Writing Will Save Your Life

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I’m in a mood today for dramatizing. Will writing save your life? All I know is that it saved mine and I’ve made it my business to try to understand how writing saved me, and how it can keep saving me. Louise DeSalvo has been one of my mentors—not that I know her, personally, but I’ve read her book, Writing as a Way of Healing, about 100 times. DeSalvo doesn’t flinch from the difficult, in fact, that’s exactly what she goes after:

Writing about traumatic or troubling life experiences initially unleashes difficult, conflicting emotions. In the long run, though, we feel better emotionally and are healthier and achieve a level of understanding of our lives that only writing can provide. Safe writing—writing what we already know or understand, writing that is superficial—won’t help us grow, either as people or as writers. For our writing to be healing, we must encounter something that puzzles, confuses, troubles, or pains us. (p. 93).

And that’s why you don’t get to go back to bed and sleep through the next six week news cycle.

I recently came across this KUOW story about poet Colleen J. McElroy and wanted to share it—she’s a walking, breathing example of writing’s power to sustain us. (Click on the link to go to the story/video.)

Hunkered down at 85

Colleen J. McElroy

DeSalvo continues:

An outgrowth of the kind of writing that digs deep, that takes risks, that arises from our desire to explore the unresolved emotional puzzles or ongoing pain in our lives is that we “gain greater psychological freedom” (as Albert M. Rothenberg, M.D., has observed) and greater range and depth in our artistic expression… (p.92)

I can’t imagine living any other way.

#notoriousrbg

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Rabbi Alfred Bettleheim once said: “Prejudice saves us a painful trouble, the trouble of thinking.” – Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I have been trying, not entirely successfully, to wrap my head around all that’s swirling around us in 2020. There’s the pandemic, of course, and there’s the resurgence of Black Lives Matter–both, to my mind, more than worthy of our attention. Then wildfires, extreme weather, climate change hit the news headlines, and the furor over the coming election becomes even more heated.

With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death, the political turmoil that our country is going through seems even more exaggerated, and more divided. Because many people in my family of origin are on the opposite side of this divide from me, all of it is a source of deep, personal anguish.

I try to read widely and deeply, to think my own thoughts and be clear about what I believe. But, under these circumstances, it gets murky and I am as apt as anyone to lose my way.

“Why be a poet now?” I asked a friend. “What’s the point?” She said, “If RBG were a poet, she’d be the best damn poet. That’s what you should do.”

This morning I read this tribute in The Seattle Times, “Clerking for Justice Ginsberg We Learned about Law–and Love,” by Miriam Seifter and Robert Yablon. It says it all:

“The justice kept up her relentless pace because she believed in her work and in doing the job right.”

And in my email feed yesterday, I found this message from Richard Rohr, author of Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, and many other books. He helped me and maybe his words will help you, too.  I’m attempting to share, via this link — but just in case the link doesn’t work, I’ve pasted it in below:

Some simple but urgent guidance to get us through these next months.

I awoke on Saturday, September 19, with three sources in my mind for guidance: Etty Hillesum (1914 – 1943), the young Jewish woman who suffered much more injustice in the concentration camp than we are suffering now; Psalm 62, which must have been written in a time of a major oppression of the Jewish people; and the Irish Poet, W.B.Yeats (1965 – 1939), who wrote his “Second Coming” during the horrors of the World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. 

These three sources form the core of my invitation. Read each one slowly as your first practice. Let us begin with Etty:

There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.

—Etty Hillesum, Westerbork transit camp

Note her second-person usage, talking to “You, God” quite directly and personally. There is a Presence with her, even as she is surrounded by so much suffering.

Then, the perennial classic wisdom of the Psalms:

In God alone is my soul at rest.
God is the source of my hope.
In God I find shelter, my rock, and my safety.
Men are but a puff of wind,
Men who think themselves important are a delusion.
Put them on a scale,
They are gone in a puff of wind.

—Psalm 62:5–9

What could it mean to find rest like this in a world such as ours? Every day more and more people are facing the catastrophe of extreme weather. The neurotic news cycle is increasingly driven by a single narcissistic leader whose words and deeds incite hatred, sow discord, and amplify the daily chaos. The pandemic that seems to be returning in waves continues to wreak suffering and disorder with no end in sight, and there is no guarantee of the future in an economy designed to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and those subsisting at the margins of society. 

It’s no wonder the mental and emotional health among a large portion of the American population is in tangible decline! We have wholesale abandoned any sense of truth, objectivity, science or religion in civil conversation; we now recognize we are living with the catastrophic results of several centuries of what philosophers call nihilism or post-modernism (nothing means anything, there are no universal patterns).

We are without doubt in an apocalyptic time (the Latin word apocalypsis refers to an urgent unveiling of an ultimate state of affairs). Yeats’ oft-quoted poem “The Second Coming” then feels like a direct prophecy. See if you do not agree:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Somehow our occupation and vocation as believers in this sad time must be to first restore the Divine Center by holding it and fully occupying it ourselves. If contemplation means anything, it means that we can “safeguard that little piece of You, God,” as Etty Hillesum describes it. What other power do we have now? All else is tearing us apart, inside and out, no matter who wins the election or who is on the Supreme Court. We cannot abide in such a place for any length of time or it will become our prison.

God cannot abide with us in a place of fear.
God cannot abide with us in a place of ill will or hatred.
God cannot abide with us inside a nonstop volley of claim and counterclaim.
God cannot abide with us in an endless flow of online punditry and analysis.
God cannot speak inside of so much angry noise and conscious deceit.
God cannot be found when all sides are so far from “the Falconer.”
God cannot be born except in a womb of Love.
So offer God that womb.

Stand as a sentry at the door of your senses for these coming months, so “the blood-dimmed tide” cannot make its way into your soul.

If you allow it for too long, it will become who you are, and you will no longer have natural access to the “really deep well” that Etty Hillesum returned to so often and that held so much vitality and freedom for her.

If you will allow, I recommend for your spiritual practice for the next four months that you impose a moratorium on exactly how much news you are subject to—hopefully not more than an hour a day of television, social media, internet news, magazine and newspaper commentary, and/or political discussions. It will only tear you apart and pull you into the dualistic world of opinion and counter-opinion, not Divine Truth, which is always found in a bigger place.

Instead, I suggest that you use this time for some form of public service, volunteerism, mystical reading from the masters, prayer—or, preferably, all of the above.

        You have much to gain now and nothing to lose. Nothing at all.
And the world—with you as a stable center—has nothing to lose.
And everything to gain. 


Richard Rohr, September 19, 2020

 

 

The Land of Overwhelm

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I talked to my friend Carla this afternoon while I took my second walk of the day. After a sunny morning, the sky was overcast and the air felt close. Before I was finished I swear I felt a drop of rain. Carla said she was struggling a bit: “Maybe it’s the pandemic. But it’s not just that.”  I have been feeling antsy and, frankly, a little crazed, myself. Today I looked at the sky and reminded myself of how much impending weather plays with my moods.

I am finished with my mystery novel and poised to get it out to agents. Poised to begin in earnest with typing the new mystery (so far scribbled into various notebooks). I’m also making a valiant effort to pull together a poetry manuscript. My present writing mood is an anxious grieving coupled with a feeling of being about to burst … maybe into bloom. I’m not sure yet.

My youngest daughter is in California with a friend. “Do you know there’s a pandemic?” I asked her, and she said, “Can we use your car?” Right now she’s staying with an old friend of mine, who–like me–has an empty nest and a great need to mother somebody. She talked the kids into canceling their hotel reservations in San Diego and spending three more days with her and her husband. So that makes me happy. It makes me happy that Emma was in the ocean today and saw five dolphins and a pelican. Despite everything else going on in the world, there are also dolphins.

Who knows why (or check “all of the above”) but this weekend I have spent a bunch of hours reorganizing one of my writing spaces. On Friday afternoon, I decided to move a big file cabinet from a corner of the playroom downstairs to my “zoom room” upstairs. First, I had to empty it. I found records for my 1981 Datsun, a copy of my wedding invitation, and six months of bottle-feeding and diapering records that we kept when our twins were born — from July 12 to mid-December 1993. (Good grief, what were we thinking?)

I also found drafts of novel openings that never went anywhere, short stories I had forgotten I ever wrote, tons of old Creative Writing Program journals, and stacks and stacks (and stacks) of poetry. I had kept every program for the old Castalia reading series, and other people’s poems from four years of Professor Bentley’s workshops–four quarters per year, labeled and dated. 

From all of these, I kept copies of my poems with Nelson’s comments on them. I kept a handful of the Castalia programs and a copy of the news article about his death, at age 72, of cancer. I kept my wedding invitation.

I felt a little like Theodore Roethke in his “Elegy for Jane.” (If you don’t already have it memorized, click on the link to hear Roethke read this 22-line poem for his student.) Or, I don’t mean his experience in the poem, but the story Nelson told us: that when Roethke came across his student Jane’s poems in his office files, he gave the bundle of papers a kiss and threw it into the trash.

I threw most everything into the recycle bin. So many people I will never see again. So many poems that I thought someday I would make the time to reread. Maybe I didn’t feel like Roethke. I felt more like Jane, as though I were a ghost, “waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.”

But I also felt lighter. I felt a little more able to move forward. Or to imagine moving forward.

Before I finished for the day, rain began. The dark swooped in a little earlier this evening, along with that smell that is partly rain, partly chill, and partly the scent of woodsmoke. It reminded me that even in the “Time of Corona” (as another friend calls it), one season is ending and another tiptoeing into the room.

Carla’s right. It’s the pandemic, and it’s not the pandemic.

 

Paul Marshall at Chuckanut Sandstone Open Mic

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What a thrill to hold this book in my hands!
I first met Paul Marshall at Everett Community College 25 years ago, and we’ve been writing together since we put together a teaching lab around writing in 2009. This past March, he decided to dedicate some time to assembling a book of poems, and he asked me to help. To quote from the back cover:

The poems in Stealing Foundation Stones share the journey of a blue collar, small town, hot-rod loving kid who grew up to go to Vietnam, returned home to the radical turmoil of the 70s, became a psychology professor and an award-winning community college educator, then, after a major loss, rebuilt his life, remarrying and morphing (yet again) into a ukulele-playing grandpa and woodworker and writer. It is a trip you don’t want to miss.

I hardly know what to excerpt here, as I love all these poems. They’re familiar to me as old friends and as welcoming.

Zen Handyman

Cursing saw torn flesh
dripping red blood mars heartwood
my grandfather’s laugh

In these poems, cars rev their engines and bears growl. Blackbirds hoard trinkets the way the poet hoards memories while he lets go of detritus, including old books that (like the bears) growl back: “Their cat haired, dust bunnied pages / fall open as they gasp out their reason to be saved. // I’m a first edition. / I’m an autographed copy.” (“Don’t Leave It for the Children”)

After retiring from the college, Paul and his wife moved to Whidbey Island, and one of his pursuits is to walk the shoreline. This quiet poem makes me feel I’m walking with him:

Post Card Poem to a Friend

Coho and Chinook woke me from a sound sleep last night.
They are returning to the inland sea of our home.
As ever, they sing their spirit songs in time with muscular
undulations in the deep currents of Admiralty Inlet.
Listen. Can you hear them?
Their low murmuring call
imbedded in these post card fibers.

Paul’s book is  available at Amazon. com.  He will be the featured reader this evening, Wednesday, August 12, at Chuckanut Sandstone Open Mic. Here’s the invitation from Carla Shafer, who tells me there is still time for readers to join the open mic. Contact her at chuckanutsandstone@gmail.com . The reading begins at 7 PM (but opens at 6:30-ish) and ends about 8:45-ish. Some hang around and socialize for awhile.
INVITATION & ZOOM LINK:
You are invited to a Zoom meeting. 
When: Aug 12, 2020, 06:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada) 
 
Register in advance for this meeting:
 
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
 
It would be lovely to meet you there. Bethany