Mandala Musings Newsletter
Summer Edition
Letter from our Director...
June 2010
As I was preparing this newsletter, I was sifting through poems for the front page while also compiling information about our International Day of Peace Event that will be held in September. As I let my mind wander, the phrase that kept coming to me was “Peace is like Poetry.” Both peace and poetry require thoughtfulness, mindfulness, self awareness, compassion, time, energy, understanding, open-mindedness, patience, and lots of practice. As the contemporary poet Mary Oliver says, “Poetry requires us to pay rapt attention to the world around us and within us.”
This list of characteristics also describes qualities required for personal growth, spiritual exploration, and simply taking care of oneself and others. This is the same list of qualities we know arise in the seekers and travelers who find their way to The Mandala Center – whatever the purposes of their journeys are. Making time for a personal retreat is like poetry, too…it asks us to seek “more” in life – to open our eyes to a fresh way of seeing and our hearts to a better way of living. To be engaged in life we must at least be embodied with “rapt attention” now and then.
This line of thought brought to mind an article I had read a few years ago called “Becoming a World: Children and Their Poetic Intelligence,” by Richard Lewis. I met Richard at an Arts in Education conference in New York a few years ago. He was a quiet, unassuming, but direct sort of man - until he started talking about children and poetry and the wonder of life – at which point he became very animated. He was able to engage the imagination of us all and brought to our attention just how magnificent life can be.
His article focused on the idea of “poetic intelligence” and on the imaginations of children. In his article he writes, “Given the pressures in school to factualize the world and the test driven curriculums…a poetic way of perceiving experience is often ignored as an indulgence.” Lewis goes on to describe an activity where he asked children to “become the grass” and was enthralled by their responses. The children spoke as grass: “I am a living thing.” “I am a drop of green animal.” “I grow just like you grow.” He says “In the simplicity of their responses was our inherent human gift, through our thoughts, to reach beyond ourselves to another form of life, to become what we are not and discover, in return, the connectiveness of our lives to other lives.” Later in the article Lewis remarks, “In poetic terms, it is a way to discover the unknown without flinching from it, to be curious about the mysterious underpinnings that encircle the world we wish to know.”