Volume VII, Issue 41 October 15,
2018 Dear ,
This week, I'm sharing one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing with you. It's a true story by physician, healer, and writer Rachel Naomi Remen about how she found her "lost eyes" and began to see clearly again.
My husband Richard and I were camping this past weekend at Table Rock State Park in the South Carolina mountains,
and, I was reminded, prepping the zine about how, while we were hiking a trail, I mentioned that my primary learning mode is auditory. His response to me was that he thought the most important sense for everyone is sight.
I argued with him about how non-visual I am, and then, there we were, standing in front of a waterfall. We heard it first, right? But to see it. . .ah, that was pretty special.
I had to concede that it was a toss-up. After all, I thought, the quote is "seeing is believing."
Seeing is something we do with our eyes, of course. But it's also something we do with our hearts. And our minds. For when we truly
understand something, have that aha moment, we say, "I see."
Writing is one of the ways we reach those aha's. Which is why, this week, I'm
inviting you to write about something you "see."
And if you live in the Charlotte area and you're free the next two Thursday mornings, you're warmly invited to attend a two-session workshop for support in telling your story in its most engaging, compelling form. Details here and below.
Regardless of whether you can attend, here's a challenge for you this week: pay attention so that you truly see what unfolds before you
moment by moment. You may be astonished, as I was last night.
(This is a bit of a spoiler; well, more likely, this will not make sense to you until you read Remen's "Healing Eye" in the featured writing below, but bear with me.) There I was, at choir practice, after I'd just reread Rachel Naomi Remen's story in preparation for the zine. And kitty corner to me, just ahead, sat the one "non-grown-up" in
our choir, a gifted middle-school-aged girl. She had drawn a face on one of her palms in pen, and was entertaining herself between songs with her own puppet show for one. She's been there week after week, right in eyeshot, and I have never seen her do this before.
I hope you're intrigued now. How odd. Why am I telling you this? Don't miss reading "Healing Eye" so you can find out! And do take a look at the upcoming WordPlay opportunities on the way down.
Love, light, and happy seeing, Maureen Upcoming WordPlay
THE GIFT OF MEMOIR: How to Get Your Most Meaningful Life Stories on Paper with Ease (Preserving Family History; Writing for and about Your Family; The Art
of Memoir)
Starts this Thursday, October 18 3 spots left!
Just for you, a two-session Gift of Memoir class to help you get your most meaningful life stories written. As best-selling author Rachel Naomi Remen says in her book Kitchen Table
Wisdom, facts bring us to knowledge, but stories bring us to wisdom. If you are interested in writing family and/or personal life stories—those significant tales of adventure, transition, love, loss, and triumph, as well as lovely everyday moments from times past or the present, come learn specific tools and techniques to retrieve and record them.
You will learn and practice the fundamental tools and steps needed to both capture individual events that have been important to you, reflecting on the impact and meaning as well as what happened, and the process of collecting events together into a full-length memoir or book of
essays—whether this is for personal reflection, to share with family and friends, or to publish to reach a larger audience.
At the second session,
you’ll have a chance to share one or two of your stories with the class to receive feedback and guidance in moving forward.
Our stories are a precious legacy. Putting them in writing is a gift to all who know and love us—they can be treasured and enjoyed for generations to come. It is also a gift to ourselves.
* For the benefit of participants, an audio recording of the class will be made each week so that participants are able to listen to classes they miss and/or review material covered at any convenient time and place. These recordings are available throughout the class session, along with all handouts, in a shared Dropbox
folder.
WHERE: The WordPlay studio, Ballantyne area. Directions will be sent upon registration. WHEN: October 18th and 25th, from 10:00 a.m. –12:30 p.m. COST: $77 TO REGISTER: To pay with a check via mail, email info@wordplaynow.com for instructions. To register online
with a debit or credit card, please click this link to pay via PayPal. -------------------------------------------------------
THE ART AND CRAFT OF POLISHING A POEM
I have the honor of teaching the Master Poetry Class at The North Carolina Writers’ Network 2018 Fall Conference, November 2-4 at the Hilton Charlotte University Place in Charlotte, NC. The class,
titled “The Art and Craft of Polishing a Poem,” which will offer registrants the opportunity to learn and practice specific revision tactics, as well as get detailed feedback/critique on at least one of their poems.
For
the first time, Fall Conference will offer a full slate of sessions designed specifically for writers of stage and screen. In addition, as part of the Network’s ongoing mission to serve writers at all levels of experience, the Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts will sponsor a “Business of Writing” track at Fall Conference for those who feel ready to take their manuscripts to market. And, because of the Hilton’s convenient location, getting to (and parking!) at a Fall Conference in the
Charlotte Metro area has never been easier.
If a poetry master class is not for you right now, please check out the many, many other offerings available that provide so much ways to learn and grow as
a writer no matter what your level of experiences, plus many networking opportunities!
For more information, and to register, visit www.ncwriters.org. -------------------------------------------------------
COASTAL WRITING RETREAT Connect with Your Creativity at the Sunset Inn
Good news! I've talked with the manager of the Sunset
Inn, and they are back open for business, so our retreat is a go. Meanwhile, I know you, like me, are continuing to think of all the people who are still struggling from the effects of Hurricane Florence and sending all best wishes for recovery.
Renew yourself and reconnect with your own creativity, whether you are a practicing writer, closet writer, or as-yet-to-pick-up-the-pen writer! The techniques and prompts we’ll use will spur your imagination, and can be used to create nonfiction, fiction, and/or poetry—the choice is
yours.
$458 + room tax for the weekend beginning Friday, November 9th through Sunday, November 11th. The Coastal Writing Retreat includes writing sessions, two nights’ lodging, two breakfasts and Saturday lunch (hotel
tax and Saturday dinner at a local restaurant not included).
Want to extend your retreat? If you’d like to stay another day to write, or to just enjoy the beach, the Inn is offering Coastal Writing Retreat participants
the opportunity to stay Sunday night at half price.
WHERE: The Sunset Inn, 9 North Shore Dr., Sunset Beach, NC 28468 WHEN: Friday, November 9th – Sunday, November 11th, 2018
TO REGISTER: Please contact the Sunset Inn directly at 888.575.1001 or 910.575.1000. If you would like to handpick your room, view your choices here first, then call.
You’ll need a
copy of Spinning Words into Gold, available for $23.54 at the retreat. Or order a copy now. photo and bio from www.rachelremen.com/about/biography/
Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. is Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at UCSF School of Medicine and Founder and
Director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at Commonweal. She is one of the best-known of the early pioneers of Wholistic and Integrative Medicine. As a medical educator, therapist and teacher, she has enabled many thousands of physicians to practice medicine from the heart and thousands of patients to remember their power to heal. Her groundbreaking curriculum for medical students, The Healer’s Art, is taught in 90 of America’s medical schools and medical schools in 7
countries abroad. A master storyteller and observer of life, her bestselling books, Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s Blessings, have sold more than a million copies and are translated into 23 languages. Dr. Remen has had Crohn’s disease for more than 60 years and her work is a unique blend of the wisdom, strength and viewpoints of both doctor and patient. "Healing Eye"
Twenty-five years ago I found myself caught between two paradigms. I had been on the faculty of Stanford's medical school for several years but I had become increasingly restless. A number of people had come my way who had knowledge of a different way of doing things: anthropologists, psychologists, artists, messengers from the world beyond medicine, students of another wisdom about pain and suffering. More and
more, I found myself participating in discussions of healing rather than curing.
It was 1973 and at
the time there was no place for these ideas in medical work or teaching, and yet, as a patient myself, I recognized them and they seemed to me to be of great significance. I began to wonder about certain things. Did people's beliefs about themselves affect their ability to get well? Could people have an intuitive sense of the direction of their healing? Was there more to helping people recover than knowing the right diagnosis and offering the proper treatment? Did our relationship to our
patients affect outcome as profoundly as our medications? Slowly, I began to question things that no one around me doubted were true. Over a period of time, l felt myself moving farther and farther away from the perspectives of my colleagues. I was unable to reach across the widening gap in our thinking and it was frightening.
The stress was so severe that I found myself wondering if I could continue in my present work, although there was nowhere to go to work differently. I didn't seem to belong anywhere and I was no longer sure of who I was or what I believed
in.
One of my new friends had given me a book of poetry—Khalil Gibran's The Prophet—which
had in it several illustrations by the poet himself, among them a drawing of a hand with a gentle and compassionate human eye in its palm. I discovered that this was a traditional Hindu symbol for the healer. In the Hindu belief the energy centers called chakras, in our palms, connect the hand and heart of the healer and convey the wisdom and energy needed for the healing. This was in direct contrast to my training, which had led me to place trust in the intellect as the tool of healing. Yet
this older idea of being able to "see" with your hands was for some reason compelling to me, and I found myself thinking about it a great deal. It seemed familiar.
Eventually, I took the page from the book and framed it. I felt uncomfortable hanging it in my office at Stanford and so I put it over my desk at home.
The stress continued to build and then I received an unexpected and significant faculty promotion. Amid a flurry of congratulations, I became increasingly troubled. It seemed to me that a choice had to be made, between the path that I had spent half my lifetime preparing to travel—the way to recognition, security, and professional acceptance—and another
path, dimly perceived and poorly understood, that led off into the unknown. How could I even consider such an alternative? A hundred other physicians would kill to step into my shoes. I desperately wanted to accept the promotion, but something held me back. I temporized.
At this time I was living on one coast and my family was on the other. A few times a year, I would fly across the country to visit my parents, to New York in the summer and to Florida in the winter. One of these occasions, my thirty-fifth birthday, was coming up. With a heavy
heart, I arrived in Florida to spend a week with the family, whose financial sacrifices had made possible my medical training. I knew my promotion would bring them great satisfaction, but somehow I couldn't bring myself to tell them about it.
On my birthday I took a walk with my mother. We sat after a while on a park bench in the Florida sunshine, talking about what she could remember of my birth: I had been born ahead of time by cesarean section. I had been in an incubator for some time. She had felt guilty about this, as if my suffering were her fault. It was very
moving for me to hear some things that I had not known, and as I sat listening to her tell me my own story, I remember having the single clear thought that here was the one person who had known me from my very beginnings, who knew who I really was.
Just then my mother turned to look at a young woman sitting on the next bench who was playing with her little girl. The child was drawing little faces on the tips of her fingers with a felt-tip pen and speaking to them as if they were little puppet people. She and her mother were laughing. I was
charmed.
After watching for a while in silence, my own mother turned to me with a smile and
remarked with some emphasis, "Some things never change."
"Why, what do you mean, Mom?" Delighted
with the memory, she told me that when I was small I too used to draw on my hands. I had absolutely no recollection of this and asked her if I had drawn little faces on my fingertips.
"No," my mother said. "You used to do a funny thing. You would take your daddy's fountain pen and draw eyes in the palms of your hands. Then you would hold your hands up on either side of your face with your palms facing forward like this," she said, showing me. "You would close your eyes and say, `Now I can see you,' and giggle. Such a funny thing. Sometimes you would not let us wash your
hands for days. You were about four. Do you remember now?"
On an average day in the pediatric
clinics, I washed my hands thirty or forty times. Perhaps over the years, I had washed away my eyes. About two weeks later, l resigned from Stanford and began searching for my lost eyes.
~ Rachel Naomi Remen in Kitchen Table Wisdom
WordPlay Now! Writing Prompt
This is WordPlay—so why not revel in the power and potential of one good word after
another? This week, it's "see." PROMPT: Write a scene in which you, or one of your characters, saw something that inspired both your eyes and your heart. It's fun to play with prompts in community with fellow writers, and to be able to share the results when you're done. You can find out about WordPlay classes, workshops, and
retreats here. MAUREEN RYAN GRIFFIN, an award-winning poetry and nonfiction writer, is the author of Spinning Words into Gold, a Hands-On Guide to the Craft of Writing, a grief workbook entitled I Will Never Forget You, and three collections of poetry, Ten Thousand Cicadas Can't Be Wrong, This Scatter of Blossoms and When the Leaves Are in the Water.
She believes, as author Julia Cameron says, "We are meant to midwife dreams for one another." Maureen also believes that serious "word work" requires serious WordPlay, as play is how we humans best learn—and perform. What she loves best is witnessing all the other dreams that come true for her clients along the way. Language, when used with intentionality and focus, is, after all,
serious fuel for joy. Here's to yours! |
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