Heartwork with Dale Biron–Poems For Heart and Soul

What happens when hope must float in a sea of uncertainty, conflict, and loss? Can we create a more durable and resilient hope? A new fire-tested hope tethered to everyday joys, delights, and even tragedies along the way, a new hope tied not to a specific outcome but hope for doing the next right thing each step of the journey.

What in your life would you work for, sacrifice for, serve and protect? The answer, of course is what you love and cherish. What if we were to widen our loving and cherishing boundaries? And beyond our closest loved humans and critters. In fact beyond humans to the wider community of sacred beings and the sacred elements that all living beings need to thrive.

How much can we safely ignore poetry? That’s a real question and we’re going to fearlessly try to answer it in this episode. What’s at stake? I would say many things are at stake. Join me now...

Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed and even besieged by the complexity of the world? Do you struggle to make sense and meaning out of our intense environmental, political, and cultural challenges? What if there were a tool that allowed us to develop our meaning-making muscles? What if we had a tool that helped us work more skillfully with paradox, complexity, and contradiction? That tool is poetry....

On one level, the people, critters, and things we love are familiar to us. At another level, it's far too easy to stop "seeing" and appreciating what is most precious to us. Our loves and connections then become obscured, a kind of secret, even to ourselves. Poetry helps us unlock these secrets, allowing us to reconnect to the wonders, delights, joys, and complexities of what we lov...

Be a tree. Listen to the magic of their beckoning poems and stories. Let them hear you out as they call out in you what is wise, rooted and clear.

We are all heartbroken, so ignoring or denying it will not make it go away. However, to embrace our sorrow, and to embrace and help others with their sorrow can open up amazing possibilities. This episode is dedicated to poet-writer, Ross Gay who speaks eloquently and practically about the paradoxical relationship of sorrow and joy in his book called, "Inciting Joy." He said this, “Joy i...

When you read or hear a "just right" poem, you will know it. The poem will delight and stun you. It will do something vital for you. Strangely, the poem will feel as if it owns you. Then, in turn you’ll feel a second wave of owning the poem back. I call it a great and sacred “claiming.” In this week’s episode, I’ll share how the process works, while revealing some poems that own me, and...

The meta-crisis is a multitude of overlapping, interconnected global crises of ecology, perception, culture, politics, education and spirituality. The "complexity trap" means we're trapped and ineffective. At one extreme, we are blind to (or deny) complexity, so we refuse to act. At the other extreme, we are buried in complexity such that the mind and heart shut down in overwhelm an...

In this episode we take on a very human feeling. A feeling we all have at times, yet a feeling no one wants. When we are in the grip of "aloneness" we often feel trapped. When our sense of separation becomes intense we can feel depressed, alienated from others, from the natural world, and ultimately ourselves. As we’ll see in this episode and reflected in the featured poems, we are truly...

Systems theory will never be the same after we hitch up some world-class William Stafford poetry to it. "Traveling Through The Dark"  Stafford's most famous poem, provides a straightforward and powerful lesson in the perils of the "specious present" and in turn how to move beyond falling victim to either ecological doom or a reality-free unearned hope. In other words, a li...

Sometimes the most serious subjects require the lightest, most humorous touch. These featured poets are masters at using with and humor to help us along our path, troubles and all...

Silence is a powerful tool. It's essential for any meditation practice. Yet it can also be challenging, an acquired taste as they say. What would it mean to embrace silence more fully? To love it. Here is a featured poem, a number of quotes, and a discussion about silence that I hope you will find helpful. 

Do you ever lament the fact that the half-life of your clarity and best insights are often quite short? Here is a featured poem that suggests that this is only human. This is a poem that delights in the delicious, awakening act of discovering the truth again and again. Rather than try to "fix" this challenge, why not "feature" it?

"Hello just right poem...  I have found you." That's the new subtitle for this practical poetry podcast. I'm headed back to the future, as they say. For many years I've delighted in helping clients, students and workshop participants find just the right poem at just the right moment. I learned long ago through my own experience that finding the right poem can make the diff...

Love may be the only workable response to the ecological devastation we face. Even fierce resistance goes better with love. To confront the sheer magnitude of our ecological polly-crisis and predicament without art in general, and poetry in particular, is not only a recipe for despair, it also reduces the likelihood of success by some major and terrifying degree. The great writer and earth lover,...

Eco-grief is real and growing. We ignore it at our peril, especially for those who wish to act in healing support of the natural world. Poetry is a potent tool for working with all kinds of grief. In this podcast, we'll explore how poetry can become one of our most practical means of working with eco-grief, with all its complexities and paradoxical qualities.

In this episode, featuring the amazing poet William Carlos Williams, we will explore how stories that seem so right can be so wrong and damaging. Specifically, we’ll take on an incredibly enduring cultural story referred to as “The Tragedy of The Commons” most recently presented in a 1968 essay in the journal Science . It would become one of the most unquestioned, accepted and cited scientific pap...

In this episode, featuring the amazing poet Rumi, we will explore the ecological predicament we're in and how poetry can play a vital helping role. It’s never been more critical to understand the history, facts, and context of our ecological crisis.  However, if we only dwell on the difficult and painful facts, we risk overwhelm and eventually despair. Good, well-chosen poetry flies under the...

Can we be smart but not wise? Our old wisdom is failing us in dramatic ways. We have ecological challenges everywhere we look, from climate, to soil erosion, to deforestation, to habitat destruction, to vast plastic and chemical pollution, to extinctions, to ocean acidification. What happens when we forget the new ecological stories we most need to survive? The new stories that tell us we cannot c...

“Internalities”   Imagine all those things we might begin to count, if only all the humans were counted. Internalizing the costs of bellies unfed, mistakes unredeemed, minds unopened, histories untaught, context revered and protected, just as delicate roots beneath the brilliant and beautiful daffodils.   Yes, and how democracies have hobbled themselves, where ecologies are divided by a toxic igno...

Today, like every other day, mother earth kept doing  her wondrous magical spinning thing. As the sun  thrummed a vibrational magic, the light and dark  doing its eternal dance. That's when that big old mother earth smile happened, realizing this day  was named for her. She said to all,  please, take what you need.  So the remaining bears, the wolves, hawks, butterflies, and whales, even the...

I should mention that of course, I'm talking about myself here. When we are afflicted by this malady, we are often the last to know. Just ask your friends, loved ones, significant other...

Many environmental activists I've spoken with agree on one thing. We won't make it through this narrow and ever more harrowing tight spot we're in without art. Since some have enjoyed my "Poetry Monday" posts, I've decided to begin "Saturday Songs." Here's a humble offer. A song I wrote called "Wolves In The Streets."

Robert Bly is the perfect poet for those interested in and working toward healing the planet. (Not to mention healing ourselves.) Bly brings just the right combination of inspiration, surprise, humor, and a much needed deep wisdom. Enjoy this first podcast episode of the new format and focus.