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….