What is a Found Poem, Anyway

Posted on March 5, 2019 by Heloise Jones

“Poetry is the beauty between the lines that we can only feel but never really explain.”
~ Irish poet Michael Hickey.

I’ve been feeling like a frayed rope, strands flying loose, each ending with a question mark or beginning with ‘complete this sentence.’ I’m strong at my core, crystalline & heart-centered. I know what I’m good at. And yet, those bedeviling threads.

Then last night the strangest thing happened.

I’d received unsettling news about work. Anxious, I jumped to what does this mean for me, I need to make a plan, solve it now. I need answers! Truth. I saw myself jangling and I didn’t have what I needed to comfort myself. That’s when the angels stepped in with an intervention. Really.

A cloud of peace & calm enveloped and filled me. I heard a voice say ‘It’s gonna be alright.” I didn’t try to figure it out. It was so palpable, I could only observe with wonder the feeling and the smile on my face that lingered so easily & sweetly. Feeling no hurry or stress, only gently whole. Wow, Thank You my only prayer. It lasted 30 minutes.

This morning familiar anxiety hovered at the edges of my Being. You know the feeling, right? I thought about the stories I’ve been telling myself. How they’ve been isolated, singular, like the wild threads of the frayed rope. And I realized I missed how the threads have been bundling. Not as fast as I like, or in a way that’s clear to me yet, and still, bundling. I considered it might be time I do what I guide others to do: Follow the story. Trust.

A few weeks ago I wrote how life is full of found poems. I knew I’d been living this perspective for years. In fact, my found poems were the core of the poem I wrote that was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. I wondered, though, if anyone who isn’t a writer read that blog.

For most folks, poem means written verse that includes meter, images, stanzaic structure, metaphor, symbols, words carefully arranged and chosen for their sound or beauty. And yet, at its heart, a poem is something that stirs the imagination, thoughts, and/or emotions of the viewer. Something that awakens memory, or feelings of awe & wonder. Life and the world around us is full of them when we think this way.

For me, it’s observing with an awareness so we see with new eyes. Or so something’s awakened inside us that shifts or transforms us in some way.

This week it was robins in my yard. There were eight. Tho I’m told they visit other people, these were the first I’ve seen in New Mexico the entire 25 years I’ve lived and sojourned here. And there were 8! They reminded me of my Asheville home, the one I designed. I’d been pining for the Appalachians lately, too. (weird, as I couldn’t wait to leave all that capital G Green) Watching those robins walk, punctuated with a pause every few steps (step-step-step-step-stop), I remembered the phalanx of 15 I saw hop into my yard one day from the trees on the left. Once in the yard, they turned in tandem, faced the house, and hopped forward together in a line, stopping 7 ft. from the picture window where I stood. They stared up at the house for minutes. An extraordinary moment that left me wide-eyed, hunting for meaning.

…the ordinary is what the extraordinary yearns to be. ~ Bayo Akomolafe

Days before my NM robin gang appeared, I’d seen author Richard Powers speak about his journey writing ‘The Overstory,’ how it changed his life (his words). It started with a walk thru the redwoods in the hills above Palo Alto, CA when he came upon a massive giant unlike any around it. Surrounding it were second growth trees, and this one lone tree had somehow miraculously escaped the chainsaws. It was as wide as the middle section of the theatre, he said. 12 theatre seats wide. Rising straight up-up-up to the sky beyond what he could see. It is a 1200 year old tree! He was gobsmacked in awe.

He crossed the country to the Great Smokies National Park to walk in one of the few remaining old growth forests on the planet. This was where he pulled me in.

He could feel the moment he stepped from second growth forest to old growth. The sounds and light and air are different. The ground and understory are different. The sensations run deeper, there among those ancient trees of the eastern tribes – birch, poplar, hickory, sourwood, oak, maple. In my mind they became people. And I thought of the pictures I’d seen of the American Chestnuts before the blight wiped them out in the 1940s & early 50s. And how I felt deep within me the land, the bones on the savannah, the voice of the breeze in Africa. I wanted to leave immediately, walk that forest in the Great Smokies. I felt chastened I’d not done it while I lived so close for 15 years, in Asheville.

The next morning the two great oaks in my Asheville yard visited me. One in front I called Grandmother oak, and one in back I called Grandfather oak. I felt again the shock I experienced when I saw the new owners had cut Grandmother down. I realized what I hadn’t before – the shock was of memory. The shade that tree gave, the way the light filtered thru, the color of the air under it. Seeing the daddy bluebird sit on a limb year after year above the house where his little family grew. How I watched cicadas fly like tiny birds in bee-lines under the canopy the year they rose from their 17-year sleep. The shock of seeing that tree gone was the flood of all that. I realized, too, that in the shock, I forgot to see if the bluebird house still stood.

That 1,200 year old giant sequoia is a poem. Richard Powers’ journey was a found poem, and the robins in my yard. And all the memory they sparked. Because found poems are the things that arouse connection within and between us. We don’t have to write them down. We just need to be present.

Richard Powers ended with this: “We can’t tell the story of us humans without telling the story of place. There has to be a change in the way we look at things that are not us.” Look. Find the poems.

***
Getting to Wise. A Writer’s Life.

The photo at the top of the page was taken at St. John’s College (Santa Fe, New Mexico). When I see it, my heart travels to Taiwan, bending to the water with my then tiny grandson to feed the fish.

*
Like what you read? Sign up for updates in your inbox.

Have a book to finish, or questions about your writing? CLICK HERE.
Like to listen in your car or on your phone? CLICK HERE

Life–Found Poems Everywhere

Posted on February 8, 2019 by Heloise Jones

“It’s hard for anybody to put their finger on the moment when life changes
from being something that is nearly all in front of you to something that happened.
~ Pam Houston, author

I had a funky night. Two hours of deep sleep followed by way too many hours of none. I turned on the light, read. Gave up, laid back in darkness for what seemed forever. And somehow, 8am, hours after I usually rise, a dream rattling my brain that made me realize something’s changed inside me. I could think dark of the moon, feng shui flying stars migrating to new yearly homes. It’d make sense. We’re tied to the cosmos and energies we can’t see. Folks have tracked it for eons before I got here. And it made sense when I thought of the inexplicable pains in my body, growing pains called energetic by my bodyworker. The hard part is how vulnerable and unsure I can feel. The good part is mystics mapped this long ago.

The thing is, I know my gifts and purpose. I know giving up is not an option. I don’t want to. Magic happens. So, I said, Yes. . .and asked to live with a rhythm that feels good.

In answer, an article crossed my desk, written April 14, 2018. “Life is a Found Poem.” Gosh, I write and teach this, I thought. I live this. It’s my writing practice. And yet, something was different.

“If you pay attention, the events of an ordinary day can come together as a found poem.”
~ Parker J. Palmer, author

I went to the farmers’ market for the first time in 2 months. A fraction of the usual vendors display in the market’s warehouse winter home. Still, it’s full, bustling, and many of my favs are open for business. I came home with one onion, and a bag full of bread, my all-time comfort food.

A smallish boule with African nigella black seeds & turmeric, chewy and deeply crusty. Two large soft flat-breads, fresh chopped mushrooms folded in and on top, deeply savory. A whole grain raisin bread, moist with body and a tinge of sweetest to the loaf so delicious I cut the small boule in two, froze half so I wouldn’t eat it all. And for dessert – something I rarely do since my involuntary abstinence while in Africa this past December – a thick slice of pumpkin roulade cake with sweet-tart creme cheese frosting rolled in. All so beautiful, I thought Bread is a poem.

“When you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image, when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another,
that’s a poem.” ~ Naomi Shihab Nye, poet

I lingered in my car before pulling away. Four or five mountain bluebirds hopped about my moonscape front yard. Shots of blue amongst the brown & gray of dirt and winter grasses. A few more flew in. They always seem to fly in tiny flocks. I didn’t want to leave.

I was reminded of the time I lived in the middle of 500 undeveloped acres of NM desert. How they came down from the mountains in winter, lined the wide bowl of the watering station I’d set in the middle of our tiny yard. A ring of blue with russet chests.

And I thought of the bluebird house we planted 10 ft. from our picture window in Asheville, NC. . . smack in the middle of a mountain neighborhood. I’d read they wanted it south facing with a long unobstructed path in/out, and knew I could give it. For 8 yrs. a pair hatched two-three broods each season. I say ‘a’ pair, because each year I’d see the male on the same branch overhead in an oak watching out for his family. And I would often find him on the ledge of the large window or the curved handle of the storm door looking in. No logical reason can change my mind he was watching for me, because I know he knew me, and knew I loved them.

A friend says mountain bluebirds remind her of Disney movie birds, the kind in Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or Bambi before the fire. They’re so cute they don’t look quite real, she says. I feel the same way. The ones in the east are simply pure vivid blue. Perhaps that’s why my first thought whenever I see them is ‘bluebird of happiness.’ Not for the song, but because of the feeling. Like a flash-blessing flitting by, or looking in from my windowsill. Bluebirds are a poem.

Last week temps hit 34° by 6am. I stepped out for my first dawn walk of the season. The light was magical. The sun shown luminescent thru an overcast sky not yet turned gray. On my glide by foot, the world looked fresh, washed after being buried in wet & snow for weeks. Stucco on walls and houses looked newly painted. Large & small swaths of ice lay like flat lakes in weird places. My gift, tho, was four blocks up. Two trees, their bark furled & rippled out, with edges a flurry, like feathers. A smooth oval of a face on their sides where a large limb once lived. Each face cupped by small furled-bark wings. I wondered if the wet caused the bark to rise or the frigid temps to contract the crevices. In the end I didn’t care, because in an instant I saw two women in feathered robes filled with myths and poems, and could almost hear them say ‘Yes.‘

“Poetry is the use of words where music is heard but none is playing. . .
Where you hear music by the rhythm and the cadence of the words.”
~ Elvis Costello, singer-songwriter

Finally, on Super Bowl Sunday I discovered life thru another’s found poems, and I realized it’s not the first time I’ve done that.

On intuition, I rushed to a bookstore for a memorial reading of poems by Tony Hoagland.
Nineteen poems chosen and read by people he touched in some way. The intro by his close friend, author Robert Wilder, made me wish I’d known Tony. The poems, everything from borderline bawdy to the spiritually profound, made me feel as if I did in a way. All were about being human in this extraordinary experience on earth, the beauty and the ugly of it.

As he neared death, he wrote what he feared most about losing of himself. . .”the loss of curiosity, the falling away of engagement…curiosity, the most essential feature of being alive.” Those words. Truth. I write often about that, too.

So I say, be curious. Let life, the sky, the niggling inside you be your found poems. We can all be poets.

Getting to Wise. A Writer’s Life.

My poem found in the bones on the African savannah will be published next month in The Wayfarer Literary Journal. It’s a beautiful journal. I’ll keep you posted.

*
Like what you read? Sign up for updates in your inbox.

Are you ready for your Fierce Hearted writing? CLICK HERE.
Like to listen in your car or on your phone? CLICK HERE

Where You Put Your Camera

Posted on November 15, 2017 by Heloise Jones

When curiosity outweighs our expectations, we find more delight than disappointment in the day.
~ Oriah ‘Mountain Dreamer’ House
*

I’m venturing out at night, again. It’s part of my intention to live life beyond work and rebuilding a home. To return to what engages my wonder and awe, feeds my heart, mind, and curiosity.

Tho I feel so very lucky to be here with the privileges I have, my permissions to myself it’s okay to let go betray me. They’ve come with lying on the sofa at the end of a day for too long. I sometimes briefly nod off in the darkened rooms at events. My bobbing head waking me to what I’m missing. Travel, my other companion to such permissions, has been absent for three years.

Self forgiveness can be hard. Because I know what I missed is extraordinary. A moment that can’t be recovered. It’s sometimes a tug to turn my attention back to the present. This is a key message in my book and workshops. Proof it happens to all of us.

The latest episode was a few weeks ago when I saw an extraordinary humanitarian and photo-journalist. Iranian-French Reza Deghati who works under the name Reza. His vitae includes covers on National Geographic, Time, and Newsweek, + decades of travels around the world, often living in far flung or war torn (read, dangerous) locales for months at a time. Places that are words in the News for most of us in the US, or ghosts in the living rooms of vets come back from their experience.

Reza’s images are intimate, and bear witness to the stories of individual lives. Stories etched on the subject’s face or belongings – a girl’s favorite dolls for sale on a street corner to buy food for her grandmother who hasn’t eaten in three days; a child’s stiff, frost-covered sneakers that needed to thaw before she could go to class; dirt, expression, focus. The faces and postures revealing the details of their stories without words. We don’t need to see the buildings reduced to ash to imagine what being human is for them. Or for all the others with them, trapped in history.

Reza says his goal is to help people tell their own stories. To give them the tools to do it. He spoke of poetry. How he reads poetry every day. I wrote as he spoke, capturing nearly all his words:

Poets have reached the extreme beauty of humanity. They use the same words we all know – and then, put them together into something that touches the heart and mind. Same with the image where you can see the words of poetry. Both take you out of your daily life and put you deep inside yourself.

Wow, I thought. Exactly.

He ended with a thought I think applies to writers, as well. Or any of us, for that matter: “Where do you put your camera? Your brain, your heart, your stomach, or under you belt.”

I asked this question in a workshop. The answers from the participants surprised me. Most began somewhere else (their brain, under their belt, their gut), then traveled to their hearts. And it seemed those, like me, who feels it with my entire body, did not feel disconnected with the heart. It was as if when we’re given the invitation to notice, we all know the heart is our true compass.

I often say writers and artists are powerful. For Reza, a young man documenting the political struggles in Iran in the 70s, he realized photographs were perceived as actual weapons by the Iranian government. He was arrested, spent three years in prison for his photos. He was tortured there, then forced into exile when released. Forced from his native ground.

In a section of Reza War and Peace titled “Thoughts of an Exile,” he writes:

“Within you remains the memory of your lost country, and you may feel disappointment in the land where you are now living, the country you thought would be your promised land and beyond it your way of being free. There remains, too, a feeling of mourning for your native land.

This grief is always with you below the surface, but the longing for your homeland is called up even more acutely by a tangible reminder of your country — a familiar smell, a food that tastes like a dish back home, a countryside that evokes scenes from your childhood. You feel it as well when you hear someone speak your language and you hear once again the melody of your native tongue. For the exile, the joys of the present are full of memories of the past.

I can’t help thinking about Reza as we head into Thanksgiving and the holiday season, a time where connection with family is emphasized. Or thinking about how intimate his images are. How they so often reflect longing for Home. How this season brings Home up for so many of us. How so many feel like exiles in one way or another.

I also can’t help thinking how longing for Home is at the heart of my novels. And how over the past nearly 3 years of my blog, I’ve written Home is up for me 4-5 times. Just this year, during the extreme physical hardship I went thru to get back my soul home, Santa Fe.

The stories we see outside us are nearly always reflections of something that resides inside us. Not word for word, thought for thought, detail for detail, but connection. I believe this reflection always happens when you chronicle the human heart. I work with writers. See it again and again.

In this moment, I see my work with writers as connection in a way I hadn’t thought about before, too. As I hold space for them, ask the questions leading to discovery of what matters for them, offer help so they find the way to say it. . .it’s like Reza who gives cameras to people so they can tell their own stories. It’s my genius, delivering metaphorical cameras. My charge from the Universe. No wonder I love what I do and feel it all magical. Big Heart moments. We’re made of stories, and connection.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
*

Tell me. . .Where do you put your camera?

*
Like what you read? Sign up for updates in your inbox.

Looking for help with your writing? Click Here.
Like to Listen? Check out The Creative Life for People Living in the Real World.
Wanna know what’s up next? Events page has all the News, including workshops & retreats.

Poetry Taking Me Home

Posted on September 17, 2017 by Heloise Jones

“This turning toward what you deeply love
saves you. Read the book of your life,
which has been given you.”
~ Rumi (from A Voice through a Door)
*

I went to a most extraordinary concert the other night. Jami Sieber on electric cello + Kim Rosen reciting, nay chanting, poetry like she was calling our spirit to dream deep and live out loud. As I walked into the space, a woman approached me with a box in her hands. Want a poem card, she said. I took the one on top. The lines paraphrased what had been up for me this past week. It felt like an affirmation. I wanted a blessing, or message. I traded it in. The poem on the second card was from “The Still Time” by Galway Kinnell, and as it turned out, my first story of the night taking me home.

The music went to my bones, flowed with my blood. The poetry Kim spoke, repeating lines as a chorus, started with a mix of Mary Oliver’s ‘The Journey,’ Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah,’ and her own. She took us into the words of refugees fleeing horror. ‘No one leaves home unless Home says Go, you are not safe here.‘

It was her chant of Rumi’s Sometimes you hear a voice though the door calling you, as fish out of water hear the waves from “A Voice Through a Door” and

If the water were clear enough, if the water were still. . . you would see yourself, slipped out of your skin, nosing upstream, slapping, thrashing, tumbling over the rocks till you paint them with your blood from ‘King of the River’ by Stanley Kunitz

that cracked my heart open.

Once home, I ran to my small bookcase, reached for my two Stanley Kunitz books. “The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden,” written when he was 98, was missing.

I knew the shape of what I looked for. The cover, the thickness of the spine. I turned to the three boxes of books behind the door. I searched twice. Not there.

All the books neatly back in the boxes, I questioned myself. I’d missed something. The next morning I pulled every book from the boxes and stacked them on the floor.

I once had an entire wall of books. I shipped them move after move for decades. Six years ago, forced into a downsize, I decided I wouldn’t do that again.

Some left easily: I no longer did raku, would never build a kiln; I hadn’t read the spirituality books in ages. What remained were linked by attachments and meanings not on the pages in the books. And not ‘til I wrote my husband in NC ‘You have one of my books. It’s important to me,’ did I realize that truth.

I remember the first time I heard a poem from “The Wild Braid.” The vivid image of entwining snakes in a tree. I remember where I sat in the circle of women who came together each week to write to prompts, and read our raw work aloud. How later I gave the book as a gift to new friends in New Zealand when meeting for the first time. Knowing they were writers and gardeners. Not knowing how precious and costly books were in that country. This book has memories. It has stories beyond those on the pages.

I looked at the other books I’ve kept thru four downsizings.

Author and director John Sayles’ signed novel. Because I’ve followed him since 1984 when I saw ‘Brother from Another Planet’, not fully understanding what I watched but feeling I knew this director. And because when I finally saw him in person, he embodied such presence with each person when he spoke that I will never forget it. And a signed book by author Ron Rash, who wrote one of the most beautifully haunting passages I’ve ever read, and years later blurbed my own novel. There’s all of author Nancy Peacock’s works. Including both volumes of her last novel (self pub & trad pub) + her very first publication in St. Andrews Review that she gifted me when I was young & beautiful. A story that became her first novel. We’ve been friends for 35 yrs. and she is the first writer I ever met.

There’s numerous poetry books, most purchased at readings and workshops. Books on writing – process, craft, exercises. The pristine hardcover of Stephen King’s “On Writing” I got second-hand, feeling so lucky that day. Volumes on creativity, two dozen large art books and a number of small exhibition booklets. I still have a half dozen cookbooks, tho I no longer cook beyond function. There’s more memoir than I realized. And a miscellany of reference that follows no particular thread except energy and connecting with the Universe. Only a small number of novels remain. Some I may or may not read. A few because they’re hard to find. A few because they’re simply the best for language, story, and/or craft. And in the mix, three vintage books on beekeeping given me by my son that hold a flood of memories.

The process put me into my Life. I whittled the three boxes to two. Short stacks of a dozen novels on trial + beloved oversized art books now sit on the floor, a chair, and on top of the boxes.

What it all gets down to are the stories inside us that give meaning, and hold the energy of a life lived. Every book has a story in it for me, whether in experience or one I still hold in my mind. Things more than merely things. Holding more than the sum of their parts.

For me, the theme of the night was greeting my life. I knew it by the time I heard Derek Walcott’s ‘Love after Love.”

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door. . .

You will love again the stranger who was your self .

And returning to what we were born to love? I didn’t know ’til the very, very end it is myself I return to. Or that the changed air between my palms born from living my life falls like glitter on common things.

So it surprises me now to hear
the steps of my life following me — so much of it gone
it returns, everything that drove me crazy
comes back, as if blessing the misery
of each step it took me into the world;
as though a prayer had ended
and the bit of changed air
between the palms goes free
to become the glitter
on some common thing that inexplicably shines.
~ from “The Still Time” by Galway Kinnell

Kim Rosen says poetry is our first language. What do you think?

*
Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

Photo of wildflower path: Aaron Brunhofer

Like what you read? Get updates in your inbox.

Extreme Presence is the Key

Posted on June 22, 2017 by Heloise Jones

The past month feels like I’ve slept more than I’ve slept the entire past five years. Slept in a purposeful cut-back on brain and doing with an intent to reclaim time for myself, learn to be forgiving with lazy, and simply rest. To slow down the mind-whirl inside and outside me of m.a.i.n.t.a.i.n.i.n.g. Recovery from the push – create, disassemble, reassemble, create book, home, life.

I set out to get my animal body moving once more, too. To step into the early morning like I once did. Feel blood circulating in my legs and joints. I confess, wanting my ankles and hips back to their only months ago size is also a motivation. What gets me moving, tho, is being present to the sky + everything around me outdoors. I experience space inside that allows a return to creative work where the only function is telling a story and playing in the mind-field of my imagination.

It’s working. I spontaneously wrote three poems in the past two weeks, and something magical happened as I clipped around and across my designated 2 x 3 block square where there’s little or no moving vehicles.

About half the homes are sweetly landscaped. Some I simply love and wish were my own yard. I even play games with myself as I pass. How I’d maintain that yard. How much it would cost to plant. How long to mature garden.

One morning I heard the sound of sprinklers 1/2 block from my home. A gorgeous yard with beds of flowers and swirls of pebbled walkways, an entire row of roses bordering one side. It took me back to Florida where I heard sprinklers every morning as I walked eight blocks thru the fabulous historic neighborhood to the bay. Every morning heard them, even with monsoons.

I stopped to admire the yard and searched for the darkened pebbles, sandy dirt, or thorny trunks of roses that indicate wet. I looked for the glisten of droplets on the yellow, pink, magenta, and lavender flower heads. I listened, looked, and found nothing.

As I passed the yard on the last stretch home after I’d criss-crossed my chosen territory, I was looking up at the sky. And how the breeze riffled the tree canopies. At the back of the gorgeous yard was a tall tree with tightly packed leaves the size of your palm. The entire canopy rippled. The undersides of the leaves caught the early sunlight with the rhythm of the breeze.

From it I heard the sound of the cool nourishment of water I’d searched for 20 min. earlier. It came from leaves rubbing against one another. As I stood, my attention went to the small spade-shaped leaves of the aspen in the front yard, the lower timbre of the sound they made. I thought, aspens don’t quake. It’s us who quakes inside at hearing them.

Everything in the world dropped away except for me, the sound of nourishing water, the sight of the leaves riffling amongst one another on a field of the broad saturated blue flawless sky. My perception of myself completely altered. I was one with it all. I moved on only after a raven called.

Days later I went to a workshop by Brooklyn born Persian poet Haleh Liza. She composes music, writes poetry, and translates Rumi. Has performed and read all over the world, including Carnegie Hall. Throughout the workshop she sang and read in her, and Rumi’s, native language – Persian. Again, my perception completely altered.

What I heard in Rumi’s poems spoken and sung in Persian is they hold the rhythm of his whirling in prayer. The cadence regular and palpable. And the lines rhymed with each rotation. I felt it before she said, listen to this.

I realized how all that magic gets lost in translation to English. For how can you translate rhythm and rhyme when a single word in one language holds sentences of meaning in another.

When I went to Rumi’s resting place in Konya, Turkey, a vast complex of museum and mausoleum that’s a pilgrimage for many, I felt the reverence in the people and place. I also felt something I couldn’t identify. Not until this workshop shifted my perception, and relationship to Rumi’s poetry, could I name it. I’d felt the rhythm and rhyme in the place and people like an extension of his movement in whirling prayer that reached out to exist as air we breathe.

I shifted inside in that moment. I heard our everyday humanness in his words not as being flawed or longing, but as present as the Divine. I felt like I did watching & listening to the leaves that sounded like water. My humanness merging with the Universe.

I shared someone asked what the heart of my teaching is. What is the craft of your teach, the way she put it. How I told her there is more than one way to look at things. I’m adjusting my answer right now to include this: how we perceive ourselves in the world has the power to expand our understanding infinitely, and bring us back to ourselves in a new way. Extreme presence is the key.

When I left the workshop, even the hollyhocks looked different than when I went in.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

Tell me. . .have you ever had a transcendent experience where you left yourself, and returned knowing yourself different?

I’ll tell you a secret. . .you really gotta listen to Haleh Liza.

*
Like what you read? Sign up for updates in your inbox.

Looking for help with your writing or writing life? Click Here.
Like to Listen? Check out The Creative Life for People Living in the Real World.
Wanna know what’s up? Events page has all the updates.