Healing through Writing

We communicate most beautifully during periods of great joy or grief. From Psalms to Songs to Odes to secret blogs, the eloquence of the human heart rises like smoke when it is celebrating or is singed and stinging. In writing about these peaks and valleys, we are healed, calmed, soothed and nurtured. Writing works like Prayer that way.

Writing heals because it releases and receives energy. It sends an imprint of that present moment to the Universe; an acknowledgement and cognition of feelings, a message of praise and gratitude, a myriad of pleas and searches for meaning. This acknowledgment is sifted through a creative process which is therapeutic and transformative.

I have written through some of the most difficult parts of my life, and in re-reading them, I realize they were the some of the most beautiful times, second to this moment. I felt alive; desperately, overwhelmingly, intensely alive, right before calming me down -- the storm before the calm, this time around.

A few excerpts from my journal in November 2002 (Mastectomy from Breast Cancer)...

Assymetry

What does it mean - losing one's symmetry?
Is beauty bipolar and balanced?
Never tipping to one side,
Never lopsided?


If symmetry is lost, will this beauty slide
to one side, shatter on the floor
and break?


The Latin Words Come to Me Now

The latin words come to me now.
Patior. Carpe Nocturn.
I seek for my ethymology.

Will I find my origin
in lexicon and language?
Or will words, in finding meaning
in me,
falter too?

In Situ

So this is what happens.
Along with my proud lineage
runs this venom
richly laid upon my breast.

I've seen it, thick and dense
and speckled on film.
I felt it in clock position
when the sun shines brightest
on everything...
but this.

It sits obediently in place,
this venom.
Growing patches from pain,
taking seed
While I contemplate on an antidote.

My venom richly laid in place
upon my breast
And in place of this breast -
my life.

I Shall Be Disfigured

I shall be disfigured
in stark white light
from the scars, from the battles
fought and won.

In broad daylight
this body will be old as this soul
unshattered, streaked,
broken, strong.

But at night,
unclothed by the starlit sky,
I shall be soft and incandescent -
sharpened edges smudged
in candlelight.

My silhouette shall glow
golden outlines slow moving
above and beneath your gaze
And you (I) will remember that I am
Still am
Who I was.

***

And the yogic thoughts of my "childhood"...

I Shall Speak For You

I shall speak for you.

You who sit
cross-legged, limb upon limb
On your lotus pad
Where thoughts once splayed
are now columned on your back,
unstrained,
bone upon bone
in a balancing act.

I shall see through eyes

Gazing, transcendent
at nothing-ness, half-closed
Or else
everything-ness, half-open.

I shall breath you in.

Petals of fingers,
Sepals of feet.
A bud of oval bliss
tucked beneath your thumbs,
points slightly touching,
begin to bloom
In you.

And having been in you,
In me.

----

And so now, 8 years later, I continue to write.