The root meaning of heal is whole. Healing does not mean being unbroken. It means illness and mishap and even great tragedy can lead us from the pain of isolation to a greater wholeness. There is rich evidence of that in this Fall 2016 issue of Parabola, on “Ways of Healing.”
In Newtown, Connecticut, a new school is about to open to replace the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where on December 14, 2012, twenty children and six adults were senselessly shot and killed. How can a building help heal such an unspeakable tragedy? Parabola ’s editor and publisher, Jeff Zaleski, interviews architect Barry Svigals, whose firm designed the new school and who speaks of beginning the design process by inviting the community in to share memories and pictures of what they love about their town and school. “There is a kind of remembering that is about the past and there’s a kind of remembering that is about the present,” says Svigals. When people speak of love of a place, others feel it, he relates. This kind of remembering brings people back together individually and collectively after fracturing, as does remembering nature. “It’s so elemental, to be fully human.”
Also in this issue, Pulitzer-winning poet Mary Oliver offers new poems that help us remember our full humanity and the goodness of life. Beloved author Mark Nepo describes how a successful trial attorney, ambitious and well equipped, climbed a legendary peak in Mongolia, only to be stripped of all he thought he was. “All that was left was the bare fact of his own existence, the fact of his breath connecting him to the fact of all existence.” This stripping down, Nepo says, brought the wisdom that Whitman conveys in “Song of Myself”: I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood./ I see that the elementary laws never apologize.
The path of healing is not easy. But in the words of ServiceSpace leader Pavithra Mehta from her contribution to this issue, “it has softened my gaze. Opened doors of compassion for the world that I didn’t even know were closed.” May all of the essays, poems, stories, and art in these pages accompany you on the way to becoming whole.
—Tracy Cochran
Cover Description: Sunflowers. Photograph by Autumn Mott
