Loose Leaf Notes

Katherine Chantal and I presented a keynote poetry reading at the Mindful Living Soulful Aging retreat, held over the weekend at the Floyd EcoVillage and hosted by Instill Mindfulness and Be Well Now.

“Mining the Gold of the Inner Life,” the sixth installment of our call-and-response Soulful Aging readings, set the tone for the retreat that focused on the inner life. Retreat days included sitting and walking meditation and small group dialogues for sharing and deepening, which were facilitated by mindfulness teachers Joe Klein, Jamie Reygle and Nenden Stillman-Runyan.

At the start of our reading, I read an excerpt from Maria Popova from her review of Jungian analyst James Hollis’ book The Middle Passage: “One has entered the Middle Passage when the demands of the true self press and uprise against the acquired persona, eventually colliding to produce untenable psychic ache — a “fearsome clash,” leaving one “radically stunned into consciousness.”

“It’s a shock: aging and facing the inevitably of death as it comes closer, and many of us are beyond the “middle” passage,” I said before continuing.

“The summons often begins with a call to humility — having failed to bend the universe to our will the way the young imagine they can, we come to recognize our limitations, to confront our disenchantment, to reckon with the collapse of projections and the crushing of hopes. But this reckoning, when conducted with candor and self-compassion, can reward with “the restoration of the person to a humble but dignified relationship to the universe.”

Believing that poetry is a healing art, Katherine and I were initially interested in using poetry as legacy and memoir. We were both called by poet David Whyte’s description of the stage of life we are in as “apprenticing ourselves to our own disappearance,” a time when one is obliged to ask ‘Who am I, apart from my history and the roles I have played?’

For this reading, we had in mind to draw from previous readings and add a few new poems to show the cumulation of our work. But that’s not what happened. The grouping morphed into more of a sharing of where we are now, where have we come to because of our three years of using poetry as a tool for depth psychology.  We realized that we are lighter for having gone deeper. In the past, we had talked about an eventual series on Transcendence, but while putting together this latest series, we realized that Mining the Gold of the Inner Life is the start of that.

We were blessed with an attentive and engaged audience of about 20 retreatants. The following is a poem that retreatant Paula Markham wrote after being inspired by our reading.

She read it the following day during a writing workshop I led, Self-Portrait in Eulogy, a third person creative writing exercise that gives participants an opportunity to tell the world who they are at the core.

Workshop poetry snippets included… She was odd from the start… She thanked the child who protected her but laid her to rest in a field of wildflowers… Curiosity and growth was her drug of choice, leaping each day into a new book… She like mermaid colors… wigs and hot sauce… He woke up in a hospital room. He saw a bit of light coming through the patches he had on both of his eyes… He was a reluctant leader, a 1st mate, not a captain…  She lost her childhood name, but claimed love as her identity. To be continued…   Colleen Redman

You can read my Self-portrait in Eulogy, which was used as a loose template for the class HERE.  Katherine’s and my books are available locally and for sale on Amazon (search Katherine Chantal and Colleen Redman).