Welcome to Reverence
Seasonal Writing, Movement, Audio, and Practice
to Reawaken Embodied Creativity
Welcome!
I’m so delighted you’re here. This will be our landing site for Spring Reverence and will hold our course materials including audio, resources, and links; it will be available through May of 2023. As always, please let me know if you have any questions at all; I’m looking forward to supporting you in care. ~ With love, Johanna
Because this material was created exclusively for folks in Reverence, I’m grateful if you don’t share the link outside the course - thank you!
A few quick notes of orientation:
Please mark your calendars for our live, hour-long Zoom workshops on Sunday, March 19th, at 11 a.m. EST and Sunday, March 26th, at 11 a.m. EST. These optional meet ups will be a chance to settle, move gently, write, and explore some of our shared inquiries. We'll use the same login each time, which I'll also re-send before each meeting. Recordings will be available on our portal if you'd can't attend live (or want to attend again!)
In the spirit of permission and reverence, I hope you’ll make this practice entirely your own, discovering what timing, rituals, or practices feels most congruent with your own unique process.
Exploring Spring
Spring delivers us from mud season to flowering abundance. We listen in the key of water, flow, and our own breath. What is ready to thaw? What is taking root? How do we recognize our own readiness?
Transcript of Spring Reverence. Resources mentioned: Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening to the Voice of Vocation, Ada Limón, Instructions on Not Giving Up
Daily Emails
Day 1: Mud Season
Day 2: Thaw
Day 3: Water
Day 4: Breath
Day 5: Gathering In
Day 6: Expanding
Day 7: Movement(s)
Day 8: Flow
The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.
- Donika Kelly
The home I’ve been making inside myself started
with a razing, a brush clearing, the thorn and nettle,
the blackberry bush falling under the bush hog.
Then I rested, a cycle fallow. Said winter. Said the ground
is too cold to break, pony. Said I almost set fire
to it all, lit a match, watched it ghost in the wind.
Came the thaw, came the melting snowpack, the flooded river,
new ground water, the well risen. I stood in the mud field
and called it a pasture. Stood with a needle in my mouth
and called it a song. Everything rushed past my small ears:
whir in the leaves, whir in the wing and the wood. About time
to get a hammer, I thought. About time to get a nail and saw.
Saint Francis and the Sow
— Galway Kinnell
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.