The Forgotten Familiar

One of the exercises I teach in my BodyWrites! class is all about familiar sensations. We encourage students to take few moments alone, in silence to think about what has served as touchstones for them, particularly from childhood. When my husband Hawk and I wrote the exercise, we were thinking purely of the familiar as a positive, and this is the example we wrote together for this:

There is a stairway in my Grandmother's house in Germany. Wooden stairs, wooden railing. I grew up playing on those stairs, running down for breakfast, running up for bedtime. And then we moved to America. For twenty years, I was away. Upon my return to that house, I walked up those stairs again. I felt the grooves worn into the wooden stair, so many feet traveling up and down. I felt the banister, smooth wood polished by the hands of family, hands of time. And the sound of that third stair down from the top, the creak of it telling me, I was finally home again.

And a few weeks ago, we went to see Sharon Olds read in the Seattle Arts and Lectures Poetry Series. She read this marvelous poem about seeing the alphabet for the first time above the chalk board at school. She had thought it was one long word she needed to learn, and the poem was a positive one about those letters being a touchstone for her.

What I didn't realize until we got into working with people one on one, until reading through John Fox's Poetic Medicine, is that some of these familiar sensations are forgotten for good reason. They often have a more painful association and much of the emotion surrounding the familiar has been repressed because as children we were unable to handle the pain.

So now, as we are getting older, more ready to handle whatever comes up, these exercises in the forgotten familiar can be very helpful for healing wounds that we have unconsciously brought with us into present day. In the same way that I encourage students to take silent time alone to start the process, Fox suggests much the same in Poetic Medicine. He goes on to encourage some spontaneous writing. Just write whatever comes to mind, as quickly as you can, without edit, just

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