I had a strange and disturbing thought. It originated from reading a compelling book, “Writing as A Way of Healing,” by Louise DeSalvo. She shares many wonderful perspectives on how writing heals.
It’s not only the act of writing that heals, it’s the memories. Not as in remembering someone’s name, but in recalling events. Medical staffs term it narrative medicine. I prefer story. I can’t decide which I love more, telling stories or listening to them. My ultimate epiphany is why choose?
Week days, I work as a hospital chaplain. On weekends, I enjoy a fair amount of reading and writing in solitude. Mondays come and go, and at the beginning of each new week I look forward to getting back to the hospital community. I visit dozens of wonderful people and know I am privileged to hear their stories.
Pushing the boundaries
So what’s strange and disturbing?
Nothing until I read the following lines in DeSalvo’s book: “In the year before I started writing my first book, I became interested in Japanese Zen circle paintings. … From my training as a painter, I knew that the fewer elements a painting contained, the more difficult it was to pull the work off.” She devotes one full chapter to how circle painting became part of a creative process that included her writing. This brought on my curiosity and for a moment I lost touch with reality. I considering painting, a strange and disturbing thought.
It happened once before, several years ago while attending a memoir class at Sharon Art Center. It took all my courage to be there. I feared that its location at an art center could be a trap, a come on for something more, like making potholders. I imagined the doors closing and my life over, but I successfully dismissed its fiction.
I remember riding a bike home from second grade carrying in my front basket a year of student possessions inclusive of crayons. I enjoyed their smells and loved their colors. What happened? What destroyed that pleasure? I have no idea, but I am quite sure I will feel embarrassed if ever I showed up at Sharon Art Center asking how to paint.
Writing about these experiences dilutes my fears and proves DeSalvo’s point, writing is healing. I write of things in ways I might not tell another face to face. I examine illusions. A lifetime of fearing arts and crafts has been diminished but not quite abandoned.
Not long ago I observed a woman at the hospital with colored pencils using them to fill in an elaborately drawn coloring book full of complicated designs. She said she was a painter and that coloring was a temporary endeavor. Something to do until she could get back to her studio and paint.
I didn’t ask if she was a writer. I didn’t want to know, but watching her enjoyment strengthened the possibilities of my enrolling in a painting class. I focused on DeSalvo describing how hard it is to circle paint, even as an accomplished painter. She reasoned its fewer elements made it more difficult. Fewer elements appeal to my leanings toward efficiency. The strange and disturbing thoughts continue.
Is this irrational interest in arts and crafts maturation? Growth? A fad? I take reluctant comfort that it’s not yet on my bucket list. No sense rushing into anything. I want to explore the bottom line. Bliss or no bliss, that is the question. Or maybe it’s about the angst.
Bob Ritchie is a regular contributor to the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript.