Excerpt from Poetic Medicine, by John Fox, “Giving Yourself Permission to be Wild and Magnificent”
Earth offers us powerful images and metaphors with which to tell our stories. Rather than thinking of the earth’s resources as commodities like oil and wood . . . consider the more intangible qualities which nature offers us, such as beauty and spectacle, turmoil and order, mystery and predictability.
A sense of beauty – wild and terrible or lovely and breathtaking – can be healing.
Infusing your writing with earth imagery will help reveal your unique voice and imagination. The stories of earth – and our stories – are interwoven, constantly changing in the cyclic process of birth, growth and death. A language for expressing these deep changes in your life can be found by tuning to the language of the earth.
Poem-making
and the natural world give you permission to be wild and magnificent. Your poetic musings of connection with the earth can take you beyond conventional ways of looking at yourself.
We are often so busy conforming to traditional notions of success that we miss this joyful opportunity to cut loose and feel our lives – to express our highest potential and explore our true legacy.
Prompt: Using inspiration from the natural world present an outrageous, yet honest, picture of yourself . . . or paint a word picture about anything you want, perhaps something that happened over the weekend, or during this past week.
