An Afternoon Workshop with Gertrude Reif Hughes

We will explore how poems and contemplative inquiry can work together to awaken creative and perceptive powers that lie dormant in our consciousness.  We will begin with riddles to model the kind of knowledge that contemplative inquiry seeks, and we will see how poems are really ways of preparing our hearts to think.

Please bring pencil and paper; we will have time to practice an exercise or two in writing poetry.  All are welcome. No prior experience with contemplative inquiry or poetry is necessary.

Gertrude Reif Hughes is Professor Emerita at Wesleyan University, where she taught Literature and Women’s Studies. She has developed themes and exercises on poetic consciousness in her course, Poetry and Insight, offered in the Graduate Liberal Studies Masters Program at Wesleyan. A member of the Mariposa Center Board and of Contemplative Mind in Higher Education, she attended the New York City Waldorf School as a child. She is a teacher of meditation, and former president, at the Rudolf Steiner (Summer) Institute, which will be held this summer on the campus of Stonehill College in Easton, Mass.