505 Writing from Grief: Bringing our Broken Open Heart to the Page (ENGLISH)

Around the year 1000, the Japanese woman poet Izumi Shikibu wrote this five-line tanka:Yes, the windblows terribly here –but moonlight also leaksbetween the roof planksof this ruined house.(translation by Jane Hirshfield)This poem reveals, in a flood of radiant night-wisdom, a magic secret; when we move or are moved beyond what we have come rely on as our shelter, we can plunge into the transformational moment. Many of us find ourselves called to write poetry in transitional and difficult times: loss, divorce…death… Many of us have had difficult childhoods, hard relationships, grief, abuse, sorrow. Our stories and the emotions they bring beg to come pouring out onto the page. They seek the sunlight of expression…the solace of being shared.The etymological root of both healing and health is the idea of “wholeness.” When we heal, we take what in ourselves, our lives, and our hearts is broken, separated, fragmented, injured, or exiled and restore it to wholeness.And sometimes – Ojala! – by bringing and spilling our wounded spirit to page in poem, we stumble, miraculously, into amazement and wonder…into dazzle and praise. Through Poetry we can reknit the self: by the very process of choosing and weaving together words, we can repair, restore — re-story — the self to a new kind of wholeness…a deepening, a ripening: and our soul grows stronger, in the place where once it was rent. To write from our grief is to bring that News of the Deep Wild, Soul — messages of healing and transformation that only those of us ready and willing to let our courageous hearts have a Voice can bring.I will provide us with a bountiful handout of exquisite grief writing and grief writing practices, together, we will immerse in a wealth of global poetry and write our way through.

Instructor

Judyth Hill