Saved by a poem
15/02/11 04:49 Filed in: Poetry
It’s always an exciting day at our home when the SUN arrives. It gets separated from the mail and safely tucked away.
A few months ago the interview was with Kim Rosen and her work to bring poetry back into our culture by “learning poems by heart”.
After reading it I felt like it was time to bring it back into my life too. My wife, Jacki suggested we learn a poem a week and that’s what we’ve been doing.
I’ve also started sharing my poems with the men at Options during our Friday morning meditation sessions.
A few months ago the interview was with Kim Rosen and her work to bring poetry back into our culture by “learning poems by heart”.
After reading it I felt like it was time to bring it back into my life too. My wife, Jacki suggested we learn a poem a week and that’s what we’ve been doing.
I’ve also started sharing my poems with the men at Options during our Friday morning meditation sessions.
Making a digital story
I’ve taken the last 3 days “off” to delve into the world of digital storytelling. The Center for Digital Storytelling here in Berkeley is where it all happens. Although this organization travels all over the world to conduct workshops. I have wanted to take this workshop literally for years and never getting around to it. When i watch the stories that come out of these workshops, I’m often moved to tears. I recently worked with them again to bring a 12 TB RAID storage system on line and had the glimmer that I might like to conduct these workshops sometime in the future.
My next career?
I decided to try and capture a transformative moment at my first Burning Man. So for 3 days I wrote, rewrote, slashed script and searched my hard drive and the web for images and music.Then, dipping my toe into Final Cut Express, put it all together into a 3 minute movie.
There were 8 of us in the class and 2 amazing facilitators/coaches.
And did we ever keep them busy! The nexus of the workshop was the Story Circle. A safe place where we each revealed our “script”, and got helpful suggestions and ideas that we probably hadn’t considered about our story.
There were many levels of experience and expertise represented in our group and yet once the group training ended, our guides were able to jump among us. It must have been a bit like herding cats but Andrea claimed that we were an above average bunch.
The finale was a storytelling theatre. One at a time each of our stories were played on the big screen and each received thunderous, supportive applause.
The stories ranged from gifts for loved ones to recounting hostage situations in government buildings.
My next career?
I decided to try and capture a transformative moment at my first Burning Man. So for 3 days I wrote, rewrote, slashed script and searched my hard drive and the web for images and music.Then, dipping my toe into Final Cut Express, put it all together into a 3 minute movie.
There were 8 of us in the class and 2 amazing facilitators/coaches.
And did we ever keep them busy! The nexus of the workshop was the Story Circle. A safe place where we each revealed our “script”, and got helpful suggestions and ideas that we probably hadn’t considered about our story.
There were many levels of experience and expertise represented in our group and yet once the group training ended, our guides were able to jump among us. It must have been a bit like herding cats but Andrea claimed that we were an above average bunch.
The finale was a storytelling theatre. One at a time each of our stories were played on the big screen and each received thunderous, supportive applause.
The stories ranged from gifts for loved ones to recounting hostage situations in government buildings.
