Earth Day 2013

After several days of heavy downpour, frightening those of us who have watched large hunks of Whidbey Island slough itself into the sea, Earth Day burned glorious with sun.  I celebrated by taking my recyclables to the Bayview Recycle Park, and then taking Snickers for a walk in the woods.

As Snickers took off like a rocket through the underbrush, I strolled the still-muddy wooded path, observing the dappled spots of sun taking their shapes from the leaves and branches above.  Tree trunks lying on the ground, thrown down by winter storms, nursed communities of mosses and ferns.  Overhead, birds swooped and clouds scooted in the wind.  Earth Day, I thought;  how can there be only one day per year to celebrate all this?

We need an ongoing Earth Year, continuous, never-ending, to remind us every minute of every day to honor and respect the overwhelming beauty and complexity of our planet, our home, our Earth.  Maybe it should be called "Earth Age," the era when all humans band together to take back our planetary health.  I hope your Earth Day was as beautiful as mine.  Peace ...

Rainy Day Workshop

On Thursday, April 4, 2013, I facilitated a poetry workshop sponsored by Friends of the Clinton Library.  My friend and fellow poet Pat Kelley Brunjes (Poems from the Desert Floor) presented a short course on how to give an effective reading.  Although our attendance was smaller than anticipated, the participants were enthusiastic and creative.  Here is a photo of two workshoppers in the process of creating ekphrastic poems based on sculpture:

We also created imagination-based poems, recalling looking out windows from our childhoods and what we saw out there.  Finally, we created poems by freewriting using a list of 15 randomly-generated words.  All the poems were interesting and vivid, and some were read in the evening at our 7 PM reading.

APRIL IS NATIONAL POETRY MONTH!  Host your own event to celebrate poems.  This can be as simple as a group of friends sharing a bottle of wine in your kitchen and taking turns reading poems important to them.  Our workshop was fueled by homemade chocolate chip cookies -- always a good idea for stimulating imaginations.  Read some poems, write some poems, talk about poems, give books of poems as gifts.  My best chum from childhood has requested my new book (Ring of Fire, Sea of Stone and yes this is a shameless plug -- buy it on Amazon!) as her birthday present.

Poetry will set you free!