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For the Week of December 15, 2013: What Do You Want to Remember?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 15, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

Anyone who’s written with me over the years knows I often find inspiration from the words of William Stafford, who, for me and for so many who love his poetry, “offers a unique way into the heart of the world.“  His words resonate, and I return to his poetry time and again, discovering a line or two that invariably speaks to me.  This morning was no exception.  I rose at six a.m. as I always do, treasuring the solitude and quiet of early morning.  As I walked into the living room I saw the seventy or so greeting cards displayed on our book shelves, all sent by family, friends, colleagues and students as a surprise for my husband’s 75th birthday.  J., though loving, is reserved in emotional expression, and faced with another reminder of age, was less than enthusiastic to celebrate the day.  The cards came from as far away as India, Europe, Canada, and across the U.S.  He was, for a few moments, speechless, disbelieving that so many people would honor him with their cards and letters.  I watched as he read them, one by one, laughing at the humor, but with tears in his eyes.   Starting here, what do you want to remember?  Not, I hope, the fact of advancing age, but rather, the evidence offered to him that his life was—and is—full, rich with people who think of him with affection.

I think it’s difficult, perhaps as we age or when life strikes us a blow, to remember the gifts of our lives.  When I was much younger, I welcomed each birthday, each new year as an opportunity to start anew, revisit good intentions not quite realized and turn them into action.  Another year in front of me held promise, opportunity, and new adventure.  There were times marked by personal tragedy, illness or losses that I was happy to see end, and I turned my back on them with a sigh of “well, thank goodness that’s over,” fixing my sights on the year in front of me with all its possibility for something better.  I was always looking ahead.

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

I was waiting for the better to come, but it’s different now, for J. and for me.  I feel a mixture of nostalgia and reluctance to have time move so quickly.  I try to avoid reminders of our advancing years and the sometimes regret that I haven’t accomplished all I set out to do.  It’s a mixture of looking back or, as I contemplate that foreign concept of “retirement,” feeling anxious about what might lie ahead.  I forget, as I know my husband sometimes does, to remember what a full life I’ve led—and that I am still very much living in the here and now.

But I am more aware of the fragility and uncertainty of life.  My brushes with cancer and heart failure, the men and women who, weekly, write out of the struggle and hardship of cancer, have taught me how precious life is.  I am more attentive to the present than I have ever been, much more inclined to remind myself to pay attention, to live each day fully and find the joy in the small gifts life offers daily.  I return to Stafford’s words as a reminder.

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life -

This morning, I wrote to remember the look on my husband’s face as he opened the box of birthday greeting cards from so many people whose lives intersected with his.  But as I looked up from the page to the window, an iridescent flash of color caught my eye.  It was a ruby throated hummingbird hovering just outside the glass, red and green feathers glistening in the morning sun.  It was a reminder, as if on cue, reminding me how important it is to stay attentive to the gifts of now.  As Stafford asks us,

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

(From:  The Way It Is:  New and Selected Poems, Greywolf Press, 1999)

Try writing this week by beginning with Stafford’s question:  “Starting here, what do you want to remember?”

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For the Week of December 1, 2013: The Promise in Dark Mornings

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 1, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

You look over all that the darkness
ripples across. More than has ever
been found comforts you. You open your
eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast
and as far as your thought can run.
A great snug wall goes around everything,
has always been there, will always
remain. It is a good world to be
lost in. It comforts you. It is
all right…

(From:  “Waking at 3 a.m.,” by William Stafford, in Someday, Maybe, 1973)

It’s dark outside when I awaken each morning, a time when the house is blessed by quiet.  As as I walk, neighborhood streets are still, their silence interrupted only by the odd passing car, early risers on their way to work.  I cherish these winter mornings, the comfort of darkness shifting into dawn, the shorter days and longer nights, even though I live in a place where the advent of winter is less noticeable than other places I once called “home.”

Yesterday,  the first day of December, the temperature i San Diego was a balmy 70 degrees, making the idea of winter seem all the more unreal.  As I gaze out my window and across the canyon, the slopes are still green, dotted by succulents, silk oaks, eucalyptus and palm trees, unfazed by the calendar date.  There are buds on my bird of paradise plants and a riot of fuchsia blooms on the bougainvillea.  Yet winter has announced her coming in change of the light.  The angle of the sun has shifted—it will soon be at its lowest arc in the sky—the daylight hours are shorter, and each morning, I darkness greets me when I awaken.

The advent of winter signals not only a change in light and seasons, but a time of celebrations, whatever what our religious heritage or beliefs might be.  In the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice in our hemisphere occurs later this month, on December 21st, coinciding with the season of our major holiday celebrations.

Our winter celebrations have their roots in the winter solstice, the time when our hemisphere is farthest from the sun.  The winter solstice was time our ancestors associated with death and rebirth.  As the days grew shorter and the sun began to sink lower into the sky,  they feared the sun would completely disappear, leaving them to endure an existence of permanent cold and darkness.  Imagine the primitive fear that accompanied those dark winter mornings, a feeling echoed in the first stanza of “Winter Solstice,” a poem by Jody Aliesan.

When you startle awake in the dark morning
heart pounding breathing fast
sitting bolt upright staring into
dark whirlpool black hole
feeling its suction…

The winter solstice was considered a turning point.  It marked the return of sun and promise of warmer seasons to come.  Even though winter was far from over, the solstice a time of celebration, usually taking place  a few days later, the time that many of us now celebrate the Christmas holidays.

Aleisan’s poem echoes that same sense of promise that the ancients associated with the solstice, something I find I also feel in these dark mornings.  She reminds us there is comfort found in remembering the beauty of darkness:   stars close together, the winter moon rising, or an owl in the distance.  A sense of rebirth emerges out of the beauty in darkness.

already light is returning pairs of wings
lift softly off your eyelids one by one
each feathered edge clearer between you
and the pearl veil of day…

(From:  Grief Sweat, Broken Moon Press, 1990)

This week, why not use the metaphor of winter, of solstice, to reframe your experience with cancer or another difficult time in your life, a time when hope seemed to fade and you feared little more than darkness. Did your experience a kind of “death” and rebirth?  Move from darkness into light?  Discover a sense of life renewed?

It’s comforting to look up from this roof

and feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,

to recollect that in antiquity the winter solstice fell in Capricorn

and that, in the Orion Nebula,

from swirling gas, new stars are being born.

(“Toward the Winter Solstice” by Timothy Steele, from Toward the Winter Solstice. © Swallow Press, 2005.)

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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 June 2, 2013: Hope is a Thing with Feathers

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2013 | 1 Comment »

It was a week already colored by loss.  I watched the news on Friday evening in shock as again, images of tornadoes in Oklahoma filled the screen.  Barely two weeks since the town of Moore was devastated by a massive tornado, it was hard to imagine that the town could be struck again by another tornado before it had even recovered from the first.  Then the news coverage shifted to the war in Syria, fighting in Lebanon, and I turned the television off.  I was already filled with enough heartache and sorrow.

Two days earlier, I received an email from an acquaintance, the wife of a dear friend, B., who had been at our sides in the years after the death of my daughters’ father, my first husband, helping to ease my daughters’ grief.  “I need your telephone number,” she wrote.  She and B. had divorced five or six years ago before she moved back to the United States from Canada.   I hadn’t heard from her for years.  I sent a reply with my telephone number and waited, filled with a sense of dread.  I’d just sent him a note last week to tell him I’d be in Toronto next week, but he’d never replied.

B. never recovered from the loss of his marriage, and although he said little about the break-up, he gradually became more withdrawn, until he was living the life of a recluse.  We continued, my daughters and I, to telephone from time to time, visit him when we were in Toronto, send birthday cards and occasional emails.  Time and again, B. reassured us that he was all right, but we were all dismayed by the change in him

His former wife telephoned that evening. “B. is dead,” she said.  “They found him in his bed.  He died in his sleep.”  Whatever the cause of death, no one knew.  The family declined to have an autopsy performed, and whether natural causes or suicide, no one could say.  I went to bed with a heavy heart and for the next few days, replayed our last conversations, the late night sentimental messages he had been sending, the memory of the first time we met him—and how he’d helped us through that first turbulent year of grief.  My feelings of loss were acute—and I chastised myself for not having reached out more often.  But it wasn’t B.’s death that finally brought me to tears, but a mother dove with losses of her own.

For the past two years, doves have chosen a potted asparagus fern, one that hangs over our porch railing, as their nest.  Their arrival announces springtime and new life.  We’ve watched as, each year, two pale eggs appeared in the fern, patiently tended by a pair of doves.  Twice, we’ve seen chicks hatch and test their wings with their protective parents in tow.  But this year we were visited a third time, a few weeks after the other family of doves vacated the nest.  Another mother dove appeared, and after a day or two of assessing the abandoned nest, claimed it for her own.  Soon, two more eggs were visible in the few fleeting moments she would leave the nest, and her vigil began in earnest.  She sat patiently, tolerating our comings and goings, her dark eyes riveted on mine when I watered the other plants near the fern.  As our eyes met, I experienced a kind of communion, as well as a sense of awe.  It seemed she somehow trusted I would not harm her.  I felt like her protector.  Several days passed, and I grew eager for another pair of chicks to hatch.

It was just about time, or so I thought, when early in the morning a day after B.’s death, I saw her pacing back and forth on the railing, coo-cooing repeatedly in agitation.  I tiptoed as close to the nest as I dared and peered into it.  Empty.  Her eggs were gone, no doubt stolen during the night by one of the predators that inhabit our canyon—coyotes, hawks, and rodents.  As I got closer to the nest, she flapped her wings frantically, squawked and flew away, leaving me to stare, in disbelief at the empty nest.  That’s the moment my tears began, and I wept over the loss of two small eggs—and so much more.

The mother dove returned a few hours later, paced the deck again, repeatedly checking the nest, as if she thought it was somehow been a joke, a passing mirage of emptiness.  Only the hollow in the fern, where her eggs once lay, remained.  I, was as hopeful as she, returning to gently probe the hollow, hoping that maybe the eggs had just slipped below the fern and into the soil.  She squawked and fluttered her wings once more, and flew away, both of us grieving in our own way.

This morning, I returned to the porch to water the parched fern,  surprised to see a young dove strutting among the day lilies below the porch.  She was unfazed by my sudden appearance, pausing briefly to look up at me before continuing her strut about the garden–apparently quite at home.  Perhaps he was assessing the garden as a potential nesting place for next year.  I wondered if it was one of the offspring of the pair who’d nested there earlier in the spring.  Whatever the reason for its casual stroll among the lilies, I smiled, my spirits lighter than they had been all week.

“Hope is a thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson wrote.  I recalled words as I thought about the dove this morning, and about the natural cycle of life, birth and death.  Even when we suffer unexpected loss, as in B.’s death, we can rediscover hope.   B. gave to us, as a friend-in-need, hope when we needed it most—and that is the memory that will live in our hearts.  Hope is a gift we can pass on to others, but this week, it was the unlikely appearance of a little dove that gave to me.

“Hope is the thing with feathers”

By Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers 

That perches in the soul, 

And sings the tune without the words, 

And never stops at all, 

  

And sweetest in the gale is heard;         

And sore must be the storm 

That could abash the little bird 

That kept so many warm. 

  

I’ve heard it in the chillest land, 

And on the strangest sea;        

Yet, never, in extremity, 

It asked a crumb of me.

 

This week, write about hope.

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For the Week of May 26, 2013: Reclaiming the Sacred in Life

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , writing and spirituality, , , on May 26, 2013 | 5 Comments »

Paying attention, the act of being fully present to our outer and inner worlds is the writer’s work.  But in the everyday demands of our busy lives or especially when our lives are defined by pain and hardship, our attention is often pulled in a dozen different directions.  Writing can help us quiet our noisy minds, reclaim a sense of calm, even help us heal.  But sometimes, writing becomes little more than rumination, the constant replay of old scripts, old pain and heartache.  We don’t feel better, and we are too preoccupied with our struggle to pay attention to anything else but ourselves.

For me, writing is a kind of prayer, a chance to notice, to reflect, to make sense of life.  But there have been times, in upheaval and challenge, my writing has turned too much inward; I’ve ended up consumed by pain and preoccupied with whatever struggle I’m facing.  For example, in the months after my first husband drowned in the midst of our marital separation, I filled my journal pages with a barrage of questions that couldn’t be answered; I poured out my sorrow, anger and self-recrimination on the page day after day after day.  At first, my outpouring gave me a sense of temporary relief from suffering, but I was soon locked in the vicious cycle of rumination, consumed by my pain.  I felt worse.  I put my journal aside and sought the help of a therapist.

For the first few months, I did little more than weep and grieve in the safety of a supportive other, but my healing truly began when my writing changed.  I began to write poetry.  Raw and wordy at first, I took one poem to my therapist each week, reading it aloud at the start of our session, then handing him a copy.  He responded with two simple words:  “thank you.”  It was enough.  I began to feel better, and my poetry took on new depth and insight, expressed in metaphor and imagery.  I began to “see” the world again, in all its detail and beauty.  I rediscovered a deep wellspring of reverence, of what was most sacred in my life.  I had begun to heal

My experience isn’t unique.  I was experiencing something that poets had always known.  Ted Kooser, writing the introduction to his book, Winter Morning Walks:  One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison said:

“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…”

His poetry, the act of writing each day, was important to his healing.  In his book, we find a touching portrayal of a poet recovering from the ravages of illness and treatment, whose spirit and sensibilities were reawakened in his solitary walks.  He too began to notice life around him once again and the beauty of the natural world.

My wife and I walk the cold road

In silence, asking for thirty more years…

 

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.

 


 Kooser reminds us of the importance of noticing, of paying attention, and being fully present and attentive.  As he began to notice the life around him again, we “see” his recovery, but it’s the spiritual recovery we are most touched by, not the physical one.

“Poetry…,” Robert McDowell states in Poetry as a Spiritual Practice “leads to stillness, the calm center where you are most open and alive.  Poetry…makes you more mindful, and as you become so, you gracefully reconnect with the natural world.”  The great poet, Robert Frost, according to McDowell, said that “poetry doesn’t so much tell us anything new, but reminds us of things that we need to know but forgot” (p.6).

Things we need to know but forgot…That’s why I read—and write—poetry each morning.  I don’t think of myself as a poet—far from it—but in the quiet of early morning, the ritual of writing little poems helps me pay attention and be reverent of the beauty of life happening just outside my window—the hummingbirds’ frolic at the fountain, the swoop and glide of a red tail hawk over the canyon, a mother dove, patiently warming her two delicate eggs in the asparagus fern on our front porch.  In those moments of still and solitude, a poem is there to be written, and I am deeply aware of being part of something greater, of all living things.

The poet Wendell Berry spent his Sunday mornings in a kind of walking meditation, observing the world and writing poems that became a collection of “Sabbath poems” spanning two decades.  In the preface Berry writes, “These poems were written in silence, in solitude, mainly out of doors…the poems are about moments when heart and mind are open and aware…”

Best of any song

is bird song

in the quiet, but first

you must have the quiet.


 (In:  A Timbered Choir, 1998)

 

In her poem, “Gratitude,” Mary Oliver, asks–and answers—eight simple questions.

What did you notice?

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

 The poem continues, in a pattern of a question of the narrator and her response, a treasure of richly described observations of the natural world.  At the end of the poem, she poses one last question:

What did you think was happening?

And answers:  so the gods shake us from our sleep.

(From:  What Do We Know:  Poems and Prose Poems, 2003)

Paying attention, as Oliver and others remind us,  is about slowing down and being attentive to the present, to what’s inside or right in front of our eyes, and in doing so, we embark on a deeply spiritual exploration.  Poetry is one of the most spiritual of all writing practices—and nearly every religious tradition and great spiritual mentors attest to its universality in helping us “reclaim the sacred” in our lives.

Reclaim the sacred in your life.  Embrace quiet, the stillness.  Meander along a trail, near the sea, the woods, a long walk along city streets.  Take in the sights, sounds, smells, and movement.  Write about what you see—one single observation.  Describe it and let it take you wherever it takes you.

          “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 April 7, 2013: In the Garden

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , poetry and healing, , , 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 17, 2013: “Submit to Nature; Return to Nature”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , writing and spirituality, , , 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 November 25th: The Healing Power of Place

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Every autumn, I experience a wave of longing, something akin to homesickness, a desire to be among hillsides colored in scarlet or looking out at a mountain peak in the distance.  The longing is not specific to one place I love, but two.   Many years ago, I left my native northern California town and immigrated to Canada, where, over the next twenty three years, I became wife, mother and widow, rooting myself to another part of the continent, quite unlike the place I’d always called “home.”  I came to love my adopted country as fiercely as I had the countryside that I’d grown up in, and, as Barry Lopez reminds us, a place you love not only delights your senses, but shapes you:

My imagination was shaped by the exotic nature of water in a dry southern California valley; by the sound of wind in the crowns of eucalyptus trees; by the tactile sensation of sheened earth, turned in furrows by a gang plow; by banks of saffron, mahogany and scarlet cloud piled above a field of alfalfa at dusk; by encountering the musk from orange blossoms at the edge of an orchard; by the aftermath of a Pacific storm crashing a hot, flat beach…

I became intimate with the elements of that particular universe. They fashioned me. I return to them regularly in essays and stories in order to clarify or explain abstractions or to strike contrasts. I find the myriad relationships in that universe comforting. They form a “coherence” of which I once was a part. (From an article in High Country News)

That “coherence” is about belonging too, and a place we love, one that is familiar and storied, makes us feel “at home.”  Loneliness can be exaggerated when we find ourselves in a place that does not somehow resonate with us.  I grew up in the northernmost area of California, in the shadow of an ancient volcano, surrounded by tall pines and wide vistas.  After I married, I came to love the rugged beauty of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and the panoramic views of the Atlantic.  Living in Southern California, as I do now, amid palm trees and an arid landscape, I struggle to find that elusive sense of “home.”  Apparently I’m in good company.   Goethe once wrote that all writers are homesick.” And in an essay, “Looking for Home,” Mary Morris wrote “that all writers are really searching for home.  Being a writer is being on a constant search for where you belong…”

I think about feeling “at home,” and the return of that peculiar longing for the places I loved.  I sometimes close my eyes and visualize Mt. Shasta or the Cape Breton highlands–their beauty fed my spirit, and no doubt,  my well-being, because it turns out that place can be important to health.  Our ancient ancestors knew this, and they understood  that some places had healing powers, but the effects of place on health not studied until the latter part of the 20th century.

In her book, Healing Spaces, The Science of Place and Wellbeing, Dr. Esther Sternberg, a prominent medical researcher,  states that a space that is rich in legend and history can help create a place of healing for people suffering from stress and chronic illness.  She cites a landmark study published in Science in 1984.   Researchers found that patients recovered faster if their windows overlooked a grove of trees rather than a brick wall.  Sternberg explores  environmental influences, such as sunlight, meditation, music or exercise  and their effect on the brain, body, mental and physical disease, explaining why we feel at peace in certain surroundings and how place and nature are important to healing—something often and eloquently expressed by poets such as Mary Oliver and  Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

By Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things,” in Collected Poems, 1985

Explore place this week.  Visualize or visit a place that is important to you.  Pay attention to the details, colors, light, geography or the immediate surroundings where you find pleasure or comfort.   Make a series of quick notes to capture the impressions before writing.  Begin by describing a place you hold in your heart.  Why is it important to you?  How has it been healing for you?

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