Wondering Words: Poems for Your Daily Life

What if you had a poetic ritual for every day moments? In this five-week course, we will explore how poems can help us find meaning, connect us to one another and support the life we want to live.

Rituals and symbols have been radically discarded in Quakerism. Yet there is a human need for celebration, community, inspiration and comfort. So, in this course, we will get to know a clutch of poems that we can lean on when taking decisions, eating, finding gratitude, going to sleep and trying to meditate. We will experiment with taking them into our daily life and creating our own rituals for these moments.

You will be encouraged to compile your own set of texts of wonder and integrate them into your daily routines in between the sessions. There will be an opportunity to share our poems and experiences in the course’s online discussion forum.

This course is inspired by J.M. Hecht’s book “The Wonder Paradox”, welcoming those who are completely new to poetry and also the more experienced poetry readers and writers.