Solving the Puzzle of Health and Creative Energy:
Healing Stories, Arts, and
Therapeutic Metaphors

Why would anyone want or need another site seeking health for individuals, society, and the planet. The short answer is that so far health eludes us. A longer answer unrolled for me while I directed a doctoral student's dissertation on the rhetoric of healing. Although I had learned much from others (including my wife), what finally awoke me was hearing again from my student detailed statistics about the growth of alternative and complementary medicine into a multi-billion-dollar industry. Unfortunately, motivated by this industry, most internet sites on it are mere advertisements for products and practitioners. The remainder (and some of the former) bring to mind a boundless fog of thickly scented, new-age incense. Web surfers are left hungry for something more substantial, such as what the present site intends to be: a place to study the linguistics, poetics, aesthetics, and narratology of the curative arts.

If you want a brief taste of this concoction, click here on Healing Potions as Communications (a few preliminary recipes). In greater detail, assembling the ingredients will always be a work in progress. You can join it by sending us brief queries, personal anecdotes as well as commentaries on therapeutic stories and techniques ranging from relatively traditional ones (such as hypnotherapy or psychoanalysis) to more controversial ones (such as qigong, reiki, reflexology, NLP, kiatsu, or generic energy healing). Rather than take the claims of these quite literally, we are looking at the patterns they share, in a sense the plot of healing, but you can help us choose areas of particular concern. We see value in topics as diverse as Myth Criticism, Treating Terrified Children Who Cannot Sleep at Night, Systems Dynamics, Parents' Telling Adolescents About Sex and Drugs, or Modeling Successful Healers.

How might you write about healing communications? Unless you are suffering from Writing Block (and this will be a topic with its own section here), you can scrutinize some therapeutic process that is like or involves language. As an example, I have listened to Rimsky-Korsakov's opera about Kitezh, looked at pictures on that theme, and synthesized other sources to discern a basic pattern, which I hope the following will display.

Long ago, in a Eurasian Empire linking East and West, a Czar (actually a whole dynasty of Czars) ruled both church and state. Resisting this, many Russians joined secret cults and dreamed of an apocalyptic future when they might escape the sickness of their society. This is the period when Old Believers (Raskolniki) comforted their children with a folk tale about a disappearing village engulfed by Lake Svetly Yar. I imagine a mother sitting beside a depressed child, who wants to be reassured that a better day will come. She says:

Now what had the child heard? That if he were brave he would be strong. Unseen powers would bring aid and anything he craved might come in an invisible otherwhere. Hope is healthful, but only if one can envision it fairly clearly; this version was a bit short on how and when the happily-ever-after might be achieved. Because the fairy tale served a need, however distantly, the story developed into a ballet and an opera. In the latter, the village of Kitezh grew to two cities, the Lesser destroyed, the Greater surviving as a place of Light, which painters later depicted in gilding and lacquer and oils.

In twentieth-century Russia, less otherworldly people grew tired of waiting for a celestial Kitezh and so a revolution arrived to build it on earth. This didn't work. Then, there was a revolution against the revolution. This failed also. Today we have would-be Kitezhes proliferating, including a children's eco-village associated with the United Nations in the same way Findhorne is; nonetheless, remembering Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, postmoders are suspicious of paradisal dreams (which so easily turn to nightmares). Imagine, then, a postmodern, longtime caregiver (what used to be called a parent) e-mailing the following to his or her depressed, post-doctoral-student offspring:

If no computer virus keeps the message from arriving, what does the offspring receive? Evidence that someone at least cares enough to write and is making playful allusions to a fairy tale from childhood. Such intention to help has power in itself. Furthermore, if the depression comes from seeing life from a momentarily frozen perspective, the deconstructive playfulness may be contagious, helping to melt the block, particularly since people presume that messages sent to them are about their situation. Whether the letter is obvious or as obscure as tea leaves, the offspring will look for personal application of it. Nonetheless, although this anatomizing of the legend avoids the actual fairy-tale's fin-de-siecle naivity, the e-mail has no desirable goal to offer. A basic pattern of healing is that it must both move away from some dysfunction and toward dynamic health.

How should we write this story? I offer the following as a very brief, preliminary outline:

Along a forest road, the hermit Fevronia watched Russian missionaries and traders trudge toward Tartary. "Frightening change is coming," she said to her friend Ivan the bear and he growled in agreement. One day, looking into the waters of Lake Svetly Yar, she had a vision of the recent past or a premonition of the future: blazing cottages, crackling timbers, acrid smoke. She felt the warmth of the flames. In a celebration after a raid, an old Tartar sipped fermented mare's milk from a silver chalice. He spoke in his language, but she understood in her own: "Of old, in the place of water and light from whence we came, we were hardy, drinking from streams like bears. Now we grow sick and soft like Russians. When I think of it, anger rises in my throat," and he spat as if choking on poison. Then he continued to sip from the silver chalice, which he had wrested from a priest with an arrow in his throat. In her mind, Fevronia saw others throughout Eurasia having this vision. Each knew the Tartars would be looting more and more of the land, ever wanting to re-prove themselves because what they took from caravan and town changed them. The visionaries each worried about his or her own people—Fevronia about the village of Kitezh. As she glanced up from the lake reflections, Prince Vsevolod came riding and his arm ran red with blood. "There are Tartars on the road," he said. "Soon they will reach Kitezh." Fussing, she mended him, laid him in her bed, appointed a time for their postponed tryst, prayed for energy, and hurried toward the village, Ivan at her heels. The Tartars were approaching the village but as always when they attacked, their true target was invisible to them. Instead, they saw softness and corruption they felt devouring them. Anger rose in their throats and they spat as if choking on poison. Suddenly, a bear stood on two legs before them. Their horses reared and they clutched their bows, but before they could shoot, a flute sounded in the distance and Ivan began to caper. Merrily, he whirled, a furry dervish. The Tartars laughed. Distracted even for a moment, they could no longer maintain their projections of all their hatred on the village. So it changed in front of them. They blinked, seeing a place of light and water, like that from which their myths said they had come. For a while they milled in confusion until they felt indecisive and embarrassed. The old Tartar saved face by shouting, "It isn't worth bothering with," and they left. Fevronia had saved the village by making it visible. The handsome prince, of course, proposed to her, but she suspected that if she ever went to Kitezh she sooner or later would be burned as a witch. More interesting than a prince was the end of her vision—the others like her who might be united. East and West were in transition and only such a community could have an understanding sufficiently extensive to interrupt addiction to the static and ready the world for the challenge of change.

Konstantin Gorbatov, "The Invisible City of Kitezh" (1912)

What if such a community could exist! In the hope of participating in such a possibility, we shall try to answer queries and respond to other e-mails. When we deem contributions appropriate and they grant us permission to post them, we shall present them on this site. Indeed, that is the goal of this site, since it certainly is not designed as a substitute for treatment by a physician but as a complement to other means of healing the interconnections of the world.

James and Lynn Whitlark

jswhitlark@yahoo.com