The nature of all existence is relationships. This chapter discusses how spirituality is a being’s relationships with all forms of existence and phenomena. For human beings, spirituality means accessing cognitive and physical capacities in order to find and establish connections with the universe. Human spirituality is a secular form of practice and belief that focuses on the autonomy of the person. There is an encouragement to explore personal freedom and to develop relationships with the natural world. This chapter focuses on why connections with others, animals, nature, weather, and natural environments is a critical aspect of the social and emotional intelligences.

This chapter attends to the regular presence of grass in poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Walt Whitman and English war poetry to recent work by Oswald and Burnett, the poetry of grass works to articulate, obscure, and heal the marks of contemporary trauma. Grass also shapes the soundscapes and visual form of poetry to the extent that, as this chapter suggests, grass can be said to constitute the contemporary practice of composition itself. Like poetry, the green field works in and through trauma to find again new life after war and conquest, after personal loss. In its seemingly perpetual growing, grass finds in the poet new ways of making and responding.

Of Celsus’ Artes (early first century AD), which originally handled agriculture, medicine, the art of war, rhetoric, and philosophy, only the eight books on medicine survive. Celsus’ work attests to the vibrant interdisciplinary culture of the early Imperial artes. The books De medicina in particular reveal a distinctive conceptualization of specialized knowledge that bears the hallmarks of the scientific culture of the artes but contrasts sharply with the approaches of Vitruvius and Columella. Celsus’ theory of the medical ars self-consciously appropriates but also develops and expands key methodological terms from the Greek medical tradition, including reason, experience, cause, and nature. These terms set the parameters for Celsus’ exposition of medicine, as exemplified in discussions of bloodletting, fevers, and fractures. Celsus’ more reserved attitude toward the kind of knowledge of nature required for expertise does not ignore the central preoccupations of the scientific culture of the artes, but instead pragmatically inflects them for medical practice.

Chapter 6 examines the reconstruction of Rwanda’s music scene after the genocide. It considers how it opened up new possibilities for young urban Rwandans to transform their hearts and imagine new visions for themselves. Although young artists seemed to share an understanding that song could communicate ‘messages’ (abatumwa) not available in other modes of speech, they also understood there were limits to this. Far from being a space of ‘freedom’ or the ‘unofficial’, the local music scene was shot through with politics. Young artists were keenly aware that the power dynamics that shaped wider post-genocide social life equally shaped the kinds of music they were and were not allowed to make.

Chapter 3 introduces the eight Byzantine churches housing visual depictions of Christ’s miracles and presents a thematic analysis of the cycle. The first part of this chapter examines the selection process of the episodes depicted in early Palaiologan cycles and their iconography. It theorizes how the choices were made about which miracles were included or excluded and delves into the political and theological concerns that might have affected this selection. The second part of the chapter assesses and explains the iconographic peculiarities of this period by examining the development of Christ’s miracles in the early Palaiologan period in comparison to earlier visual material.

One of the miracles associated with king Henry VI (for whom an application for canonisation was unsuccessfully made) is included here from the anonymous collection of miracles made around 1500. This miracle involves the healing of a painful injury to the groin incurred in a country football match, a sport which the writer disparages.

Chapter 2, “Marie Laveau’s Generational Arts: Healing and Midwifery in New Orleans,” turns from Saint Domingue to the immigrant communities of New Orleans many of whom were of Haitian heritage. Through an excavation of the myth and legacy of New Orleans “voodoo queen” Marie Laveau, I argue that Laveau renegotiated her body as capital, resisting social, cultural, and legal forces that sought to commodify, exoticize, or criminalize her. Instead, she became a community leader, healer, and possibly a midwife. Situating Laveau within a longer genealogy of Black women’s birthwork and midwifery within the nineteenth-century US South and circum-Caribbean, this chapter argues for alternative ways of imagining reproduction, kinship, and energy economies. Ultimately, it puts pressure on the myriad myths surrounding Laveau’s dynastic legacy, drawing attention away from white heteropatriarchal logics of touristic consumption, and instead allowing for bodily autonomy, love among women, and the notion of gestation and labor as an autoregenerating, independent economy.

In the 1910s, human and animal populations all over the Lushai Hills were pounded by a chance series of calamities - environmental, financial, agricultural, and epidemiological - forever altering the social landscape. This chapter is about how people attempting to escape the crush of bamboo famine, debt, crop failure, and disease were set in motion across mountains. As traditional coping strategies were constrained by new political, economic, and environmental realities, shattered clan groups began to forge new survival mechanisms out of missionary medicine and Christianity itself. Shattered families, scattered clans, sickly refugees, and indebted labourers were dashed across mountainsides to become seekers of new powers as older survival mechanisms failed or were ruled out, regulated, or lost. Disasters reordered not only by catalyzing opportunities for spiritual searching, but also by remixing splintered clan groups of survivors - once disparate kin groups and communities that, according to contemporary upland cultural logics, were in dire need of communal healing, restoration, and reconciliation. Foregrounding local terminology in the telling of these pasts opens up causal explanations, interpretative pathways, and complexities otherwise obscured by using Western categories and frameworks alone, and points to the multiple meanings of the conversion process itself. Christianity advanced through catastrophe as shattered populations folded it back into the normal healing structures of upland life.

Given their intersecting, historically oppressed identities, Black women are more likely to be exposed to traumatic experiences than other racial groups. In this chapter we review the historical, systemic and institutional, and individual trauma that impacts the mental health of Black women. We provide a framework for treating trauma with Black women that is based on intersectionality and Black feminist theory. Further, we share the key components of providing trauma-informed care and best practices clinicians can use when supporting Black women in healing from trauma.

As discussed throughout the book, Black women experience racial trauma and discrimination and may internalize these messages and become highly self-critical. These experiences can lead to feelings of low self-worth, anxiety, and depression. In this chapter, we share the strategies of self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and self-love and acceptance to support Black women in emotional healing. We also discuss the use of the arts and religion and spirituality as resources for Black women’s healing and thriving.

Creativity is connected to healing in many different ways. Creative people are more likely to experience post-traumatic growth or beneficial psychological changes that come in the aftermath of trauma. Creative activities can also help maintain emotional equilibrium. The cognitive reappraisal of seemingly negative events is associated with divergent thinking. Notably, the act of drawing, writing, or making music simply for the pleasure of the act can improve one’s mood by helping reduce sadness, anxiety, and anger. Even passively engaging in the arts can improve one’s mood and stave off potential cognitive decline.