Writing to Earth

Deena Metzger

Apr 30 - May 2, 2010

If Earth is your mother—is your sister, brother or lover—if Earth is a spirit or a god—if Earth is your teacher, companion, confidant or healer—if Earth is the great mystery—if Earth is the muse—what shall you say and how? Placing the Earth at the center of our ruminations allows new poetry, new story, dreams and imagination to pour forth. Who knows but that this writing may serve to help heal us and/or the Earth.

Join Deena Metzger for a powerful weekend of writing and ruminating. Deena says, “Stories act as a map and a guide. They are given to us by Spirit as profound instructions for living our lives. Spirit speaks to us in story, engaging us in ways that are creative and awesome. Stories concern every aspect of our lives, including our relationship with the Earth and all the visibles and invisibles.”

In her workshops Deena offers exercises that build on one another so that participants have the possibility of recognizing the story each has been given to live. Participants will use writing and draw from dream telling, story telling, council, meditation, prayer, and divination to begin to discover the stories that are coming to us. From the beginning of time such means, as well as alliances with animals, plants, and communications from spirit, have guided communities, warning of dangers, articulating the paths of healing and peacemaking, revealing the true nature of the universe. Participants will identify the stories and paths that are calling to us. We will examine our own lives; we will offer ourselves to the future.

“These questions,” Deena says, “will focus our investigations: How do we step away from human centeredness and become Earth centered? Who are we being asked to become? How shall we live? What alliances with the natural world are we each, individually, being asked to make?

Finding the words and the forms for a new relationship—or remembering the old one—to grieve and/or to rejoice with the Earth is the focus of this weekend. New words, new possibilities, new visions. Deena’s workshops are powerful and deeply moving, as is Deena herself. We wouldn’t offer this program if we didn’t believe that Deena, and all who are summoned by this call, can make it happen. We are honored to welcome her back.

Click to read a Poem by Deena published in the Center Post.

Deena Metzger is a storyteller, a political activist, spinner of myths, spiritual explorer, novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, lecturer, educator, and psychotherapist. She uses the power of story to address physical, emotional, and spiritual crises. She teaches writing and trains and initiates healers. She is also a breast cancer survivor. “Story,” she says, “is a form of knowing and healing” and the “organizing principle of our lives.” A short list of Deena’s work includes Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems; Writing for Your Life: A Guide & Companion to the Inner Worlds; TREE: Essays & Pieces; Intimate Nature: Women’s Bond with Animals edited with Linda Hogan & Brenda Peterson; The Other Hand; Doors: a fiction for jazz horn and From Grief into Vision: A Council. Her work, Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing was written in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and published one year later. “I wrote it...calling [on] myself..to the courage and stamina it takes to say what must be said.” Deena helps people wake up and ask, “What is Spirit asking of us?”