Preparing to listen…
As you listen to Michael read his Babushka poem and as you listen with both head and heart:
What words and phrases catch your attention? Notice what speaks to your head and heart?
How might these speak to your current life and leadership circumstances?
Reflections on “Babushka”
From our first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, ..... we listen to guidance from everywhere except from within. .... Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.
Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening to the Voice of Vocation
As you listened to me read my Babushka poem, I wonder:
What words and phrases caught your attention? What spoke to your head and heart?
How might they speak to your current life and leadership circumstances?
I wrote my first poem as an adult in my mid-50s, in August 2010, while on my first Courage & Renewal Retreat, based on the work of Quaker educator, Parker Palmer and the movement that’s grown around him.
Drawing on the best of his Quaker tradition these retreats create a profoundly safe, respectful space of “solitude in community”. Making imaginative use of poetry, metaphor and images, the gathered community of professionals support each other to listen to their own “inner teachers”, to reconnect who they are, with what they do, to reconnect soul with role.
From my experience of participating in and facilitating these retreats I’ve developed my own practises to support my ongoing inner journey. These include:
Reading poetry and short reflective prose (my own and other’s like David Whyte and Margaret Wheatley) aloud to myself in my early morning stillness practise; as a way of listening to my ‘inner teacher’ and setting myself for the coming day, and
Writing my own poems and reflective prose as a way give voice to, find out what I’m actually thinking and feeling at any given time: again, learning to listen (with head, heart and body) to what my inner teacher is saying to me beneath the noise of my life.
My Babushka poem is an example of what can emerge. This poem continues to be a powerful frame of reference for me to understand and navigate life to be and become my most whole-hearted and broken-hearted self.
What individual and collective disciplines and practises do you have to enable your ongoing transformational personal journey? Is there anything from what I’ve shared you’d like to try that might serve you as well?
To begin a conversation with Michael Prince, head to Michael’s profile page.
Images credits: Iza Gawrych on Unsplash and Julia Kadel on Unsplash