Poetry and Spirituality                                  Sheila Packa Facilitator Ellie Larmouth

In poetry, in the spiritual, we are travelers.  If we follow a well established road, a road used by many, it might not be true.  Formulas exist and sometimes work, but sometimes they fall short.  Jane Hirshfield writes:  “Spiritual poems emerge in response to central questions of human life…. mortality, and transience, isolation and alienation, the question of suffering in all ifs dimensions.”  So we travelers, poets, seekers experiment, persist, take risks to find a path forward, our way.” Join Sheila for a presentation and a meaningful conversation. Sheila Packa is a Unitarian-Universalist and a poet. Her latest books are Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range and Surface Displacements.  The latter is currently a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, awards on May 2 at the Ordway Theater in St. Paul.