Illuminating Talk, Enlightening Theater
The Lensic Performing Arts Center has joined with theater artist Nina Wise and activist Randy Hayes to present Election Year: A Festival of Optimistic Voices. In this series of inspiring evenings, some of the world’s leading visionaries gather to discuss insightful new perspectives and solutions to the pressing questions of our times. Following each discussion, Nina Wise will weave the themes of the evening into one of her signature performances, transforming the conceptual issues from the mind to the heart.
In this election year political speeches overflow with the call for change. Discover what that change could be. Learn about viable, affordable solutions to critical issues that are available to us right now. Become informed. Become inspired.
Evening 3
Women Transforming the World
Jane Hirshfield, Susan Griffin, Wendy Johnson, Joan Halifax, Natalie Goldberg
May 25th , 7 pm, $10.00
Five powerful women come together for the final evening of Voices. Around the world, women are playing key roles in the transformation of social systems from models of domination and violence to models of cooperation and respect for all life. These five women are important visionaries in their respective fields who integrate deep spiritual understanding with their notions of politics, democracy and our relationship to this earth. This promises to be a rowdy, moving, and inspiring evening.
Jane Hirshfield is an award-winning poet. She received her bachelor's degree from Princeton University in the school's first graduating class to include women. Her books of poetry include After, Given Sugar, Given Salt (which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), The Lives of the Heart, The October Palace, Of Gravity & Angels, and Alaya. She is the author of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. About her work, the poet Rosanna Warren has said: "Hirshfield has elaborated a sensuously philosophical art that imposes a pause in our fast-forward habits of mind.” Her honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, Columbia University's Translation Center Award, the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. She is currently on the faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and multiple volumes of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.
Susan Griffin is a poet, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. She was born in Los Angeles California in 1943, in the midst of the Second World War and the holocaust, and these events had a lasting effect on her thinking. The time she spent as a child in the High Sierras and along the coast of the Pacific Ocean also shaped her awareness. Her work moves beyond the boundaries of form and perception, as she draws connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and traces the causes of war to denial in both private and public life. She is known for her innovative style. Her groundbreaking book Woman and Nature is an extended prose-poem. A Chorus of Stones, the Private Life of War, blends history and memoir as does Wrestling with Angel of democracy, the Autobiography of an American Citizen, a work in progress (to be published by Trumpeter books in the Spring of 2008) that explores the state of mind that engenders and sustains democracy.
Wendy Johnson is a lay Dharma teacher ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh. Wendy has lived and practiced at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in northern California since 1975. Practicing engaged Buddhism, Wendy combines her 30-year training in organic agriculture with a commitment to teaching meditation engaged with the life of the world. Her Buddhist philosophy is the inspirational force behind her work leading walks, practicing organic gardening and teaching. She has been involved for many years in establishing gardening programs in Bay Area schools. Her book, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate on Zen practice and gardening has been recently published by Bantam Press.
Joan Halifax is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and author. She is Founder, Abbot, and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center, a Buddhist monastery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has worked in the area of death and dying for over thirty years and is Director of the Project on Being with Dying. A Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order, her work and practice for more than three decades has focused on engaged Buddhism. In May, 2005 she became a Spiritual Director, in Training with Roshis Bernie Glassman and Pat Enkyo O'Hara, of the Zen Peacemakers. She is Founder and Director of the Upaya Prison Project that develops programs on meditation for prisoners. She is founder of the Ojai Foundation, was an Honorary Research Fellow at Harvard University, and has taught in many universities, monasteries, and medical centers around the world.
Natalie Goldberg an author and teacher of creative writing. She is the author of Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within, which broke open the world of creativity and started a revolution in the way we practice writing in this country. The book has sold over one million copies and been translated into fourteen languages. Since then she has written nine other books, including the novel Banana Rose. Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World, is about painting as a second art form. Her lively watercolors are exhibited at Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Natalie has been teaching seminars in writing as a practice for the last thirty years. People from around the world attend her life-changing workshops and she has a reputation as a great teacher. The Oprah Winfrey Show sent a film crew to spend the day with Natalie for a segment on Spirituality that covered her writing, teaching, painting, and walking meditation. She currently lives in Northern New Mexico.
