News and Ideas for Caring for Your Soul
A personal invitation to join me and grow together....
Hey Everyone,
I wanted to update you all on a couple offerings and observations:
Consider Joining Me Every Month Live!
In this day and age, we need something to help us make sense of “it” all. We need to find a place where we can ask our questions; feel safe in our curiosity-- knowing there are no dumb questions and we need to do this with a few other people in an environment where we feel safe, welcomed and valued.
This is why I envisioned a new group of people coming together to do three things:
-Form a cohort—a group where we can learn, grow, explore and ask questions. We don’t have to do this alone. This is a coming together cohort—a community of like minded folks—folks like you and me.
-Become curious—we need to look under rocks, swim in the deep end of the pool and look for help from outside our own mind, experience and stories. Curiosity is how we explore our inner world and find the help we need along the way. When we ask questions, we anchor ourselves with wisdom hunters and spiritual pilgrims of every age. Questions become the ground in how we find one another and how we find each other.
-Extend care to one another. We’re are not in the same boat---all of our experiences in this life are different, but we are all in a storm. I think it is this sense of existential anxiety that seems to grow larger and larger in today’s world—this angst is what we can care about; listen to and find some antidotes to help us along the way. This is a simple way to do what we read over 50 times in the New Testament regarding this three word adage: love one another.
The 3 C Group: Cohort, Curiosity and Care—is how I’m envisioning and inviting you to join me. We don’t have to do this alone.
We will meet once a month for 90 minutes. In our time together, Peter Ivey and myself will help facilitate our group’s journey together. All the dates and times are in the details in the link below.
We are using poems to ground us and to help us. Why? Because good poems are like roadmaps that can lead us out of the dark and to our home of belonging. Now, more than perhaps at any other time in our lives, we need something like this 3C Group that I’m inviting you to consider.
We are inviting living poets to join us and as we read their poems, we’ll get to ask the poets questions about what they’ve written---we’ll get the back story and explore how this particular poem might help us.
We’ll also explore poems in our required text. We’ll divide into “micro-groups” to have more personalized sharing and we can glean from each other from our insight, stories and observations.
The 3C Group is a way to come together. It is a way to gather once a month to feast on the insight of men and women who have written inner road maps to help us find our way home.
Space is limited. The 3C Group is filling and registrations will stop when we reach 25 participants. The group is now 60% filled.
I’ve asked Peter Ivey to be my cohost. Peter is younger in years but keen in heart and mind and he is an aspiring poet as well. He is also in training as a Spiritual director. Together, Peter and I have forged a relationship that has grown and changed as we both have deepened our heart and souls in the work of soul care. Poetry has been a way we’ve used to draw us together over the years. We wrote a book together called, Solo: Creating Space with God. Together we developed the “State of My Soul Wheel” which has grown to become a tool now used world wide to help people understand the state of their inner world.
Here’s the link for more information and to register.
In my own spiritual journey, I’m taking the time to study, reflect on and learn about Celtic Spirituality. John Phillip Newell and others are guiding me into a way of re-thinking and unlearning some of the baggage I’ve picked up along my journey. Perhaps you can relate.
Every morning for a season now, I’ve been reading Sacred Earth: Sacred Soul and John Phillips brand new book, The Great Search. I’m moved. I’m excited. I’m connecting some dots in my head and heart. It’s been a great blessing in my own “greening” and coming alive in my soul at this stage of my life. I trust this might be a blessing to you as well. For now, I’d invite you to read along with me on your own, then in the New Year, we can see where this might all lead.
In addition, John Phillip Newell is coming to my little mountain town of Brevard, NC for an all day retreat with him at Brevard College. The date is Saturday, October 19th. If you’re close you just might want to consider coming to Brevard for this day of learning and exploring with him. Here’s the info on that day event! I’d love to see you here at this important event.
Together, we can learn. We don’t have to do this alone!
I wanted to share with you a new poem that I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks. The title is “The Living Mountains.” Living in the mountains has indeed been a deep part and piece of my own spiritual “greening” and renewal of my soul. The beauty and invitation to go out and into the mountains has been one that I have not ignored. More, Gwen and I are more outside than inside. The weather is inviting and just write and we have all of our meals on our porch or deck—depending on the sun’s angle. It’s wonderful. I’ve harvested the last of our tomatos. You’ve seen pictures and you’ve seen my writings about growing and greening.
The Living Mountains is really a poem with Celtic underpinnings. It’s a poem about my own awakening and coming more alive and aware. I hope you might enjoy this poem. It doesn’t have to be that mountains are necessary in our lives or journey. There are liviing parks; living rivers; living streams; living yards and more… But mountains sure have helped me and I wanted to acknowledge this in my poem that you can read here.
I think in my poems, you can trace with me my own growth; shifting, greening, unlearning and curiosity concerning Jesus’ own statement: Seek and You Shall Find. Knock and the door will be open. I’m still seeking and I’m still knocking.
I’m making this available to the entire Substack Community!
I hope that a few more of you will seriously consider joining me in the new 3C Group that I’ve explained above.
The Living Mountains by Stephen W. Smith Ever since we kept time, Mountains have kept us. Always calling us to look up and in; Bringing us beauty, splendor and peace. They are alive—these mountains of blue and hue. Made of stone that still cries out, “Look at us!” And I look and am somehow seen too. I belong to these peaks and valleys. Dressed with fur and pine, laurel and oak. The robes of your chosen attire display your mystique. The clouds are your crown—the mist your morning veil. The rivers are your tears for us—flowing into the confluence of life. I, too, am alive in your presence. This greening inside my soul awakens me. I need you but you do not need me. I am the dust alive for this moment in your time.