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For the Week of July 28, 2013: What Did You Notice?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , writing and spirituality, , , on July 28, 2013 | 2 Comments »

This past Friday, I led an all-day writing workshop for a group of twelve women.  We met at my home; first assembling in a cozy circle, but as the day wore on, moving outdoors to the deck, the dining room or my study to write. It was, as it always is for me, a privilege to be present and share in the richness of stories and poems written and read aloud, each in response to a single prompt, yet each so unique to the person doing the writing. I felt, as everyone did, inspired and exhilarated by the experience of writing together in community.

One of the great gifts of being a writing instructor or group leader is that I am always surprised by what is written and read:  the unexpected observations, the life stories revealed, the beauty and musicality of someone’s voice.  Even, as it turns out, learning to see the familiar in new and surprising ways.

“A writer pays attention,” I said, before segueing into two exercises on noticing and using specific details and description.  I began with a short exercise inspired by Poets & Writers’ “The Time is Now,” a series of weekly writing prompts for poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction writers.  It’s an exercise I now practice routinely during my morning writing practice, one that reminds me to attend to the details, even find the unexpected and describe it. 

Choose an inch of space anywhere around you: the sole of your hiking boot, the rusted headlight of an abandoned car, that weathered and broken thumb your grandfather used to pry open the back fence. Write about that inch...

The results, as you might expect, are diverse and surprising.  Fingernails, an inch of skin, the fur of a dog, a patch of denim—all yielding something unexpected, even beautiful.  Once we finished sharing the results, I sent everyone outdoors for a ten minute exploration of the neighborhood.  “Walk around the block,” I said, “and as you do, note a half dozen or more things you notice.  Describe each.  Then use all you’ve observed to create a poem.”  The women left notebooks in hand, and began exploring our street, returning to write as instructed.  At the end of the allotted time, I sounded the chime for everyone to gather in the circle to read aloud.  What happened next was a lesson for me.

Each person had written a short prose poem about my neighborhood, the one I have lived in for six years, where I walk my dog and drive along its streets.  A neighborhood I know well, a familiar array of houses, gardens, sidewalks, but seen through the eyes of the writers, full of the unexpected.  The persistence of weeds, cracking the asphalt and poking their heads through the street; the house two doors away that last week, was beige stucco, but had been painted a colonial blue—an odd choice for a neighborhood of succulents, palm trees and stucco exteriors—the contrast of neatly arranged plants against the multitude of dove droppings, the porch swing, empty, swaying gently in the afternoon breeze, but seeming to ask for a coat of paint, and the house across the street from us, brown, white and speckled with several shades of green as our neighbor tried out new paint colors for its exterior—all seen from different perspectives and vantage points.  What I thought I knew well, it turns out, was full of surprises—and I think the writers were amused by my unexpected exclamation, “I didn’t know that!”  I had, as we all do, attenuated, become less observant in the familiar in my neighborhood.  Each person’s observations offered  something different, a way of seeing the familiar anew.  I realized I hadn’t been paying attention, caught up, as I often am, in my own thoughts–agonizing over a deadline, a stalled story, even a topic for this blog…”  Whoops.  “A writer pays attention…”

Ted Kooser’s Winter Morning Walks:  One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison, is a book of poetry inspired by his postcards to his colleague and friend, Jim Harrison, and written during his recovery from cancer treatment.  Simple in format, it is testimony to the power of paying attention, how  ordinary and little things can inspire and captivate us in simplicity and insight.  Kooser describes how the book came to be in his preface:

“In the autumn of 1968, during my recovery from surgery and radiation for cancer, I began taking a two-mile walk each morning…hiking in the isolated country roads near where I live…During the previous summer, depressed by my illness, preoccupied by the routines of my treatment, and feeling miserably sorry for myself, I’d all but given up on reading and writing…  One morning in November, following my walk, I surprised myself by trying my hand at a poem.  Soon I was writing every day… I began pasting my morning poems on postcards and sending them to Jim…”

What I love about this book is its portrayal of a man recovering from the ravages of illness and treatment, whose spirit and sensibilities are reawakened by the small moments of beauty in the natural world around him.  On each, he begins with a note on the weather before beginning the poem:  “Sunny and clear.”  “Six inches of new snow.”  “Quiet and cold at 6 a.m.”  Each poem is an observation, rich in detail and imagery that leads to a reflection or insight.

The sky a pale yellow this morning

like the skin of an onion

and here at the center…

…A poet,

and cupped in his hands, the green shoot

of one word.

 Despite his recovery from surgery and radiation, Kooser’s poems do not focus on cancer, rather, it is life he shows us, the small gifts in nature he captures.

I saw the season’s first bluebird
this morning, one month ahead
of its scheduled arrival.  Lucky I am
to go off to my cancer appointment
having been given a bluebird, and,
for a lifetime, have been given
this world.

Just as my writers did for me, Kooser’s book is a reminder of how important it is to pay attention, to notice, to be fully present in the world around us, to celebrate, and to give thanks.

There’s another exercise I have used in my writing practice from time to time, inspired by the poem “Gratitude,” by Mary Oliver.  Her observations of the natural world are so beautifully rendered as she asks–and answers—eight simple questions.  She begins by asking, “What did you notice?”  And responds:

The dew snail;
the low-flying sparrow;
the bat, on the wind, in the dark…

What was most wonderful?

…the sea lying back on its long athlete’s spine.

What did you think was happening?

…so the gods shake us from our sleep.

(From:  What Do We Know)

Paying attention, as Oliver, Kooser, and other writers remind us, is about slowing down and being attentive to the present, to what’s right in front of our eyes, discovering not only the beauty, but the meaning, the metaphors that inform our lives and our writing.  Anne Lamott observed, “There is ecstasy in paying attention.”

What did you notice?  I’m taking a walk today along paths familiar to me and I’m taking my notebook and capturing those small gifts in nature, the extraordinary found in the ordinary, the poem waiting to be discovered.  Why not rekindle your observational powers this week?  Practice paying attention, really noticing, what is around you.  Talk a walk, meandering along a trail, near the sea, into the woods.  Take in the sights, sounds, smells, the movements that are Nature’s.  When you return, take out your notebook and describe what you’ve seen.  You just might discover a metaphor lurking somewhere, a poem or story just waiting for you to notice it.

          “At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world,
Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive.
You empty yourself and wait, listening.”


–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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For the Week of July 21, 2013: Returning “Home”

Posted in Uncategorized on July 21, 2013 | 1 Comment »

 and when i am home, i have gone home

            wherever i might find myself

            home

            where the memory is.

                        Lucille Clifton, “When I Go Home”

Two weeks ago, my husband and I returned from a road trip, one we’d intended to make last year, but were unable to do.  We traveled north from San Diego to Bend, Oregon, enjoying brief visits with old friends along the way, and for one night, staying in Yreka, a small town just south of the Oregon border and the place I once knew as home.

I hadn’t been back to Yreka since 2004, shortly after my mother’s death.  I’d taken her ashes there to be scattered in full view of Mt. Shasta, on a hillside she walked nearly every day of her life.  My father died twelve years earlier, his ashes scattered north, on a mountain he hunted for deer with his brothers and his son, my brother.  In the wake of our parents’ deaths and the ensuing family dynamics, what lingering sense of home or place all but disintegrated.

“You can’t go home again,” the title of Thomas Wolfe’s 1940 novel echoed a theme many writers have explored in one way or another.  Goethe once wrote that all writers are homesick, searching for home.  “Being a writer is being on a constant search for where you belong”  Mary Morris wrote in “Looking for Home.”  “It comes out of a place of memory, not geography.”  Or, as Philip Levine called it, “the country of memory.”

It is the return, I suppose, to what was once home that gives us a chance to remember, yes, but also to realize how our perspective has changed—in fact, how we have changed in light of our life experiences.

My sense of “home,” began to disappear for me in the late sixties.  It was November of my graduate year at college that I received a late night call.  My mother delivered the news.  There had been a fire.  Our house, the one my father built, the one I’d lived in all my childhood, had burned to the ground.  My parents ever recovered from the loss, and in the years after the fire, their marriage could only be described as rocky.  I left for Canada with my first husband one year later, and as much as I longed for the home I once knew, my visits there, now taking place in the small bungalow my parents moved into and renovated, were filled with tension, each parent complaining to me about the other.  Separated by a continent, I distanced, feeling less and less as though I belonged, and yet, after my husband died suddenly, I longed to return to that place of memory, to go “home.”  A few years later I did, returning like a homing pigeon west, to California.  What I discovered, like so many emigrants before me, was that “home” no longer existed in the ways I had imagined it.   It—and I—had changed.  The very thing that drew me back to the West was now elusive.

Home is a “bit of geography on which you grow up, with which you identify yourself before you even think about such things…” as a place that forever marks you in some distinct way, acting “in your life much the way your parents do….  You are defined by it, your vision made by it…eventually you will either love your hometown, your neighborhood, your house, or you will struggle against it…” –Rosellen Brown, “Displaced Person”

It’s been over twenty years since I returned to California, and in that time, my sense of “home” has never quite reinstated itself.  Yet I still wanted to make that stop in Yreka, drive through the town I once knew by heart as “home,” remember what it was like to be me then.

We drove through the town, noticing empty storefronts we didn’t remember from earlier visits.  Walmart moved into to the town several years ago, and the impact on the small local businesses is evident on Main Street.  We passed the city park, seeming now so much smaller than the vast playground I remembered from childhood, past homes once occupied by aunts and uncles, past the high school, and finally, past my old house, rebuilt by a contractor after the fire.  Across the street from it stands the smaller house my parents moved to and lived in until their deaths.  I was shocked by its appearance.  The house looked abandoned.  The garden, once immaculate and full of flowers, was overgrown with weeds.  A tattered sofa sat in the driveway, filled with old clothes.  “Oh no,” I cried, “let’s get out of here.”  We drove directly to Interstate 5N, stopping briefly at the vista point just north of town for one final view of Mt. Shasta before driving on toward Ashland, leaving the sadness behind.

“You can’t go home again.”  Even if we’ve never left a place, the events of our lives can make us feel as if we’ve suddenly become strangers to it.  Yet we’re “of” it—surely shaped by the place and the people who were part of our lives so many years before.  The imprint stays, visible in our language, the stories we carry in our hearts, the places that now, in adulthood, “speak” to us. Now and then, perhaps we long for home, the place we knew by heart.  Only in returning do we discover that we can never, as Wolfe suggested, be at home as we once were.

Write about home this week.  The place you knew by heart, the one that shaped and defined you in particular ways.  Write about leaving and returning to the “country of memory,” the place you once called “home.”

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For the Week of July 14, 2013: Music is Good Medicine

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

When our semi-conductor
Raised his baton, we sat there
Gaping at Marche Militaire,
Our mouth-opening number.
It seemed faintly familiar
(We’d rehearsed it all that winter),
But we attacked in such a blur,
No army anywhere
On its stomach or all fours
Could have squeezed though our cross fire…

By the last lost chord, our director
Looked older and soberer.
No doubt, in mind’s ear
Some band somewhere
In some Music of some Sphere
Was striking a note as pure
As the wishes of Franz Schubert,
But meanwhile here we were:
A lesson in everything minor,
Decomposing our first composer.

From: “The Junior High School Band Concert,” by David Wagoner;  Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems.  University of Illinois Press, 1999.

When I first read David Wagoner’s poem, I laughed out loud, remembering with some embarrassment how, as one of the few French horn players in the high school band, we enthusiastically blasted out the theme to Dvořák’s “The New World Symphony” at the annual Spring concert, not appreciating the need for subtlety and modulation at the time.

No wonder, since much of our playing was relegated to football season and marching around the football field,  icy brass mouthpieces stuck to our lips as we played the boring after beats to the marching tune.  Given the opportunity to “shine,” as it were, in our spring concert, we made certain we were heard.  I doubt “Pop” Behnke, our band leader, was ever the same after that, and I quickly gave up my career as a French horn player after I went to university.

It turns out that all those years of piano lessons, singing in the church choir, doing pliés while a pianist accompanied the ballet class, or playing French horn in the marching band were beneficial in multiple ways.  Not only can music enhance young people’s self-esteem and academic performance, musical training appears to help protect our mental sharpness and brain functioning.  And as I grow older, I’m intent on maintaining my mental acuity for as long as humanly possible.

It’s one of the reasons I drum, something I’ve been doing for nearly two years.  Each Monday evening, I spend an hour playing the dunun, a family of West African drums that accompany the djembe in the Mandé drum ensemble.   Given my age and stage in life, I often joke that I’ll remain in the beginner class indefinitely, but mastery isn’t the reason I drum.  I love music and rhythm.  I drum because it’s joyous activity.  I drum because drumming in a community of other drummers is exhilarating. Drumming, dancing, singing–anything to do with music–makes me feel better.  The cares of the day disappear. I drum because it’s good, very good, medicine.

“The power of music to integrate and cure is quite fundamental,” Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author of Awakenings wrote. “It is the profoundest non-chemical medication.”  In fact, music has a long history in medicine and healing. The ancient Greeks believed music could heal the body and the soul. Ancient Egyptians and Native Americans incorporated singing and chanting as part of their healing rituals. Even the U.S. Veterans Administration incorporated music an adjunct therapy for shell-shocked soldiers after World War II. Today, music therapy is widely used in hospitals and cancer centers to promote healing and enhance the quality of patients’ lives.

Google “music and healing,” and you’ll find a number of articles attesting to the physiological and emotional benefits of music.

  • It aids our autonomic nervous systems, positively affecting blood pressure, heartbeat and breathing.  In fact, music can actually improve the overall functioning of our cardiovascular systems.
  • It helps reduce stress, aid relaxation and alleviate depression.
  • In cancer patients, music can decrease anxiety. Together with anti-nausea drugs, music can help to ease nausea and vomiting accompanying chemotherapy.
  • It relieves short-term pain and decreases the need for pain medication.
  • It’s effective in diminishing pre-surgical anxiety and beneficial for patients with high blood pressure.
  • Music even plays a role in improving troubled teens’ self-esteem and academic performance.

But even among Alzheimer’s and dementia patients like my mother, the role of music in memory is also a powerful one. We all associate songs and other musical pieces with people, places and emotions we’ve experienced in the past. Not only can music trigger life stories, but it can enhance memory functioning and face-name recognition among Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.

On one of my last visits with my mother, I was shocked by her physical and mental deterioration in the few weeks since I’d last seen her. She was completely unresponsive,  no longer able to walk and sitting motionless in a wheelchair, her head bobbing listlessly to her chest. I tried without success to elicit any reaction from her and decided to take her outdoors and into the garden.  I positioned her next to a bougainvillea, furious with red blooms, hoping to see  a glimmer of life, some sign my mother was still there.  I held her hand and, at a loss, began singing a song she often sang to me as a child.    “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you,” I began, struggling to remember the lyrics.  “I’m in love with you/Let me hear you whisper…”  By then I had tears in my eyes, but I kept singing , because very slowly, my mother raised her head and fixed her eyes on my face.  With great effort, she smiled, and for a moment, I saw light return to her eyes.  “Why,” she said, struggling to find the words, “it’s Sharon!”  She closed her eyes and sighed.  “I’m happy,” she said.  The memory stays with me, forever associated now, with that long ago song.

This week, think about the role music plays in your life.    Has it been beneficial to your well-being or recovery?  What memories does a particular song ignite for you?  What stories?  Music, even a song like “Happy Birthday,” is  a powerful prompt for writing.  Here are a few suggestions:

  • Perhaps there was some particular music that helped you through cancer treatment or another difficult time.  Listen to it again, closing your eyes, and try to remember that time and how the music made you feel.
  • Recall a lullaby from childhood, a favorite song, a bit of classical music, or even the somewhat dissonant music from your high school band. What memories or stories does the music trigger?
  • Take any favorite recording, classical, jazz, new age, or pop, and listen to it.  Keep your notebook nearby. As you listen, capture the random thoughts and associations that come to mind. Once the recording ends, open your notebook and begin free writing.  Do this for five minutes.  When you finish, re-read what you’ve written and underline the sentence that has the most power for you.  Use that sentence to begin writing again on a fresh page. Set the timer for 15 minutes and see where it takes you.

I think I should have no other mortal wants if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.– George Bernard Shaw

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For the Week of July 7, 2013: The Heroes in Our Lives

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on July 9, 2013 | 6 Comments »

We returned home last night after a holiday road trip that took us from San Diego north to Bend, Oregon, the same trip we planned a year ago but had cancel at the last-minute.  We spent one night in the town I used to know as “home,” Yreka, stirring up childhood memories, names and faces of old classmates, memories of my father and mother, the life I knew until, at 18, I left for good.

One memory, never forgotten, took me back to my freshman year at Yreka High School.  I was becoming depressed and withdrawn that spring.  My photograph in the high school yearbook described me as “nice.”  Nothing more.  I became inexplicably and seriously ill near the end of March with little more than high fever and headaches.  At first, the family doctor diagnosed my condition as “mononucleosis,” a virus also known as the “kissing disease,” although I had no boyfriend at the time and in any case, was too shy to have kissed anyone.  But my condition worsened, and over the next many weeks, I was ferried from one specialist to another without any definite explanation for my symptoms.  As I became worse, I began to have, during those long feverish nights, dreams of death, images that would return night after night.  I awakened, terrified and crying, frightening my parents.  Thankfully, it was the persistent recurrence of one of these dreams that prompted my mother’s frantic calls to obtain yet another referral, but this time, to a physician in Medford, Oregon.

We visited Medford this past weekend to meet a dear family friend, now in her eighties. As we drove into the city, I remembered the hospital on the hill—replaced long ago by newer, shinier buildings.  After the physician in Medford had examined me, he made a call to a neurosurgeon, Dr. Mario Campagna, and a half hour later, I lay quietly on the examination table in Dr. Campagna’s office while my anxious parents sat nearby.  I was admitted to Sacred Heart hospital that evening, and two days later, drowsy from medication, attempted to make a joke as Dr. Campagna gently began shaving my head.  Hours later, I awakened to the doctor’s smiling face and the sounds of my father’s unmistakable whistle—something that had ceased during my illness—as he entered the room.  I was minus a chunk of forehead, which would be replaced by a steel plate six months later—but alive.  A year later, when examining the pages of the high school yearbook, my smiling face appeared in several clubs and groups. I was part of the school newspaper staff, and by the time I graduated, described as “most popular.”  I continued, throughout high school and college, to write Dr. Campagna at Christmas and update him on my activities.  He always wrote back, supportive and encouraging.  Three or four years ago, I wrote him again, this time sharing my books and the work I do in the cancer community, telling him that he was, as he had always been, an inspiration to me.

Dr. Campagna died on July 3, 2013, two days before we drove into Medford, the obituary printed in The Oregonian on Sunday, a day after we left to go on to Bend.  We had driven past the hill where Sacred Heart Hospital once stood, past his former office on State Street, and I recalled how lucky I was to have ended up in the care of such a gifted and extraordinary neurosurgeon.  I remember how he strode into my room one morning as I despaired, a turban of white bandages around my head, both eyes blackened from the surgery, and crying over how desperately gruesome I looked.  He smiled, took my hand and said, “What?  Are you worried no one will want to marry you?”  I cried even louder.  “Well,” he said, “I’m not worried.  Besides, if no one will, I have a son—he’s only five—but I’m sure he would like to marry you.”  It was enough to make me smile.  Then he reached out and wiped away my tears.

Dr. Campagna gave me a second chance at life, and thanks to his skills and compassion, he did that for many other people.  He was my hero—and remains so in death as well as life.  Not the hero of storybooks or childhood fantasies, but someone whose presence, whose gifts, truly made a difference.  He inspired me to want to “do good,” to make a difference, as, I suspect, he inspired many others.  His legacy is significant; his contribution to Medford and to medicine one that will be remembered for a long time to come.  Thank you, Dr. Campagna, for what you did for me.

We all have heroes—people who touch our lives in unexpected but profound ways.  Write about one of your heroes—and why they made a difference in your life.

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