Edges, Risks and Connections:
How Poetry Can Help You Stay Balanced
and Compassionate in a Crazy World

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.      —William Stafford

Where is your growing edge?

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man/woman to unfold his/her powers. --Erich Fromm

If a person lives in a way that stands for justice, tolerance and tenderness that commitment may mean that he or she is called to step outside their comfort zone, rise above the popular status quo, reach beyond personal limitation and sometimes, walk a path others may not validate.

What shakes up your conscience these days?  What does it mean to listen?  What kind of silence do you experience in your life?  Are there silences that oppress you and others?  Are there silences that nourish mystery and lead to liberation?  Adrienne Rich says about poetry and these silences:

Every real poem is the breaking of existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is:  What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

(Silence) can be fertilizing, it can bathe the imagination, it can, as in great open spaces, I think of those plains stretching far below the Hopi mesas in Arizona — be the nimbus of a way of life, a condition of vision.  Such living silences are more and more endangered throughout the world, by commerce and appropriation.

Writing used in a healing way breaks silence and enters silence.

... But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world ... —Mary Oliver from The Journey

This workshop gives you permission to risk your truth upon the page. John will invite you to make room for your imagination. By helping you pause to savor the particulars of the present moment and listen deeply to yourself and others, poetry can connect you with what matters and reveal a new voice that is your own, even the voice of Spirit.

You are invited to a workshop that will help you cultivate the creative spark within yourself. You will learn how the healing art of poetry can be a trustworthy companion and "poetic medicine" in your quest to live a life that matters.

"By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other." –Rita Dove, former Poet Laureate