Creative leadership...a MUST for our time!
Greetings from la bella Italia, and an invitation to join me online June 18 to learn more about an exciting new memoir class for creative leaders!
I have been spending time in Italy this spring, starting with a week at glorious San Fedele with a group of writers, enjoying the beautiful Tuscan countryside, charming towns and delicious foods and wines as we dug deeper into our own life stories and our purpose in writing memoir. It was a very special week, made possible by the caring attention of our San Fedele hosts and Il Chiostro guides.
On the last night of the writing retreat, as part of our celebratory farewell dinner, we shared some short pieces we had written, including a collaborative poem—an expansion of one of my favorite Rilke poems (translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows) that begins, “Quiet friend who has come so far….”
I also shared my uplifting rewrite of a depressing canonical poem, “The Second Coming” by Yeats.
As I said in the introduction to my poem, I really believe that it’s important to the collective psychic health of humanity that individuals strive to hold our own center—to keep our own note pure, not losing our awareness of beauty and goodness to the jangled cacophony of media-driven mass consciousness, which tells us over and over how everything in our world is going to hell.
Yes, things are precarious. Yes, it often seems that “the center cannot hold.” But as I am constantly reminded here in Italy, human beings have lived through terrible times before, and we have always managed to learn from our mistakes and come back stronger than ever. Why should the 21st century be any different?
In Tuscany and Umbria, I am surrounded by constant reminders of human creativity throughout the ages, whether in the realm of art, technology, agriculture, or food. As a writer and photographer, I want to capture this bounty in words and images, to preserve it and bring it back home with me, as inspiration for darker times ahead.
There is no question that creative leadership is needed now. This beautiful, battered planet needs each one of us to stand up and sing out loud and clear, inspiring others so that we become a mighty chorus singing our testament to the potential for humanity to reimagine our relationships with each other and all life on our planet, prioritizing nurturing, tending and wellbeing rather than competition, aggression and dominance.
The week of June 17, I will be participating in a free Humanity Rising online summit, the launch of a new leadership development program conceived by Spring Cheng.
Spring’s Resonance Path Leadership Program is like no other: it takes its inspiration from the archetype of the Universal Mother, inviting an inquiry into the ways that creativity can connect individuals with the larger creative fields of our world and our cosmos.
It is cross-cultural and transdisciplinary, bringing together a gifted faculty who have explored the resonances between fields as diverse as memoir and I Ching, music and psychology, science and spirituality.
You can read more about Spring and her remarkable journey here, including the dream of the dying whale that prompted her to begin to restore the feminine principle to the I Ching and create what she calls “the Resonance Code”:
“I designed the Resonance Code using the I Ching hexagrams as a “meta-language,” a system akin to musical notation,” Spring explains. “I used the Resonance Code to capture the different vibrational states of our being in resonance with Universal Mother. In this way, the Resonance Code enables each person to generate their own “oracle dictionary” to observe, notate and interpret their unique, personal frequencies of resonance with Universal Mother.”
In a time when the masculine principles of aggression seem to be driving our entire planet down the road to ruin, those of us who can perceive the resonant call of the feminine have a sacred duty to stand up on the side of Life.
Mother Gaia is calling each of us alive today to become a force for positive creativity, to shine our individual lights bright so that together we can find our way to a better era.
I will be doing my part in joining with Spring to offer a special memoir class beginning January 2025, “Life as an Oracle I: Memoir Writing to Weave a Personal-Planetary Narrative.”
If you feel called to learn more, please join us on June 18, from 11 am – 12:30 pm Eastern, when Spring and I will be talking at a free Humanity Rising event about how purposeful memoir contributes to creative leadership on both the personal and planetary levels, and what Spring means by resonant leadership and the idea of “life as an oracle.”
Register here for this free live online event, which will be recorded for later viewing.
Meanwhile, I send you warm greetings from Italy, where I’ll be for a few more days before moving on to lead my Riding & Writing workshop at Hestaland in Iceland.
Yours in resonant creativity,
Jennifer
Friends, it’s my pleasure and my passion to support you as we stretch towards living our lives creatively and to the fullest.
The motto of my author consulting business is “Writing to Right the World,” and the motto of my book publishing business, Green Fire Press, is “Books that Make the World Better.”
If these intentions resonate with you and you are working on a book, or have one in mind, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Supporting creative people bring their work more strongly out into the world is one way I try to make the world better….
