Much like poetry, living comes to each of us and it blunders along just out of view from us. It is like sitting around a campfire and knowing there is something outside the ring of light the fire casts.
Within the ring of light, there is a warmth, perhaps a certainty. We think we know what is happening next. In truth, the living happens just outside our reach. Wendell Berry describes it as happening, but, once it happens, we cannot be fully describe it.
Gary Snyder wrote about his poetry writing as having to go meet the poetry just outside the range of his campfire. When we are attentive and mindful of each moment and what is just beyond our reach and vision, life dances at the edge of the light, like poetry.
Instead of certain answers, we encounter questions that cannot be fully answered, but help form the conversation and poetry that is our living.
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope and its anticipatory relationship with the future, and hope as an essential element in learning.
Teacher as Transformer 
Instead of certain answers, we encounter questions…we go to meet it at the edge of the light. Journey of a curious soul. ❤
That is the only kind of soul to have Olga.
I have a difficult time with writing poetry. I have written only one, true, decent poem in my life, and I had to mess with it for years to get it to be okay.
However, recently I’ve been composing little Haikus. Seems like I can sort of handle those!
Emilie, if you are writing Haiku, your are writing true and decent poetry.I find Haikus quite challenging. I carve out a space for the word that best fills it.
It’s pioneering in the best sense: opening pathways between the conscious and the unconscious domains, providing signposts for those who would follow. I find myself resonating somewhere inside to this campfire image, Ivan, and to the poem you have created.
Thank you Tish. It is like there is a bridge that helps us fluidly relate to both worlds.
I like this notion, very much. I’ve often thought that poets see the world differently, but maybe they see a slightly different world.
I think both might be right. To live in a slightly different world, one might see the world differently.
For me it doesn’t blunder but dances quietly around me in a spiritual realm. I have to be very still to hear the silent voice that wants to be spoken. It’s a new experience. I just started writing poetry seriously this last year in my 60s.
That only goes to show it is never too late.
Reblogged this on By the Mighty Mumford and commented:
A REALLY GOOD POET! WISH HE’D WRITE MORE!
Thank you Jonathan. I was just thinking about that today.
Great minds…often think similarly!