Practicing Unpaving – Flowing the Creative Life

n this week’s Write Your Wild River course, a truth landing in me deeper than before regarding what the course is really about:

It’s ostensibly a course about poetry, but it’s really about walking each other home. It’s ostensibly about creative writing, but is really about creating our lives. It’s ostensibly about nature connection and flow, but it’s really about inhabiting the web of life more deeply and re-claiming parts of our wholeness.

Our theme this week was sacred grief and rage, and we are practicing Unpaving as an act of being human. An act of anti-colonial shape-shaping. An act of returning and re-membering.

All this is what fuels all wild nature heart programs.

And yes, we looked at poems by Elizabeth Bishop and adrienne maree brown and talked about the villanelle form and alliteration. And yes, we wrote on what our anger is wanting and how our grief wants to be figured in image and describing where we are from using sense-based memories, images, and textures.

Next week we explore the creative erotic and the slow caress. We’ll embody ecosensuality and write our desire. How can we slowly savor our subject with words? Where in our life can we bring a sensual touch?

But the subtle-not-so-subtle current that underwrites all this is how we are flowing our Rivers into the Greater Sea of who we really are.

Another Write Your Wild River cohort begins Tuesday morning, running for 6 weeks. Check it out if your River wants to meander with other creative tributaries.