Endless Open Heart: Contemplative Poetry and Image

This blog post is by Susan Walsh, a Meditation Guide and Member at the Edmonton Shambhala Centre.

Twelve people braved rain and wind to come to the Victoria Shambhala Centre on February 3, 2018—and to join with Pamela Richardson and me for an artists’ talk and workshop about our exhibit, Endless Open Heart: Contemplative Poetry and Image.  Together, we shared our experiences with contemplative art and creative process, and then the lively group experimented with writing poetry.

Pamela and I are both writers/poets who engage with meditation and other contemplative practices as ways of living in the world, and we are both students of Shambhala Buddhism.  Over more than a year, we developed a process of meditating and writing together, during a period of time when both of us were in a time of transition and retreat from our usual academic labour as professors in Canadian Faculties of Education.  Finding ourselves in unexpected and disconcerting terrain while on leave, we sought to trust and feel our way together—and to relate with our experiences gently and kindly.  As our creative and healing process deepened, we discovered renga, a form of collaborative poetry writing that felt like a perfect form of expression for our collaborative work.

Briefly, renga evolved in medieval Japan.  Small groups of monks and also members of the royal court wrote together, using the basic form of two stanzas: a tercet  (3 lines of 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables) and a couplet (2 lines of of 7 syllables each).  As you will note, the tercet is the familiar form of a haiku; in fact, renga is the form from which haiku later emerged.  The first writer writes a tercet and a couplet, the second writer contemplates the couplet, and then writes her two stanzas from there, and so on.  In this way, as the renga unfolds, various topics emerge and dissolve; there is no attempt to create a unified whole.  Rather, the renga is like a cascade of images and feelings.

In creating an artful exhibit of our renga, Pamela and I decided to include a few Miksang (contemplative photography) images that complemented our poetry.  Here’s an example of a Miksang image overlaid with a stanza of poetry:

Endless Open Heart: Contemplative Poetry and Image is on display from January 14 to March 6 at the Victoria centre.  We offer gratitude to Bill Pritchard for assisting with the technical aspects of combining the poetry and Miksang, to Barbara Sobon for her work in installing the exhibit, and to the Victoria Shambhala Centre for hosting it.  Also, we extend heartfelt appreciation to those who attended our artists’ talk/workshop.