Where is the Love? March's Virtual Hearth and Poetry News

I’m looking forward to holding Nimrod International Journal’s themed issue, Leaving Home, Finding Home in hand. It comes out shortly this spring thanks to Associate Editor Cassidy McCants (order here at Nimrod's main site). I’m honored to have a poem, “Free Box,” in the issue. “Free Box” gives a look at the transition from the Illinois commune to public school and is set during the years after we traveled to California in the wooden camper my father built by hand (which housed us for a time at Schoolhouse Canyon Campground on the Russian River).

The poem “Hades” is also forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine in April thanks to guest poetry editor Robert Lee Brewer.  It too finds its nexus in Sonoma County but "Hades" explores layers of past memories circling the crossroad of love between siblings and love between friends.

Where is the Love?

The meek inherit nothing, writes Safiya Sinclair, in her poem, “Center of the World.” Kim Addonizio, asks in her poem by the same title, What do Women Want? These are just two of the ideas and questions we will consider in my next on-line writing class, Where is the Love. It promises a fearless descent into love in all of its forms. Join me around my virtual hearth for a tour of the forms of love from the feral to the barely audible quiet voice of self-love we came into incarnation with, a self-love we often lose connection to given live’s challenges.

You'll explore body and soul your lived experiences of love as well as writing towards those forms of love you wish to invoke, dream into being, and invite into your life. All forms of writing are welcome; we will write to poetry, music, Tarot images, and art. Weekly you can expect: writing prompts, a Zoom session to write and share work, and access to our online support-based writing group. Please email me or use the contact form on my site here if you are interested and would like more information about how to sign up. Cost for this six-week session is $290; the course runs from this coming Monday, March 13 to April 21, 2017.

Local Love

Here a few photos from a day trip to one of my favorite places on earth, the Self-Realization Fellowship Retreat and Hermitage Meditation Garden in Encinitas. I must write a new poem in response to the question in last visit’s poem, What sort of crime does one commit / in such a garden? as my friend and I, so entranced and happy to be back in our beloved garden, in laughing freely, drew a rebuke from the garden security guard. She reminded us to lower our voices even as the weed-wacker merrily buzzed and scads of children ran past shrieking at the garden’s perimeter eclipsing her rebuke so we had to strain to hear it. 

Too happy to feel shamed for long, we settled easily into loving the sun-hot lizards doing push-ups on the rocks, the doves fanning their tails in pairs along the ocean trail, and the blooming cacti. What's not to love about the easy visual metaphor of prickled thorny limbs extending to offer clusters of saucy red blooms to the blue blue sky? One can be thorny and bloom, simultaneous, reaching for the sun.

Flamingo Love

I've written here over the years about my adventures with A Room of Her Own Foundation--writing about the retreats I attended in 2011, 2013, and 2015. You've heard me rave too about the women in the desert I've met on those retreats. AROHO is changing its role as an organization; one of the ways they've celebrated their mission of "ending the isolation of creative women" is to support the ongoing ways women continue to write and meet regardless of how the organization restructures itself. Here's an interview about the Flamingos, the writing group I call my home flock, and our story as it relates to how we met through AROHO.

Related Links:

Earlier post on the meditation garden: Self-Realization Koi