SOUL’S JOURNEY

EDGE, EXPANSION, ESSENCE
~ a weekend retreat for poetry & personal development

June 15 – 17, 2012

Inch Beach, County Kerry, Ireland

£265 (€310) (tuition, shared room and meals)

This is a time when we need to open up more and more to our own guidance, our own wisdom, and our own authority.

Creativity is where we can find this in what we ‘create’ as our own out of the most authentic and even radical part of who we are, that we can also see as the poet in us.

In this holiday retreat led by an experienced facilitator and pioneer in his field who has been running workshops in Ireland since 1992,

poet, psychotherapist and healer Jay Ramsay is offering a space for you to open to your own inner richness of being through poetry and creative writing alongside your own personal development.

Using a series of tried and tested writing exercises (which will include an inner shamanic journey) designed to spark and unravel your own expression,

you will be working through imagination and feeling, on your own and with each other, and also in the natural environment of this expansive beachside setting.

There will also be space for one to one work and specific feedback/tuition within the group sessions;

and Jay will be assisted by his partner Angela Warren offering introductory yoga to help you relax and open,

deepening the receptive space that is so vital for creative expression to emerge.

This is a long weekend to come home feeling recharged as well as deepened in and for each of our journeys at this challenging and de-stabilizing time of change.

“You made me feel very valued and listened to…you are very authentic and enabling of others’ human flourishing wherever they are in their journey…I have left the workshop feeling inspired and deeply encouraged”
—Prof. Angie Titchen

Register and pay

For more information contact Jay at jayramsay@o2.co.uk.

Jay Ramsay is the author of over 30 books of poetry and non-fiction, most recently The Poet in You (O Books), Crucible of Love—the alchemy of passionate relationships (O Books),

and Places of Truth—journeys into sacred wilderness (Awen).

A long term student of alchemy, couple relationships and healing he has pioneered the teaching of poetry with personal development for over 20 years.

More about him and all his work on www.jayramsay.co.uk

 

Angela Warren is a Bowen practitioner who trained with its original teachers from Australia 15 years ago, and a long term student of yoga. She also works with aromatherapy and massage, and has a 7 year old daughter Ruby.

_____________________________________________________________

AT LIOS DÁNA

a poem for Michael Travers by Jay Ramsay

1

The silver thread of water that led us here,

Along the edge of this peninsula

______________________________________into the light

Become this vast sheet

Of white-cresting breakers,

Silver-grey as we gaze down

_________________________________onto the sea

And at the mountains beyond it,

Lit briefly in sun…

 

As you speak of that school of dolphins

Suddenly erupting there

Leaping, splashing and circling

Out of the water—

 

As I glimpse them invisibly

__________________in the light of their colour

And this vast sky opens

__________________________under the rugged reach of land

And the wide, three mile bow of the sand

Fronts the hummocks of dunes

Embroidered in green…

 

Like a giant semi-colon

Where the sea of the Self begins:

 

__Ocean, reaching in, wave after wave

In the liquid hiss of its breaking whisper

 

__Ocean where the cloud’s reaching down like mist

Becomes the sea it blends in

 

__Ocean, where the mountains shrouded in mist

Trace their outlines in the clouds

____________________________________they vanish in…

 

Ocean as I closen

As the waves roar, and I stand

Reduced to the infinite

In the silence of Your Enormous embrace

Broadened everywhere

___________________—around my head, and off my shoulders—

So that the smallness of my voice is absurd

Inside the purity of Your Silence

Beside dolphin sounds, whale sounds…

___________________________________________and broader still

Broader even than mountains,

___________________________________or sea

Broader than all form

________________________or name

___________________________________Ocean become a circle

_________________________________in the Omega of its embrace.

 

2

Evening falls, and the clouds part sheer

The light gleaming across the sea’s dove-grey

 

After the rain at its height

Emptying, beating down

On the glass roof above our heads

_________________________________________saying listen

 

(Three times it came—

Drowning our conversation)

 

As I found my eyes closing,

As it spoke inside me

 

And through its streaming

______________________________beyond the windows

Three black posts, like waiting figures

Out there on the beach, unmoving

 

Standing in the rain, and choosing to—

As I half expected one to stir

Or raise its arms…

 

As I walk out now

____________where the track crosses the swollen stream,

 

Seeing the the sea glimmering like quicksilver

Smaller, calmer, spent of wind now

—the moon peeping behind a cloud—

 

As I reach the five chipped bars of a white gate,

And lean over it—

 

The lights winking on the farther shore

Until they peter out, further down

As the mountains become cloud

 

And further out, where there’s only the sea’s mirroring

Where the light has broken

_____________________________and opened

 

And for a moment

___________________—for as long as the air feels to be—

The clouds pause completely still

And all speech within me is still,

Raised above the wet shadow of the ground

 

And just as I reach silence

____________________________the moon rides out

With its aureole emblazoned against the cloud

Red-tinged, like a wild eye of seeing

As the birds teeter on the edge

Where edge is meeting

 

Where the waves blend with their shoreline,

And the wet sand is the stillness

Of the waves having broken,

 

And breath, it says breathe, and the whole air is feeling

Feel all you feel, let the clouds come, the rain come

And the  after-light that follows them—

 

Let the moon shine as it is shining now,

In its clear darkening blue midnight sky:

 

Let a higher will be done.

 

3

Cloud over the mountain

_______—a buzzard, and then a lark—

 

The buzzard stretching its hovering wings,

And dipping down

 

The lark rising between the phone wire’s staves

 

And the mountain, mauve-grey, mauve mainly:

Its unclimbed, unscaled summit  

 

The I where no one wants to go

Where even the gates up the path stand closed

And where, that way, there is nowhere else to go—

Over those gates, but inward, inland from the ever-changing sea.

 

Jay Ramsay 20-22. 4. 94 (improvised on tape)/ 19. 5. 97. Lios Dana & Greenhouse Barn,