Poem: Catastrophe Is Next to Godliness

So many of the wise teachers among us apprehend truths of life from an edge of illness or crisis, where the view is suddenly so stark and so clear. They come back wounded and more whole than before, all at the same time—not cured, but healing, and embodying mystical ideas that seemed strange as abstractions and turn out to be common sense. The core

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In unpredictable times, poetry leaves the safe, familiar ways of knowing and speaking and listens out into new forms of being and creating. It searches for new insights between the known, it fathoms the space between people, between us and the living world, between different ways of seeing and shaping the world. It listens for new ways of being tha... See more

What startled me about the response to disaster was not the virtue, since virtue is often the result of diligence and dutifulness, but the passionate joy that shined out from accounts by people who had barely survived. These people who had lost everything, who were living in rubble or ruins, had found agency, meaning, community, immediacy in their

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