art of healing
everybody's doing it.
it's in, it's fun, it's great for teaching social media or sizing up a site. but until i saw Mad's stark and poignant Wordle a couple of weeks ago on the topic her February miscarriage, i hadn't considered that the novelty site might also serve as a tool for art therapy of a sort; that it could offer a mirror reflecting one's own words and sorrow and thought processes back to oneself, reconfigured.
the healing process doesn't really end, i don't think. the pain becomes less immediate. the desire to connect to it fades. but, for me, with peace has come a curiosity about meaning, an urge to explore - from outside the raw wound that is personal narrative - what it means to live through loss and come through the looking glass.
so i entered text from my own posts here into Wordle, and stepped back, imagining myself perched on a bench in a wide, minimalist gallery, taking in the conglomeration of words and connections as if they'd sprung from some elsewhere, as if the blood they spoke of was foreign to me. there is healing in distance, my grandmother always told me. there is insight, i thought, maybe, to be found in this bird's eye view that brings my words back to me jumbled and reorganized, full of acrostic mystery.
i cast my tea leaves and hit "create," and time, and think, and baby and grief and wanted all leapt from the page, not entirely unexpected but still surprising in their relative size and relational combinations. in Wordle, the frequency of words in the base text impacts what size those words show up as in the created piece. time made me nod. think made me laugh. i overthink everything, always have, but didn't realize the theme had come through so dramatically in writing. the left-hand side conjunction of still, think and back juxtaposed with the alternate combination of still, go and back - with go slightly smaller, like a longing finally discarded - made me wistful...for the longest time, in my sorrow, i wished myself back to the time when my son was alive. in moving beyond that place of wishing, i have left something behind forever. but both realities - the one in which i think back and the one in which i would go back if i could - are present in the Wordle, roads diverged only by one word. elsewhere, tiny wanted baby and peace wrong and healed though never exactly enough and the way lost fits inside time all catch my eye, my breath. these are things never quite articulated aloud, yet there they are, alive on the screen. seeing them is like looking through an old photo album, a former life flooding back in the recognition.
what do you see? have you tried one of these for yourself? is this art for you, or just a novelty gag? what place has art - of any kind, writing included - had in your own grieving and healing process?
bon
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beautiful.
I tried it several times hoping the words would be different.
I can't get it to work for me.
I wrote in a journal for 12 months, poetry included. It was great. The best thing I did though, that was the most therapeautic for me was creating two memory books of William. One for my mum and one for my MIL.
Just putting the different colours together, pasting and creating something beautiful, feeling like I could still do SOMETHING was such an important part of the process in the first twelve months.
It is beautiful, but I've got ome kind of wordle block. Every time I try it, no matter with what feed, it comes back all full of words like
back
two
made
posts
now
many
text
something
read
peanut butter
...no matter how profound I keep thinking it's going to be, it's always a letdown.
I love yours, though, and I loved mad's.
I think art is huge for healing, whether it's a successful wordle or a sketchbook or a blog. I've often wondered what it would be like to buy a canvas and some paint, and see what comes out with Liam in my heart - with my talents, probably interpretive stick figures.
But sometimes it's the doing, not just the result, that's worthwhile.
Wow. I just did this with some posts I wrote about being raped and sexually abused. It came out sort of cutesy looking. It makes me realize how often I speak in euphemisms when I talk about my experiences. Hmm.
Pretty effective as art therapy, I'd say.
I thought Wordle was cool and fun and interesting, but I am unsure of what it did for me when I tried to create my own word cloud from my blog. There is a difference I think- an art you create yourself, and one someone tries to create for you.
My writing is no art, but it is part of my healing journey.
I have read and seen, though, of others who had painted, wrote poems, sculpted, etc to express their grief. And like Kate said, it's the process, more than the end-product.
Once I figured out how it worked, it is possible to make something sort of artistic with it. Whether it's therapeutic or not, I'm not sure yet.
I posted my Wordle on my blog. It's made from my twins' Virtual Memorial website...and whether it is artistic or not is definitely up for debate...but for sure, it is very real and very true.
http://withouttwins.blogspot.com/2008/07/wordles-to-live-by.html
I did a wordle and posted it on my blog. If you want to make a word more prominent, you can repeat the word in the place where you type them and it will print it bigger. I like hitting the random button too to see what kind of different combinations the program comes up with.
I did mine for my blog and SHOES was the word blaring back at me. Odd sing I don't think I ever talk about shoes. I don't like shoes. I don't own many.
Then I copy and pasted my birth stories and it became this:
Much more accurate.
I also did a wordle and was somewhat surprised at what came back. It was hard to look at it. It was all of the bits and pieces of my life that are just too much to think about all at once.
http://turtleandthemonkey.blogspot.com/
http://thentherewere3.wordpress.com/
Hmmm. Not sure what I think about what this is trying to tell me.
Oh bon, I am so glad I saw this.