Risking Enchantment with Poets, Mystics, and Other Dreamers

Risking Enchantment with Poets, Mystics, and Other Dreamers

A Retreat at the Columba Hotel on Iona, 2-7 November 2024

Rev Mark s Burrows, Ph.D

The poet T. S. Eliot coined the bold and provocative phrase, “risking enchantment” in times that were unsettled and even menacing - not unlike our own. Our sessions will draw on visionaries—poets, mystics, and other dreamers—who found within the darkness an inextinguishable light. We’ll join them in imagining the world through honing the “sixth sense” of wonder, drawing on a wide range of poets and visionaries, medieval and modern—Meister Eckhart and Rainer Maria Rilke; Kai Miller and Julian of Norwich; Hildegard of Bingen and Wendell Berry—as our guides. With their voices leading us, we’ll envision what it means to re-enchant our world and our own lives, drawing on a deepening measure of curiosity and vulnerability, compassion and awe. Together we’ll explore how “poetry searches for radiance” (Adam Zagajewski) and what it might mean to “suppose there was a book full of only the word, let” (Kai Miller).

This retreat is available to book online now.

About Mark s Burrows

Mark S. Burrows is a poet, teacher, translator, and scholar. His work on mystical texts led to three popular collections of poems inspired by Meister Eckhart, most recently Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light: Meditations for the Journey on the Wayless Way (2023). He has also published translations of the German-Jewish poet Hilde Domin (The Wandering Radiance, 2023), the Iranian- German poet SAID (99 Psalms, 2013), and several volumes of Rilke’s poems (including a forthcoming translation of his Sonnets to Orpheus, 2024), alongside a collection of his own poems, The Chance of Home (2018). He is a member of the Iona Community, currently living and writing in Camden, Maine. www.msburrows.com