Returning Your Heart to Itself: Poetry and the Opening Door

October 26, 2012 - October 28, 2012
BangorPA
USA

MICHAEL S. GLASER AND
KATHLEEN W. GLASER

Oct 26-28, 2012

Fri 5:00 p.m. thru Sun lunch

Cost $425

Derick Walcott’s provocative poem, “Love after Love,”
invites us to reconnect with those parts of our essential
selves that have been suppressed, ignored or
cast aside –to bring into the present that which has
unwittingly been relegated to “the unlived life,” to free
ourselves from those more narrowly focused paths
our lives have demanded of us.

You will love again the stranger who was your
self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart . . . .

T.S Eliot adds an additional dimension to this notion
in his

We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of our exploring shall be
to arrive at the place we began—
and know it for the first time.”

A great richness in many poems is that they extend
invitations to us to explore and welcome the various
possibilities our lives hold.

This workshop / retreat will engage participants with
poetry and stories that raise useful questions for
reflection and exploration – questions that aim to help
us identify and strengthen those suppressed parts of
ourselves that want their own voice, that want to be
written or told, heard and loved.

We invite you to join us for a weekend of poetry and
community, a weekend of nurturing and listening in
which together we explore ways we might give our
hearts back to themselves.

Kathleen W. Glaser is a Center for Courage and Renewal
facilitator who conducts Courage to Teach and
Courage to Lead retreats. She has over thirty years
experience in public schools, serving as a teacher,
principal, college professor, and supervisor of student
teachers. She received the Washington Post
Distinguished Educational Leadership Award and is a
co-founder of the Chesapeake Public Charter School
in southern Maryland. Her passion is creating trustworthy
spaces for learning and community.

Michael S. Glaser is a Professor Emeritus at St.
Mary’s College of Maryland where he received the
Dodge Endowed Award for Excellence in Teaching. He
has published seven volumes of poetry, most recently
the chapbooks Fire Before the Hand, Remembering Eden
and Disrupting Consensus. Glaser has served as a
Maryland State Arts Council poet-in-the-schools for
over 20 years and is active with the Maryland Humanities
Council’s Speaker’s Bureau. He served as
Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2004 to 2009.

Categories: Retreats  |  The Arts  |  Workshops