The Heart Aroused Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

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I love the new The Consolations book.

I love the Consolations book.

I'm still in the heart of it. I work with big companies and their leadership teams all around the world. But to begin with all I knew was my bitterly earned experience within non-profit organizations.

I went full time as a poet never imagining that I would work in the belly of the beast in the corporate world.

The language we have in that world is not large enough for the territory that we've already entered. The language we have in and in your work I've just heard the language that's large enough for us.

The hope is I can arrange to have the meeting with my spouse with my children with my life without being vulnerable. If I just arrange it all properly if I just say exactly that no I'm sorry.

I noticed that vulnerability is not a weakness a passing in disposition or something we can arrange to do without.

To lift the siege, we do our best for our children but then at the right time send them off with a blessing no matter their perilous direction.

Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.

This is the bright home in which I live, this is where I ask my friends to come, this is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love.

I'm also intrigued by you know aloneness, we talked about how alone is the first word in that book and there's a dance that you name and kind of tease out between aloneness and belonging.

This is the temple of my adult aloneness and I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life. There is no house like the house of belonging.

And the clearing of a space so that you can find your foundational mode by which you hold the world in your affections.

I have this poem actually which I wrote out of when I was in the very intense period out of which that poem The House of Belonging came, when I wrote the book called The House of Belonging.

Human genius lies in the geography of the body and its conversation with the world.

The face in the stone is a mirror looking into you.

You have never looked into the immovability of stone like this. The way it holds you gives you not a way forward but a doorway in.

Staunches your need to leave, becomes faithful by going nowhere. Something that wants you to stay here and look back.

The face in the stone is a mirror looking into you. You have gazed into the moving waters.

You have seen the slow light in the sky above Loch Aina. Beneath you streams have flowed and rivers of earth have moved beneath your feet.

But you have never looked into the immovability of stone like this. The way it holds you gives you not a way forward but a doorway in.

Staunches your need to leave, becomes faithful by going nowhere. Something that wants you to stay here and look back.

Be weathered by what comes to you. Like the way you too have travelled from so far away to be here.

Once reluctant and now as solid and as here and as willing to be touched as everything you have found.

We shape ourselves to fit this world working together. We shape ourselves to fit this world and by the world are shaped again.

The visible and the invisible. Working together in common cause to produce the miraculous.

I'm thinking of the way the invisible air traveled at speed around a shaped wing easily holds our weight. So may we in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine and find the true shape of our own self by forming it well to the great intangibles about us.

I'm thinking of the way the invisible air traveled at speed around a shaped wing easily holds our weight.

And find the true shape, the true shape of our own self by forming it well to the great intangibles about us.

So if I don't have anything decent I won't be sending you anything.

We shape ourselves to fit this world working together.

We shape ourselves to fit this world and by the world are shaped again.