July Poetry
Opportunities
Imagine: Two
hours in a room with other writers. Each loves words as much as you do! Where
else can you spend time reading and writing poems? The answer: Monday Mantarays
Poetry Read and Critique, upstairs at San Diego Writers, Ink. We meet weekly on
Mondays from 10-12 noon.
In our very
first class (today) we considered definitions of poetry. Is poetry “being, not
doing” as E. E. Cummings says? Or
is it “a place to tell secrets—a lamplight for difficult experiences” after
Burroughs? Or after Kunitz, is poetry “the telling of the stories of the soul?”
We also made a list of forms we’d like to try. After writing to
the notion of “first permission” (taken from the poem “Often I am Permitted to
Return to a Meadow,” by Robert Duncan) and Audre Lorde’s timeless assertion
that “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” we considered directions in which to point the
arrow of our inquiry over the course of our classes so that we each end up with
our own particular series of poems based on a theme or question.
I hope you’ll
join us. We dive deep in the pursuit of all the Big Questions in Life and study
the skillset of poets across time to hone our own poetry skills. We will be
using Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook
among others. Next class meets Monday, July 8, 2019. Sign up here: Monday Mantarays Poetry Read and Critique.
Tarot Journaling to Know Yourself: A Tour
Through the Majors
Knowing that I’m
an unapologetic tarot lover, a number of my friends suggested that I watch Wine
Country, a movie out on Netflix about a group of women on retreat in Napa
Valley. They land in a house staffed with a cook and suffer through an ominous
session with a tarot reader, Lady Sunshine, camera foregrounding the black
silk. One by one, the usual tarot card heavyweights fall: Death! Wheel of
Fortune! Chariot! to name a few, which of course, with Sunshine’s unsunny take
on what the energies portend, entirely unsettles each recipient.
The truth is
that tarot energies can be explored through the lens of lived life in a gentle, manageable manner to consider our goals and
potential with an eye towards joy. Certainly the cards represent major and minor transitional experiences. Indeed, some cards do stand for facing loss or change of situation, habit,
job, or friendship as we all inevitably do over and over again throughout the course of our lives (Death). We also face changes in the way we view or experience our soul-wealth, heart-wealth or pocket-book-wealth (Fortune) or periods of time when we are trying to
grow a new self or choose a new part of ourselves to bring forward
into the world (Chariot). How we respond to these situations (as failures for
example or as opportunities) can make all the difference in how we move on from
our obstacles.
The cards give us images
and symbols that we can use as focal points to ask: Which part can we change? Where is our perspective unmoving? What
stands to be re-ordered, digested, understood, forgiven? And most importantly, where is the love we've been looking for? How do we know when we've arrived? Tarot journaling gives us a chance to make a truce with the past, freeing up our energy to create or map a path forward to new opportunities.
