If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 2/22/2024 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

My Thoughts

There is an art to waiting, finding that still point that can hold the entirety of your being so that whatever need drove you to the waiting room can be held without a ripple in the pause; the art of the free-floating mind with a kind of impartial awareness that allows the world to come to you while you, held in the light and anchored in the moment, take it all in. Call it faith or the eye of the storm, knowing , as trees do, that you are rooted in something greater than yourself from which you draw your sustenance; a fact easy to forget in the day-to-day rush or when you’re on the move, especially when cursing circumstances: the rain, the heat, the traffic, the insistence of machines and the frustrations of technology. There is an art to waiting. It need not be made into an unbearable inconvenience. As Linda Hogan points out in her poem, To Be Held, be like a tree patient through the long winter, held in the healing light until the storms pass and the frost thaws and the world tilts back in your favor.

To Be Held

To be held
by the light
was what I wanted,
to be a tree drinking the rain,
no longer parched in this hot land.
To be roots in a tunnel growing,
but also to be sheltering the inborn leaves,
and the green slide of mineral
down the immense distances
into infinite comfort
and the land here, only clay,
still contains and consumes
the thirsty need
the way a tree always shelters the unborn life,
waiting for the healing
after the storm,
which has been our life.

—Linda Hogan
https://www.lindahoganwriter.com

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about waiting.

  2. Journal or write a poem as a tree, or what it is like to be a tree.

  3. Think of a time when your life felt parched, and then was blessed with rain. Use the metaphor as your prompt.

  4. Journal write a poem about something that had to develop inside of you over a long time before it could be expressed.

  5. Journal or write a poem describing what shelters the unborn life in you or in your family or community?

  6. What are you rooted to that gives you sustenance and comfort in difficult times?

  7. Describe a healing you found in or from a current or past storm in your life.

  8. As usual, write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.