Your truest self in your work, art and community
June 11 – July 27 (no class week of July 1st), 2012. | Taught by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg | $210 non-member; $189 members.
“The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into the pulse” – Annie Dillard
What work calls to you as your own as this point in your life? How can you develop a livelihood — or transform your current livelihood — with your deepest vision, values and voice? In this class, you’ll explore long-term conversations with your callings (in our art, work and life), approaches for exploring and revising myths and messages about who you should be, cultivating spaciousness for your deepest work, hunting and gathering sources and supports, making the work you love come true, and staying engaged with your life’s work as your life shifts and unfolds. This class includes writing and other arts to bring more of your dreams to the surface as well as soulful planning tools. By the end of the class, you will have a body of writing, plans and maps, and other arts and tools to guide your life from the heart of your callings.
During the class, we'll look at how to expand and deepen the lifelong conversation with your calling, and then how to translate your callings into your livelihood and life. Participants will explore what they're doing with/in their lives, what changes they want to make to live more authentically and how to change patterns and old storylines through weekly writing prompts, plus podcasts or videos to instruct and inspire. This is an ideal class if you're considering or making changes in your avocation or vocation, wanting to deepen your art or work or writing or relationships, preparing to put yourself out there in your community more, or just ready to sit down and have a long and artful talk with your calling.
"That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything—every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate—is always changing, moment to moment." — Pema Chodron
Class One: Call and Response: Conversing With Your Callings
Class Two: Cleaning House: Examining Myths & Messages about Who You Should Be
Class Three: Cultivating Spaciousness: Making Room for Your Deepest Work
Class Four: Hunting & Gathering: Inviting In Sources & Resources
Class Five: Visioning & Revisioning: Making the Work You Love Come True
Class Six: Staying Awake: Embracing the Challenges and the Gifts That Come
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. — Mary Oliver
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D. is the Poet Laureate of Kansas, founder of Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College, where she teaches, and the author of 14 books, including The Divorce Girl (novel, Ice Cube Books), Needle in the Bone: How a Holocaust Survivor and Polish Resistance Fighters Beat the Odds and Found Each Other (non-fiction, Potomac Books), four collections of poetry, four anthologies she edited, and more. She is certified or deeply trained in
grassroots organizing, yoga teaching, poetry therapy and consensus-based decision-making. She presents workshops, talks and readings widely, particularly to adults in transition and people living with serious illness. Caryn believes deeply in Right Livelihood, the Buddhist term for serving community, drawing on our gifts and facing our challenges, according to our values and deepest compassion. With singer Kelley Hunt, she co-writes songs, offers Brave Voice: Writing & Singing for Your Life retreats, and collaboratively performs. She makes her home with her husband, ecological writer Ken Lassman, and her just-about-all-grown three children south of Lawrence, Kansas, where the deer and the turkey roam. She talks, emails, texts, facebook-messages and dreams with her calling regularly.