"When I think of poetry, I recall the line from a poem I heard in grade school: 'Tiger, tiger burning bright' — words by William Blake that I committed to memory and that remain with me today. I have been inspired by many poets whose words pierce my heart and tug at my soul, among them Rainer Maria Rilke, John O'Donohue and Mary Oliver.
"I often reflect on Thomas Berry's suggestion that perhaps the best thing we can do is to write a poem. He says poetry takes us to a new place of understanding. I have found that this is true for me.
"Poetry has been a vehicle for me to reach what lies deep within and to express it without becoming entangled in too much rational thought. The psyche is able to transcend the abstract left brain while capturing the great gift of human language that originates in the imagistic, holistic right brain.
"I sit in my apartment in Berkeley, California, pick up a pen and a pad of paper, and begin to write. For a period of time, inspired after I attended a reading by Mary Oliver, I took up the challenge each day to listen deeply to the spirit speaking softly to my soul and commit that to paper.
"Poetry affords the opportunity to have a dialogue with the pad of paper. The paper serves as a dialogical partner, a spiritual companion, whose empty page is the willing recipient of whatever lies in my heart and longs to be heard.
"Sometimes I think of poetry as a dream on paper — a way to translate the impulses of the soul into shareable forms.
"Poetry gives expression to blessings, to intuitive images that hover in the human psyche, beyond the embrace of ordinary conscious thought. Poetry is the midwife of those sacred impulses that emerge from another world, the land of the preconscious.
"Poetry is prayer. Words arise from the inmost self and emerge unbidden from it, as an incense of hope and inspiration for the invisible incarnate one.
"Poetry is a heart language that can give expression to the cosmos, where hidden hopes and aspirations lie.
"Poems are the manifestations of a marinated soul. They offer a birth canal where unborn articulations of life's great mysteries emerge into the conscious world to reveal past journeys and predict future paths.
"The poem is an oracle, a golden thread that makes visible for a passing moment a road map of our destiny through another mode of understanding.
"There is so much to ponder, and so many doorways of surprise. Touch the mystery, bow in humble admiration to the words that come from another place and find expression on the landscape of Earth.
"All is welcome now, everyone is present: the turtle and the polliwog, the poem and the person. Each is a lyric of life, a declaration of inspiration and hope.
"Poetry is the art form of the mystic, the clarion call of the prophet.
"Poetic words originate from another place; they tell of truths and narratives not yet understood.
"Poems are canaries; they tell of safety and peril.
"Poems are songs of yesterday and tomorrow announced today.
"Poems pay attention to what our world has overlooked; they speak of other worlds and take us to a new time and space and understanding.
"Poems announce the morning and bid farewell to night. They discover divinity in surprising places — in books, cornfields, sleepless nights, sunshine and sorrow, and in creatures great and small.
"When I write a poem, I gain insight into my personal life and the pathology and promise of the world around me. I feel the pain of death, so prevalent in my midst: death in the streets; death to the visions of youth and dreams of old; death in my heart; yes, even the possible death of Earth.
"Yet in the midst of it all, I experience hope, and wonder why. Is there not hope in the hearts of many when a child is born?
"There is hope when a flower bursts forth from a crack in a broken sidewalk. There is hope when night turns to day, winter to spring. And in the immeasurable moment we know from our tradition, death turns into life; we call this 'resurrection.'
"Poems tell courageous tales of love and loss and hopes not yet realized.
"Poems are proclamations of amazement. They are always accompanied by beyondness, yet fully immersed in the mud and waters of life."
