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Category Archives "Poetry"

The Moon Speaks of Polar Bears

March 18, 2010 By Chris Corrigan Poetry

Forwarded to me by my colleague Ray Gordezky, with whom I am part of a team looking convening people around polar bears in Northern Labrador and Quebec.

The Moon Speaks of Polar Bears

Hailey Leithauser

Some things are better defined

by what they are not,

as when snow heaping the world

replaces the world, becoming

no longer a rooftop, no longer a narrow

gravel shoreline or road,

even in times, in places,

no longer the black breathing

of the sea.

In this way the polar bear

stealing her difficult, beautiful life

from the ridges

and drifts, the colorless

plateau around her,

teaches her young to hunt

by sliding her belly

flat along the frozen light,

blunting her cloudlike

respiration, covering

with one comic paw

the dark flesh of her nose,

so well suited to her artifice

that the oily

seals collecting the ice

are pulled by an intimate

landscape, soundless

and ravenous and white.

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Comfort

December 7, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Poetry

Comfort

Oh, the comfort–

the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person–

having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,

but pouring them all right out,

just as they are,

chaff and grain together;

certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,

keep what is worth keeping,

and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

–Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1826-1887)

Sweet to find that faithful hand in the space between me and the other.

via easily amazed.

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Beautiful

November 28, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Being, Poetry One Comment

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

I want to free what waits within me

so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear

without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,

but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,

no forcing and no holding back,

the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,

these deepening tides moving out, returning,

I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels

into the open sea.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

(1875 – 1926)

English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

via I believe in all that has never yet been spoken at Seeds for a happy planet.

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Day zero at ALIA

June 22, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Poetry

Day zero here at the Shambhala Summer Institute here in Halifax.   The staff of the ALIA Institute have been working hard to get everything ready for us, and today people started to arrive.   Over the past could of days the faculty have been meeting in a little pre-institute retreat, building our own field and grabbing the chance to have conversations with one another.   We’ve been getting a little taste of each other’s modules, playing with some of the creative process that is going on and generally catching up with each and getting a sense of our field.

Today we held a little open space and one of the things we were invited to do was give some thought to what is alive in the field of the Institute this summer.   Sensing like this helps us to be able to pay attention to the collective experience and gives voice to what is showing up, and what we can serve.   At the conclusion of the Open Space, we checked out and I harvested a little poem that captures something of the flavour or what we’re in.   Part of the set up for this poem is knowing that today the weather has been wild with high winds and driving drizzle, and even though the air is warm, there is a sense that the winter/spring part of the year is keen to leave its legacy on the summer/fall part.

Here’s the poem:

What’s alive in this field

We’re going to be at home.

The depth of passion that we own
expands out to connect
the alternatives that sing, circumspect,
from the hill tops,
that reach the ears of the young
who stand in the storm, sung
songs of drenched longing,
wanting to tap creative energy
to quiver with the joy that
lives in the edge of death and life
the light that redraws the breath of summer.

The directions are called,
the integration invites a falling into place
a space of compassionate embrace
of all we are related to.

My daughter – an image held in the hand,
at arms length, on a touch –
there is much that is held here,
much that isn’t here.

What is clear is not-knowing –
uncertainty growing like the clouds
of drizzle that shower our container

Can you feel the wind?
Can you feel the breath?

Settle down.   Then step.

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Some recent harvests

May 3, 2009 By Chris Corrigan Art of Harvesting, Art of Hosting, Facilitation, Open Space, Poetry, World Cafe 2 Comments

Anchored down in San Francisco awaiting a delayed hop to Eureka California, from where we will drive to the Hoopa Valley and work there for a couple of days.   On leg five of the epic journey.

So a little time to breathe and reflect on a couple of harvests.   First from Geoff Selig who was at the Pembroke Art of Hosting, and who collected the tablecloths from a final day World Cafe on what we have learned about the power of conversation.

Second, a harvest poem from the Open Space I ran yesterday in Kelowna.   This was an afternoon session for the 30th anniversary of the Assembly of BC Arts Councils and 18 conversations took place that reflected the place of these volunteers and staff people who support the arts in towns, cities, islands and villages across our province.   With Open Space these days I am   trying as much as possible to have a place in which a meta harvest can be collected and created.   Most often this looks like a graphic recorder who gathers materials and snippets from the sessions and co-creates a harvest with session conveners and participants.   This gives a high level framework upon which the individual sessions can hang, and it invites another level of coherence and pattern noticing.   Yesterday. we had no graphic recorder available, so I substituted with this poem that I created partly from the titles of the 18 sessions and partly from what I was seeing emerging in the conversations.   As we only had 15 minutes for a closing, I presented this in lieu of a closing circle, and it made for a nice cap on the day:

The assembly of those who host space

by Chris Corrigan

Who are we? What do we do?

How do we face change while staying true

to the art that is the heart of community unity?

What body serves the life that comes to us?

Here we pause and reflect:

Youth are the truth of growing inclusivity.

Dialogue, funding, engagement are our tools

and it’s what we create with them that fuels

the passion for change

and well-ordered offerings that welcome the stranger,

the small connections that bring us into relationship

with land, citizen, government and institution.

So how to begin to offer form

that invites the spirit of the arts to warm

the cold spaces of urban waste

and rural forgetting, arts-based, human-paced

endeavours that bring us home?

How do we step up to govern and guide

theatres, galleries, facilities, the sides

of desks off of which our best work is done?

And how do we cultivate the source of our energy,

the money and bodies that make smooth

the skid roads and rip rap that brings this enterprise alive,

delivers the promise which grows and thrives?

We host space.

The spaces between people that light up with the spark of connection

recognition, a shared story, historical succession,

the tending of the coming soon that arises

from the done before rooted in the best of now.

The space of social media

both digital and tactile that expedites

the meeting of needs,

the speaking of deeds

into the record of our collective story.

The spaces of creation and illumination

like so many star-birthing clouds

spaces that resound with the colour of the voices that sound

the melodies and harmonies of our becoming.

Spaces in which we re-create, in which we see

what we could be with the power of free

expression coursing through the veins

that carry the pulse of life – the arts beat.

And here we confront our souls,

navigate the narrow channels, reefs and shoals

that want to gobble us down,

sink us in work, overwhelm and drown

our efforts in the skookumchuk

where scarcity and demand

suck and boil together and we move uncomfortably with outstretched hand.

Only and finally in THIS space,

do we recognize friends, companions

that also walk our path between elation

and struggle, who know the million details that support creation.

Thirty years we have sat in assembly

hosting a resonance that trembles

up the coast, valleys and rivers

like so many shivers

through the spine of beauty,

a reverent bass line, upon which rests

the deep song of who we are.

A deep bow to you all –

for the boards that lead

for the boards that are tread,

for the boards that are hammered together,

the music of spruce and pine and fir

forming the floor from which we stage our flight,

take wing and soar.

This poem was composed in honour of the 30th anniversary gathering of the Assembly of BC Arts Councils. It is a reflection of the issues that were articulated in 18 Open Space dialogue sessions held on the afternoon of May 2, 2009 in Kelowna, when Assembly members gathered to find wisdom in the stories and questions that were held within their community of practice.

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