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Poems We Love

You will find these days we read from the poets often in class. Poetry has a way of expressing the ineffable. A means to deliver us into the present moment. We hope you enjoy these words. Sometimes we find our own poetics in the silence of practice.
 
If you want to go deep in with us, please make sure you have registered for retreat information. Do email us.
 
Take a breath and read,
 
Jean & Rob
Blessing in the Chaos 
 
Jan Richardson

 

To all that is chaotic in you,
let there come silence.

Let there be a calming of the clamoring,
a stilling of the voices that have laid their claim on you,
that have made their home in you,

that go with you even to the holy places but will not let you rest,
will not let you hear your life with wholeness or feel the grace that fashioned you.

Let what distracts you cease.
Let what divides you cease.
Let there come an end to what diminishes and demeans,
and let depart all that keeps you in its cage.

Let there be an opening into the quiet that lies beneath the chaos,
where you find the peace you did not think possible and see what shimmers within the storm.

 
 
Start Close in
 
David Whyte
 
 

Start close in,
don’t take the second step or the third,
start with the first thing close in,
the step you don’t want to take.

Start with the ground you know,
the pale ground beneath your feet,
your own way to begin the conversation.

Start with your own question,
give up on other people’s questions,
don’t let them smother something simple.

To hear another’s voice,
follow your own voice,
wait until that voice becomes an intimate private ear that can
then really listen to another.

Start right now take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow someone else’s heroics, be humble
and focused, start close in,
don’t mistake that other for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take the second step or the third,
start with the first thing close in,
the step you don’t want to take.

 

Love after Love

Derek Walcott

The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror
And each will smile at the other’s welcome

And say sit here. Eat
You will love again the stranger who was yourself Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
All you life, whom you have ignored for another Who knows you by heart
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your own image from the mirror
Sit. Feast on your life 

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