself as a young mother, the tenderness, the questions–“am I doing the right thing?”—and I witness little gestures and actions I learned from my mother, even my grandmother, passed along, consciously or unconsciously, just as they each do now to their children.

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point…

(“What I Learned from My Mother,” by Julia Kasdorf, in Sleeping Preacher, 1992)

“Your kind of love, once given, is never lost…”Wallace Stegner wrote in a letter to his mother over fifty years after her death.   (“Letter, Much Too Late,” Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, 1992)  It’s been almost a decade since my mother died, but today, I’m remembering my mother with a fuller kind of gratitude than, perhaps, I did before she died.  Maybe it’s time to write the letter, long overdue, I always meant to write before she died…a kind of adult version of that third grade girl’s promise, “I’ll always love you…”

Write about your mother this week.  And to mothers everywhere, I wish you each a Happy Mother’s Day.

 

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For the Week of May 5, 2013: Why Stories Matter

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on May 5, 2013 | 3 Comments »

She’s lived in my memory for sixty years.
Death steals everything except our stories.

These two final lines of “Larson’s Holstein Bull,” a poem by Jim Harrison, have lingered in my mind all week.  In the poem, the narrator remembers a young girl and her untimely death from being gored by a bull.  The poem is short, the descriptions lean and straightforward, but the impact of the final line is profound:  “Death steals everything except our stories,” something I think about often as I lead my writing groups for cancer patients and survivors.

This past week marked the end of the Spring series of two of my writing groups cancer, one at Scripps Green, the other at UCSD Moores, hospital cancer centers here in San Diego.  In celebration of our ten weeks together, we published a collection of the stories written and shared during the workshop.  Stories of cancer:  fear, sorrow for what was lost, confronting death,  hope, and more, stories that represent a whole life, not just a life wholly defined by cancer.

In the shock of a cancer diagnosis or the weeks of surgeries and treatments that follow, we sometimes forget that we have more than cancer stories to tell.  We may be robbed of our voices temporarily, but by writing and sharing our stories, we re-discover them, and we honor our lives. “Cancer,” novelist Alice Hoffman wrote in a New York Times essay, “need not be a person’s whole book, only a chapter.  Still, novelists know that some chapters inform all others. These are the chapters of your life that wallop you and teach you and bring you to tears…” (August 14, 2000).  Cancer—or other traumatic or painful life event—is that kind of chapter.

In our writing groups, cancer brings us together.  It acts as the starting point, the place in our lives we begin our stories, but as the weeks progress stories emerge of a whole life:  love, family, childhood, the joys and sorrows that make us unique.

Writing about cancer might be where we begin, but it leads us, just as all personal writing, on a voyage of discovery, and in the process, we begin to heal.  Writing gives us a way to understand and make sense our lives.  Writing and sharing our stories affirms our lives, our legacies.  Our stories say:  “This is my life.  This was important to me.  This is how I have become the person I am.”

But in order to make you understand, to give you my life, I must tell you a story—and there are so many, and so many—stories of childhood, stories of school, love, marriage, and death…
–Virginia Woolf

Our stories are our legacies, evidence of the lives we’ve lived.  Our stories live long after our lives have ended.  Think of the stories you tell of your grandparents, parents or other loved ones who are no longer living, how, through story, you remember and honor them.  William Carlos Williams, physician and poet, offered his advice to a medical student.  “Their stories, yours, mine—it’s what we carry with us on this trip we take…we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.”

It’s those stories I carry with me long after my writing workshops end, long after some writers’ lives are lost to cancer.  I remember their faces, their words, their lives.  It’s why stories matter.  We are our stories.  They shape us and act as the lens through which we see the world. Through story, we make sense of our lives, reclaim our voices, and learn that our stories have the power to touch others’ hearts.  I think of the men and women who’ve written with me over the past ten weeks, the shared tears, tenderness, compassion, and the laughter.  Cancer brought everyone to the writing groups, but the shared stories became the glue that bound us together.

I took their stories with me home with me this week, not just the ones they chose for the booklet, but others written and read in the many weeks we were together.  I’m grateful for these men and women, for their honesty, tenderness and for their willingness to share so much of themselves through their stories.  They are my greatest teachers—and I am forever humbled by their honesty, tenderness and authenticity.  Your stories matter too.  Write them.

Stories—the small personal ones that bring us close as well as those of the larger world—foster compassion.  In the telling of our personal lives, we’re reminded of our basic, human qualities—our vulnerabilities and strengths, foolishness and wisdom, who we are…, through the exchange of stories, [you] help heal each other’s spirits.

–Patrice Vecchione, Writing and the Spiritual Life

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For the Week of April 28, 2013: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on April 28, 2013 | 4 Comments »

Through the exchange of stories, we help heal each other’s spirits…Isn’t this what a spiritual life is about?

–Patrice Vecchione, Writing and the Spiritual Life

Three or four years ago, I was invited to lead a writing workshop for women at Jewish Family Services in San Diego.  What grew out of that first workshop was affection for the women who wrote with me, but also, a wonderful opportunity to partner with Rabbi Aliza, and together, explore the intersection of religious tradition, faith and life stories.  This past month, we began another series, “Writing as a Spiritual Practice.”

Each week,through writing, we engage in an ever-deepening exploration of our inner lives and the spiritual forces that support it.  I’ve long been aware of the spirituality in my writing practice, how it invites me to pay attention and notice how sacred even the ordinary events of life can be.  Writing opens my heart, and I find compassion and forgiveness as I explore my shadow self, sometimes hidden deep within.  There, I discover new meaning and perspective, a deeper sense of inner guidance.  In this way, writing has become my spiritual practice, my prayer.

Prayer exists in every religion and culture, and in times of hardship, faith and prayer take on even greater importance.  Among cancer patients, studies show that faith and spirituality are important factors in the quality of life. I witness this in my writing groups.  Faith is often expressed in the poetry and stories  written and shared with each other.  One member said  “The community I am building with my fellow writers …is… a form of spirituality.”  Shortly after her diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer, Laura wrote a prayer on the eve of her new chemotherapy regimen.  Weeping, she read it aloud to the group:

A wad of pain

In the pit of my stomach

Lord have mercy

 

I focus on it

Lord have mercy

Lord have mercy

Lord have mercy…

“Pray for me,” one woman asked the group members as she began radiation for an inoperable brain tumor.  And we did, no matter our religious affiliation, because we wanted to believe that somehow,  our prayers might make a difference.  It wasn’t blind faith.  Dr. Larry Dossey, MD, in his book, Healing Words:  The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine,  cited many studies demonstrating the positive influence of prayer on health and healing among patients with HIV, coronary disease or cancer.

When Kristen, a young woman in her twenties diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer,  confessed to the writing group that she had never been one to go to church, she said she now felt as if she needed to rely on something bigger than herself.  “I think I need a boost in the power of faith,” she said.  “Faith, I have decided is an important part of human life.”

So many times, when I ask what sustains the men and women who attend my writing groups during long months of surgery, treatment and recovery, I often hear “My faith… and I pray a lot.”  New York Times Editor, Dana Jennings, writing in One Man’s Cancer, the blog he created after his diagnosis of an aggressive prostate cancer, described his need for what he called “spiritual antibodies:”.

I converted to Judaism five years ago, after decades spent stumbling toward God. That faith has helped sustain me this past year, from the diagnosis of my prostate cancer, through surgery, and through radiation and hormone treatments …Medicine cares about physical outcomes, not the soul. I also need — even crave — the spiritual antibodies of prayer, song and sacred study.

Whatever your “spiritual antiboidies, your religious or spiritual beliefs, they can be sources of strength and comfort in difficult times.  Yet, as Stephen Levine said in a 1994 Sun Magazine interview, “As part of our wholeness, “we need our woundedness.  It seems written into spirituality that there’s a dark side to which we must expose ourselves.” That dark side is something we try to ignore  or bury, but to truly open our hearts and ourselves to healing, we have to confront our shadow selves.

Telling the truth of our experience cracks us open.  Cancer, other serious illness or painful trauma,  can plunge us into that dark night of the soul, yet, as Jennings wrote in his blog, “Each moment holds out the promise of revelation.”

Our spiritual journeys are intimately bound to our psychological and emotional ones.  Compassion, self-love, awakening and deepening are part of the spiritual paths we travel when we write out of our suffering and our truths.  “When you’re caught up in writing, poet Denise Levertov remarked in her final interview, “it can be a form of prayer.”

In Buddhism, understanding nourishes faith, and the act of looking deeply within ourselves not only fosters self-understanding, it can strengthen our faith.  Writing is mindful, a spiritual meditation that involves the practice of love, forgiveness, trust and acceptance.  In my groups, the act of writing and sharing our words aloud helps us learn that we can be vulnerable, loved and accepted for our truths.  We come to accept them ourselves.  We open our hearts to caring, compassion and connectedness with each other.  Not only is this part of our spiritual journeys, it lets the healing in.

Sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness

to put a hand on the brow of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch,

it is lovely,

until it flowers again from within

of self-blessing.

(–Galway Kinnell, from “St. Francis and the Sow”)

For this week:  How has writing deepened your spirituality?  Your compassion or insight?  How have faith and spirituality manifested themselves in your life?  Was there a precipitating event?  Write about the prayer that writing becomes, the spiritual journey that writing has helped you discover.

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For the Week of April 21, 2013: The Healing Power of Forgiveness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 21, 2013 | 1 Comment »

In the aftermath of my parents’ deaths several years ago, the sibling dynamics in our family were turbulent and hurtful.  As the oldest and initially, the one responsible for their financial affairs, I found I was frequently the target of anger and criticism, the lingering effects of the bitterness and hurt that  defined the relationships between my mother and younger siblings for decades.  Beneath the grief I felt for the loss of my father and mother lingered the shock of betrayal, the hurt that I had become the scapegoat for the bitter feelings of my sister and brother.  How could they behave so cruelly?  What had I done to cause such animosity?  It wasn’t long before I was sitting in my doctor’s office with a host of vague complaints—sleeplessness, malaise, a sense of something amiss in my body.  “You’re depressed,” my doctor said, “and it’s affecting your health.”  Two weeks later, I sat in the quiet embrace of a therapist’s office, where I began talking through my sorrow and coming to terms with my fractured sibling relationships.

The grief I felt for the loss of my parents eased in the months that followed, but the interactions I had with my sister and brother continued to be strained.  I felt as if I was negotiating a minefield, never certain what would ignite an accusation or angry reaction to something I innocently did or said.  The hurt nagged at me; it was a wound that refused to close, despite the passage of time, the hours spent in therapy.

Nearly a year and a half later, I paged through an old journal, re-reading the words I’d written in the months after my mother’s death.  I came across a quotation, something I’d copied from an introduction to a television program I’d come across, produced by the UC Davis Health System several years earlier.

“It’s not a surgery; it’s not a medical treatment or a new medication, but this is a new healing process that doctors are convinced has many hidden benefits, something you can’t get in a pharmacy.  The process is forgiveness.  And more doctors believe that it heals.” 

Forgiveness had obviously been on my mind.  I was struggling with a way to stop the replay of the hurt and disappointment, groping for some way to alleviate the sense of martyrdom, the feeling of being treated so unfairly by my siblings.  Trying to understand, to re-examine all the history I knew by heart, only resulted in rumination, taking me deeper into the pain.  What I needed to do was to forgive.

“The human mind,” psychologist Loren Toussaint wrote, “is sometimes an instrument of misery.  When you’ve done wrong…and regret it, it bubbles up again and again.”  But it’s not only forgiveness of others that makes a difference.   According to psychoanalyst Jeanne Safer, the health benefits of forgiving ourselves for our past mistakes or wrongdoings can be considerable.

Forgiveness—for self or others–is a virtue embraced by almost every religious tradition and yet, if we’re honest about it, forgiveness is often difficult to embrace.  Yet it’s important to our well-being in so many ways.  Even in the struggle of cancer, forgiveness is  important. In a 1989 study reported in the Canadian Journal of Counselling, “forgiveness therapy” helped cancer patients attain catharsis and a greater sense of peace (v. 23, pp. 236-251). 

Another group of researchers found that a self-forgiving attitude contributed to less mood disturbance and a better quality of life among women with breast cancer (J. of Behavioral Medicine, v. 29, pp. 29-36, 2006).  A growing body of research, much of it initiated by the Stanford Forgiveness Project, directed by Dr. Fred Luskin, suggests that forgiveness is good medicine for the body. Health benefits were demonstrated in a number of “forgiveness interventions,” including improved cardiovascular function, diminished chronic pain, relief from depression and an overall improved quality of life among the very ill (M. Healy, L.A. Times, Jan. 12, 2008).

It’s not uncommon, following a cancer diagnosis, that we sometimes turn our anger inward, blaming ourselves for contributing to the illness.  I did it myself, telling more than one close friend that I felt I partly responsible for my early stage diagnosis of breast cancer several years ago.  In my writing groups for cancer survivors, I’ve often heard those newly diagnosed ask, “What did I do to cause this?  What if I had only done this instead of that?” or say, “I feel like I’m partly to blame for my cancer…”

How do we forgive others and ourselves?  Poet Maya Angelou put it this way: 

I don’t know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes–it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, ‘well, if I’d known better I’d have done better,’ that’s all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then you say to yourself, ‘I’m sorry.’ If we all hold on to the mistake, we can’t see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can’t see what we’re capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one’s own self.

“We can’t see our own glory in the mirror…”   As I consider Angelou’s words, I remember this passage from the poem, “St. Francis and the Sow,” by Galway Kinnell:”

Sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness
to put a hand on the brow of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely,
until it flowers again from within,
of self-blessing.

Focus on forgiveness this week.  Perhaps it’s a simple act of forgiving yourself, another, or even your body, changed by cancer.  Pay attention to the thoughts and feelings that emerge as you write.  Where, in this week, do you have the opportunity to practice forgiveness?

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For the Week of April 14th: Greeting Yourself in the Mirror

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 14, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Six o’clock in the morning is never a good time to encounter one’s image in the mirror.  Certainly not for me.  My eyes still heavy from sleep, hair askew, and face washed clean of make-up the night before, I see a face that looks more and more like my father’s in his older years, and less and less like the image of myself I carry in my head.  One when I used to be about thirty-five, only the barest hint of lines were forming around my eyes, and my hair was thicker, longer and shiny chestnut-brown.  I stare in disbelief at the reflection that looks back at me.  “What on earth happened?” I address the reflection in the mirror.  “How did I become this older, grayer self? “

In the award-winning Irish film, The Commitments, a mirror figures into the story-line as an ambitious Jimmy Rabbitte cobbles together a group of misfits into an almost-famous American style soul band.  The group briefly succeeds then falls short of stardom, due, in large part to their inter-band bickering. But Jimmy imagines fame, and in several charming sequences converses with himself in the mirror, pretending he is the interviewer and the interviewee,.  By the film’s end, the band has failed, and Jimmy is once again back at the mirror, reflecting on their demise and what he’s learned from the experience.

We all have hopes and dreams, perhaps some of them tied to the fantasy that our faces and bodies will never age, but we all must deal with  the gentle nudge of aging as our joints stiffen or our hair grays.  It’s when our dreams and desires are thwarted or we’re confronted with unexpected obstacles or events, that we’re forced to stop and reflect, like Jimmy Rabbitte, on what happened and why.  Unwelcome or unexpected life events like cancer or unexpected loss throw our lives into turmoil.  We’re brought to our knees, forced to re-evaluate and change our lives, even questioning the self we imagined ourselves to be, and the hopes and dreams we have for the future.   In the process, we learn a lot  about ourselves.  

Many years ago, I conducted my doctoral research, a study of instructor thinking and behavior,  in the School for Landscape Architecture at the University of Guelph in Canada.  The instructors were subjected to  continual videotaping of their classrooms over a period of months, followed by viewing themselves on the screen and interviewed about the thinking behind instructional decisions  in particular teaching moments.   Not surprisingly, the act of seeing themselves in action and then reflecting on those actions, resulted in some significant changes in behavior–for the better.   

A few months later, I received a memorable letter from Ron, one of the instructors who had participated as a “subject” in the study.   Ron entitled his letter, “The White Rat Talks Back,” a humorous comment on being part of a psychological study.  He wrote about the study’s impact  on the way he had changed his teaching behavior.  He ended the letter with a quote from an old Fleishmann’s margarine commercial.  ”I’m just a guy, 57 years old, who had a heart attack.  I’m o.k. now, but I learned a lot.”  

I’m o.k. now, but I learned a lot.  Isn’t that how writing helps us heal?  Writing  involves  discovery.  Read any good memoir, and you’ll find a vulnerable, searching narrator, writing to make sense of  life, to explore its meaning, and how her life has been transformed.  It’s like looking into an imagined mirror, one that takes us to our earlier selves and yet, forces us to see the self we have become.  We begin to come to terms with how our lives have changed. 

Why not hold up the mirror this week?  Take a good look.  Think about the person you were, before cancer or another major life event, and the person you are now.  Begin with the line, “I used to be_____ but now I am_____.” You can begin by simply filling in the blanks, expanding the sentence and, perhaps, writing several sentences that begin with these words, “I used to be…”

Or, imagine you’re being interviewed, as my friend Ron was by me or as Jimmy Rabbitte did by looking in his mirror.  As interviewer, pose the questions that ask you to reflect on the impact of your experience, what happened and what you learned from it.  Here are a few suggestions:

  • Write about that unexpected event in the voice of the before self, then write in the voice of the now self.  What has changed?
  • Write a dialogue between yourself and the imagined interviewer.  What questions would you ask as the interviewer?
  • What responses would you offer, knowing that others, who have suffered the same diagnoses or similar struggles, will read your interview with interest and find, perhaps, hope or comfort in your words.

The time will come 
when, with elation 
you will greet yourself arriving 
at your own door, in your own mirror 
…

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. 

(From “Love After Love,” by Derek Walcott,  in Collected Poems, 1948-1984)

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For the Week of April 7, 2013: In the Garden

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 7, 2013 | 6 Comments »

“even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness, like praise, from the pool of shade you have found beneath the everlasting”

(From “Just Lying on the Grass at Blackwater,” by Mary Oliver (in Blue Iris, 2004).

Yesterday morning, I drove north to Encinitas and the California Center for Creative Renewal,  an art retreat center run by Ellen Speert.  The focal point of the center is an extraordinary garden, over an acre in size, full of succulents, pine trees, a labyrinth, and blossoms, developed and beautifully designed by Ellen over the past thirty years.  I was attending a day long sketching and watercolor workshop run by San Diego artist, Jane LaFazio. I’d signed up for the workshop because I enjoy Jane’s style of teaching, drawing and, to the extent I do it, using watercolor.  But more importantly, I needed a retreat, a chance to be quiet, remove myself from the demands of a busy week, and “see” my world in new ways.  I wanted to experience the poetry—in image and word—a garden reveals to those who pay attention.  I confess that I didn’t come away with any great works of art—far from it—but I was exhilarated and renewed, images of the garden lingering in my mind as I drove down I-5 to return home.  I felt, as I imagine everyone does who visits it, as if I’d been embraced and held by Ellen’s garden.

I think back to a few years ago, when one of the women from my Scripps Green Cancer Center writing group arrived late for our workshop.  Breathless and smiling, she wore a wide-brimmed straw hat as she entered the room.  “I had to go out in the garden today,” she said, telling us how it had helped her suspend the worry about an upcoming treatment.   Ann, who recently lost her life to cancer, took solace from spending her final years in a little cabin in the redwoods.   The beauty of the woods around her became the inspiration for much of her poetry, and, I suspect, nourished her will to live and be attentive to the natural world for as long as she could.  

The simple act of reconnecting with the earth can be healing.  Studies show that a walk through a garden or even looking at one from a window lowers blood pressure, reduces stress and eases pain.  In a 2005 study, cardiac rehabilitation patients who visited gardens and worked with plants experienced an elevated mood and lower heart rate than those who attended a standard patient education class (USA Today, April 15, 2007). 

“Nature heals the heart and soul, and those are things the doctors can’t help,” Topher Delaney, landscape architect, stated in a 2002 American Cancer Society article about healing gardens.  Delaney, a breast cancer survivor, had a mastectomy in 1989.  She was 39, and after surgery, went into menopause and lost her sense of smell.  The grim surroundings of her hospitalization inspired a change in her work.

“I had my pact with God,” she said.  “Oh, God, if I get through this, then I’ll do healing gardens. You keep me alive, I’ll keep doing gardens.”  She wanted to give others the kind of retreat she wished she’d had during treatment.  ”That’s what this [healing] garden is all about — healing the parts of yourself that the doctors can’t.  The garden really gives hope because people see flowers bloom and others enjoying life,” she said. “It’s a garden full of change and metaphor”  (July 24, 2002, American Cancer Society).

In the essay, “Upstream,” Mary Oliver describes how Nature and its beauty can open our hearts:

I walked, all one spring day, upstream, sometimes in the midst of the ripples, sometimes along the shore. My company were violets, Dutchman’s breeches, spring beauties, trilliums, bloodroot, ferns rising so curled one could feel the upward push of the delicate hairs on their bodies. … The beech leaves were just slipping their copper coats. Pale green and quivering they arrived into the year. My heart opened, and opened again. The water pushed against my effort, then its glassy permission to step ahead touched my ankles. (from “Upstream,” in Blue Iris, 2004).

Why not experience the healing or renewing effect of a garden this week?  Go outside to your own or take a walk through a garden.  Find a bench and sit without talking among the flowers and trees, taking in as much of the detail as you can.  Pay attention to what you see, hear and feel.  You might even sketch what you see.  And perhaps you will even find a poem waiting to be discovered there.

One flower

   on the cliffside

Nodding at the canyon

(“One Flower,” by Jack Kerouac, from Book of Haikus)

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For the Week of March 31, 2013: After the Storm Passes, Then What?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 31, 2013 | 1 Comment »

I’ve been thinking about how, in the last months of winter, my mood—and writing–seemed to mirror the season.  My spirits were low, weighted down by post-holiday blues—a predictable mood that arrives after my grandchildren and daughters fly home, and I face again the reality of the long distances between us.  My writing floundered along with my emotional state, heavy with the weight of expectation or forced prose that seemed leaden and glum, just as surely as the overcast skies I awakened to for days on end.  I tossed my unfinished novel aside, tired of the story, the rewrites, the watered down and fictionalized version of a personal crisis, and faced the blank page, desperate for something to ignite my creativity.   My internal critic’s taunts grew louder each morning:  Did I need some new crisis in my life to write anything of merit?

It’s true, however, that writing out of crisis, pain or suffering, provided the inspiration for many works of great literature.  As Louise DeSalvo states in her book, Writing as a Way of Healing, many of our greatest cultural creations were created out of pain, crisis and loss.   Novelists and poets alike have described their writing as a form of therapy, helping them heal from traumatic events in their lives.  Writer Paul Theroux described writing as something like digging a deep hole and not knowing what you are going to find.  He admitted to feeling a sense of initial shock when reading authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene or William Styron, discovering powerful—and personal—themes of alienation or suffering in their work.  For example, Fitzgerald described his battle with alcohol in The Crack-Up, Greene wrote of his manic-depression in A Sort of Life, and Styron examined his suicidal depression in Darkness Visible. Creativity, as so many writers have shown us, is often fueled by our life crises, trauma or suffering.

Cancer is one of those personal crises that often triggers intense and abundant writing.  Barbara Abercrombie offers a powerful metaphor for this in the title of her memoir of breast cancer, Writing Out the Storm.  A cancer diagnosis feels as if you’re in the midst of a storm.  You rage; you weep; you pour your emotions on the page.  Writing becomes the calm, the eye of a hurricane, a kind of refuge while the storm howls around you.  You may write desperately and furiously, revealing all your anguish on the pages of your notebooks.  I know I did, and it ultimately led me to initiating my first writing workshop for cancer survivors more than twelve years ago.

The cancer journey always changes, just as the weather does across the country.  Winter (perhaps reluctantly this year) makes its retreat as Spring arrives.  You move toward recovery as the storms subside.  The promise of new life amid the wreckage left by the wild weather, and as trees leaf out and flowers begin to bloom, a sense of hopefulness.  What happens to your writing after the storm?   Are you, by nature, a “crisis writer,” preferring the intensity of a full-blown storm or would you rather have a broad blue sky and a blossoming garden to inspire your muse?

I used to be a crisis writer, but I know too well that the real work of writing is to write under any sky, whether stormy or clear.  Writing is how we capture the intricacy, the poetry, and stories our lives encompass. Perhaps you’ve been writing out of the storm called cancer, but as the sky clears, where will you find the inspiration and the motivation to keep writing?

That’s the work for every writer—and, perhaps, it is the work of healing.  To move beyond the crisis, the storm, and see the world with new eyes; to awaken, notice and explore.  My own grey mood began to vanish after one evening spent in the presence of poet Billy Collins, speaking at the Point Loma Nazarene University’s “Writers’ Symposium” in late February.  As a poet, he said he looks out the window and finds his inspiration in noticing; even the most ordinary can contain the seed of a poem or a story.  The following morning I opened my notebook and discovered a poem waiting, or at least a humorous glimpse of myself, as I began with the line “I wish I could write a poem like Billy Collins…”  The words have been flowing freely ever since.

I recall the words from a favorite Rita Dove poem, “Dawn Revisited,” in which she offers an invitation to awaken ourselves to the world around us and write.

The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page.

It’s a great image, isn’t it?  Why not take a look out the window or go outside?  Open your eyes and notice how alive the world is with new possibility. Afterwards, open your notebook to that blank page and write about the sky above you, whether it’s stormy or sunny, gray or blue.  Write out of storm, or write of calm.  It doesn’t matter.  The whole sky is yours, whatever it holds.  Just write it.

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For the Week of March 24, 2012: Worry, Worry, Worry

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 24, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

I began my day, as is my routine, rising before the sun rose, padding quietly into the kitchen to greet our small dog, grinding a handful of beans for coffee, and sitting down to write.  But my pen hovered above my page, words stalled, as I tried to push the nagging thoughts of a restless night aside.  I had worried, as every parent does, about the enormous stresses my adult daughter is experiencing.  Unable to soothe her pain as I once did, with a kiss and a brightly colored bandage, I sat staring at the blank page, the lyrics from an old B.B. King blues song playing in an endless loop in my head:

Worry worry worry

Worry is all I can do

Oh worry worry worry baby

Worry is all I can do…

Worrying is that state of feeling concerned or uneasy about some situation in our lives.  When it gets the better of us, like the long restless nights when we cannot seem to banish worry to a dark corner, our bodies and minds go into high gear.  We leap beyond what is to what might happen, and as our worry expands, so do our anxieties.

I worried a lot…

 

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

 

…Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,

am I going to get rheumatism,

lockjaw, dementia?

 (from “I Worried,” by Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems & Prose Poems, 2012)

 In a study published by Psycho-Oncology in 2001, researchers investigated the effect of “cancer-specific worries” or “cancer-specific stress” in women considered high-risk for developing breast cancer.  The results confirmed what prior studies had concluded:   “cancer-specific” worries and the resulting anxiety interfered with the quality of the women’s daily lives.

Chronic worrying, according to Web MD, can affect anyone’s daily life, not just those at risk for breast cancer.  Worrying can interfere with appetite, relationships, sleep, job performance, and even bad health choices. With prolonged and excessive worry, harmful lifestyle habits, like overeating, alcohol or drug use, may develop as we seek relief from the anxiety we feel.  That’s not all.  Chronic worry and stress, as we know, is harmful to our health and can have serious consequences, including immune system suppression, digestive disorders, and coronary disease (“Physical Effects of Worrying”).  How then, do we keep our worries and anxiety from spinning out of control?

Web MD suggests some practical and manageable options:

  • Talk to your doctor.
  • Seek help from a therapist.
  • Exercise daily.
  • Eat a healthy, balanced diet
  • Drink caffeine in moderation.
  • Be conscious of your worries!  (Set aside 15 minutes a day to focus on your problems and fears—then let them go after your 15 minutes is up.  It’s a way to remind yourself not to dwell on your worries.)
  • Practice relaxation techniques.
  • Meditate.
  • Enjoy the company of family and friends.

I realize that worrying over my daughter’s situation won’t help her anxiety.  In fact, it could even exacerbate it.  If she thinks I’m lying awake worrying about her, she’ll begin to worry about worrying me.  That vicious cycle is the nature of worry.  My task is two-fold: to find a constructive way to deal with my worry and, despite the fact we live on different continents, to offer what understanding and emotional support I can when her worry overtakes her as it did yesterday.

This morning, writing about the concern I have for my daughter was a useful way to clear away the exaggerated worry that disrupted my sleep last night and see the situation—and what I could do—more clearly.  That’s one of the benefits of writing:  we begin to make sense out of our sometimes chaotic and noisy feelings and write our way into insight, understanding and knowing.  It’s why I smiled as I read the final stanza of Mary Oliver’s poem:

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.

And gave it up.  And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

What do you worry about?  What are the triggers that incite your worrying?  What helps you manage those times when worry threatens to overtake your life?

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For the Week of March 17, 2013: “Submit to Nature; Return to Nature”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 17, 2013 | 3 Comments »

After several weeks of cool and rainy weather, sunshine and mild temperatures have marked this past week, sending me outdoors to assess my back garden and bemoan the explosion of wild grasses sneaking up from the canyon, threatening to overtake the flower bed.  Ours is a less manicured garden than most; a long narrow bed at the top of steep slope, where the relentless advance of wild grass is only temporarily slowed by the ice plants and succulents that populate the hillside.  I have tried, ever since we moved here a few years ago, to stem the advancing tide, admiring the more manicured landscapes of my neighbors, but after more than few tumbles down the slope, I’ve had to accept I cannot overpower what Nature so stubbornly returns to me each spring.  This year, I’ve entered into a state of peaceful co-existence.  I’ll control the flower bed at the top of the hill.  Mother Nature can have the steep slopes below it.

“Submit to nature, return to nature.”  These are familiar words to me, written by the Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho, but this week, as I took stock of my garden, Basho’s words took on a different meaning than he might have intended!  Basho was perhaps the most famous of the Japanese Haiku poets, one who, while he described nature in simple language, he conveyed, through his imagery, its beauty and the emotion it evoked.  Here are three examples:

No one travels
along this way but I,
this autumn evening.

The year’s first day
thoughts and loneliness;
the autumn dusk is here.

Clouds appear
and bring to men a chance to rest
from looking at the moon.

Haiku is a simple poetic form about fleeting moments in nature or its the changing seasons.   The essence of the form lies in its visual intensity, painting a picture in the readers’ mind, calling our attention to an observation and a story hinted at behind the image.  Its most common form is written in three lines, the first line five syllables long, the second, seven, and the third, five, for a total of seventeen.  The division, when translated from Japanese, (as you may have noticed in Basho’s examples) is not always perfect, but the basic three-line form is still present.

Haiku teaches us the power of observation, of being present to the here and now.  I think it also teaches gratitude.  Focus on one small moment of Nature, and the noise from the external world vanishes as you open your eyes—and heart—to the smallest details, the fleeting moments and beauty in the natural world.  You become aware of the feelings such moments evoke in you.   While the first level of Haiku is always located in Nature, the second is most often a reflection on Nature, often characterized by themes of egolessness, acceptance, aloneness, humor, silence, awakening, compassion, even death.  It’s why Haiku is a poetic form that is often used in emotional healing, because a dialogue with Nature is more than just observation; it takes us inside ourselves.  Writing haiku is a kind of meditation,  calming, and quiet. Perhaps haiku, poetry in its simplest form, offers a prescription for a larger life.

Why not “submit to nature” or “return to nature” this week?   Find the inspiration right outside your door, waiting for your haiku poem.

Step outside, take a walk. Pay attention to what is in your line of sight.

Make notes, for example:

  • ducks swimming in a pond
  •  the budding leaves on tree branches   
  • a songbird at the feeder
  • a buzzing bee hovering at a flower

Try to find two images that create a striking impression when connected and write them down.

Keep paring your sentences down until you have captured the scene and your underlying mood—all in seventeen syllables.

Try expressing yourself—what you find—in a Haiku poem.   You might be surprised!

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For the Week of March 10, 2013: Pleasure in the Commonplace

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 10, 2013 | 3 Comments »

“In remission,” “no evidence of cancer at this time…”  Words uttered tentatively, hopefully, as individuals introduced themselves to one another in my writing groups this past week.  A reprieve from the relentless routine of hospital visits, scans and tests, treatment regimens, and doctors’ appointments.  A return to normal life.  But what’s normal?  The sudden re-immersion into “normal life” life feels unfamiliar, almost surreal.  Cancer has altered the way you experience the world; you’re not the same person you were before cancer.  Returning to life as it once was is, you quickly realize, impossible.

“In remission.”  You feel relieved, one of the lucky ones whose treatment has been successful.  But cancer, we know, is capricious and unpredictable.  You live with the knowledge that being a survivor doesn’t guarantee a permanent state of grace.  You may have many years left to live; perhaps less.  One thing is certain:  you never take anything for granted.

You might even feel, as one of my group members told me, a little guilty, especially when you know other survivors whose prognoses are less favorable, who may ultimately lose their battles with cancer.  It seems unfair.  Why have you survived while others don’t?  You may question your life, how you can make it matter, live in a way that “makes a difference.” That’s important, but it’s just as tempting, as it was before cancer, to live life ahead, your eyes on the goals you want to achieve while the present slips by unnoticed.  If there’s one thing that cancer teaches us, it’s about enjoying each day of the life we have been granted, however long, when we hear those words, “in remission.”

Some time ago, I offered a writing prompt on survival to one of my writing groups.  Nancy wrote:

“I’ve gone from thinking, ‘Why me?’ to thinking, ‘Why not me?  In the beginning, it was comforting to think of fighting to survive.”  She questioned what survival meant for her:  “I believe that I should have a powerful drive to accomplish something…a goal for which I need to survive.  But,” she confessed “I don’t find that drive in me.”

What, she questioned, was surviving—living—about?  She continued, “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…”

Nancy, like so many of us, rediscovered the comfort and meaning in the ebb and flow of everyday life, small pleasures of love, companionship or nature.  “It frees me from having to make every moment count, she wrote.  It takes off pressure that would exist if I had to accomplish something in particular before I die…”

I think of Nancy’s words to from time to time because I’m just as guilty of putting my daily life on fast forward, preoccupied with dozens of “to dos” and forgetting that the real task of being alive is to be present, to pay attention to what is right in front of my nose, those little moments of beauty, joy, or even laughter.  When I do that, remind myself to slow down and pay attention, I find inspiration waiting, inviting me in, reminding me of the simple pleasures to be found in the commonplace.

Ann, who recently lost her life to cancer, but whose poetry continues to live, sent me a poem some time ago, one that reminds us all to pay attention to the abundance of gifts our daily lives offer.  Here is an excerpt:

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…

Let me speak for you: there’s comfort
to be found in fatigue, in letting principles
fall like stones from your pockets…

Fall into the ordinary,
the rushes, the deer looking up into your heart,
risen, full in the silver hammered sky.

(From “Directive,” by Ann Emerson)

Remember the commonplace… Take notice; find gratitude for the simple joys of living.   Choose one small moment from any day, whether from nature, your loved ones, a place, or in your daily routine—a simple pleasure that sustains, inspires or gives you joy.  Describe it in as much detail as you can; perhaps you’ll find a poem or a story lurking in the ordinary.

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