The Iona Poetry Community

07/16/2023

June 2023: What is your relationship to fathering?

07/16/2023

Poetic Medicine in Action: IONA Poetry Community

07/11/2023

06/13/2023

“The Everlasting Moment”

My Heart seems to take me to places that my mind would usually resist – Sometimes with all its might. Like the neo-natal emergency room at Children’s Hospital in San Diego where my daughter spent the first weeks of her life.

My heart was broken a hundred times by her vulnerable soul – Overcoming all odds and running through he house at 3 after 12 surgeries to keep her alive. She was the happiest child I had ever seen with enthusiasm bursting from her deep penetrating eyes. Each new thing or experience in her world filled our home with laughter and sighs.

She would dance around the living room practicing to be a mouse for the Nutcracker and then sit at our $200 piano for long periods of time creating new pieces of music and then give them her own titles.

She once gave me a plaque for fathers’ day that showed us together in several pictures with a phrase she invented that I wrote down when she was 5. It said “Thank you dad for the advice of the everlasting moment”.

Her everlasting moment is continuing now with growing intensity as she pursues her PHD in Economics related to Health care. Her mentors are a Nobel Prize winner and a Harvard professor who has taken her under his wing and will be writing a paper with her for her dissertation

She now will be going places with her new wings that no one could have imagined when she looked out from those everlasting eyes – all monitors and tubes from the ICU unit at Childrens Hospital.

John Foos – April 2018

06/07/2023

Poetry in the wild! John sharing the poem "Lost" by David Wagoner with fellow hikers.

06/07/2023

Poetry has been a springboard of ongoing enfoldment in our small San Diego Poetry Community for nearly 20 years since our friend-and-mentor John Fox showed up at a book signing in Del Mar one warm summer evening. He offered a way for people to connect tenderly and openly with each other and Rebecca and I (John) went with it. Each month for this long-20-year period we have discovered together the rich interior worlds that we all share - but too often just stays interior. The joy, the sorrow the insight and the mystery of life is constantly blooming out like tender flowers when the morning light warms the potential inside. We who are witnesses to the blooming un-fold simultaneously simply by listening deeply to each other. Over and over a participant will write something that becomes a searchlight moving through the dark forest of their pastor future. We a]l become the batteries of that search light simply by our willingness to listen.

And as the poems unfold-one after another, the light in the room becomes brighter and we actually begin to notice each other. And that noticing becomes a mystery, which celebrates the individual. Morality is reborn over and over and our smiles and tears become the opening petals of the morning flowers. Community renews itself month after month, year after year and poetry becomes the catalyst of change. New people join, existing participants come back and our little community grows and grows. Poetry with its metaphors and penetrating words has become the nutrient to our communal soul here in San Diego. Each month new sources of mental, emotional and even physical food is gathered and shared. A renewal occurs and even as age pushes us towards the other side we walk with stronger and stronger steps together. This gift is why poetry community is one of the ways that a new world can be born. - John Foos

06/07/2023

Our intent is to explore the human journey together. In a world where community can be scarce and true communion with others a rarity, the Iona Poetry Community has flourished for over twenty years.

We are a vibrant community that shares life through a monthly writing meeting. The closeness and support that blooms here sources from an inner spring that naturally results in revealing truth about our lives through metaphor. Relationships made on this foundation are free and lasting. We glimpse ourselves in the other and are nourished by the exchange.

Our door is open to all who love poetry and humanity and who are interested in diving into their own hearts and minds.

We meet on the last Saturday of each month with exceptions in November & December when meetings are mid-month.

06/07/2023