Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Writing by Heart

I spent from Thursday evening to Sunday afternoon at a Buddhist retreat centre, Dorje Denma Ling, in the countryside near Tatamagouche. I was co-facilitating a retreat entitled 'Circles of Transformation' with Tim Walker. We have never done this particular offering before and it was fun to see how our ideas would fly. Fly they did. We meditated, practiced yoga and qigong, went out into nature to find our paths and our obstacles and fed our demons (a way of working with those obstacles to transform them into allies). We ate good abundant food, were silent in the mornings and chatty in the afternoons. On Saturday night we celebrated around an enormous bonfire and under a brilliant full moon. We sang and drank wine and wandered back to our rooms under the starry sky.The land there is lovely, restorative. The participants - twenty people- were willing, vulnerable and each brilliant in their own way.
Now I am home again and with all that means - the loveliness of my fella, the laundry, the bills and nagging sense of something more needing to be done. Today I will try and outsource my worries and  get down to the work I wish to do. Gwen will be here at 9 AM and we will have three hours to work.
I think I will do two things - maybe three - send off one more package (there are two gone to prospective agents for True) - have a look at The Rock Walker and figure out how to begin that revision - and start something new. I think the something new will be a series of poems - there are a few there burbling away and I would like to do something entirely different from what I have been doing for my pure creation time. I have an idea for these poems - a motif in mind. I don't want to talk about that just yet - it is too tender a bud and I want it to unfold and not be forced.
And how are you in this spring. Is the ground of your creativity loosening? How are you amending that earth? Any new shoots coming up?
Spring exerts a force - will you respond?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jan - I'm so happy to hear that the retreat went so well. There's nothing like letting nature and one's own wisdom (and that of others) help restore one to what the Navajo people call hozro - beauty. I like the way you put that, too - letting ideas unfold. I think we need to give ourselves time to let that happen when we can.

Karen Jones Gowen said...

Ah, a retreat sounds so appealing! I'll bet you came back refreshed and rejuvenated.