Poems from our Session
Sometimes
By David Whyte
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories
who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,
you come
to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.
Clearing
By Martha Postlewaite
Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.
Poems from our Session
I Have Fallen in Love with Myself
By Tracey Schmidt
I have fallen in love with them world.
I am not exactly sure when it happened.
It wasn’t on the first date
It wasn’t even on the
Ten thousandth
First we had to become friends
That in itself
Took some doing
One day
I noticed some giddiness
Present between us.
“Oh no,” I thought
Passing it off to
Something I drank.
Then, one morning
I rolled over and asked,
When did my heart break
Open to the world?
And how
Can I fit
Everyone
Into the
Church?
Re-Wilding
By Steven Gambill
You want to become one of those
feral creatures
who go crazy and leave behind
all security, all wealth
to find wild treasure,
but your domestic, lethal self
wants nothing to do with
such a reckless enterprise.
Yet doesn't the adventure
embrace the ordinary,
root deep down in it?
You bumble around as usual,
a little closer to the entrance
to that tremendous path,
embraced by yearning, then terror,
then eagerness, then foreboding;
scattering yourself in pieces.
You despair at your cowardice,
then you hope, at the exhilarating tug
of the adventure
that pulls you toward that
frightening, beautiful gate.