Bread & Poetry

Love during the Long Dark: A 2-hour Gathering Around Grief & Love 

For our second annual love & grief gathering, we'll be exploring the Long Dark with Holly Trulhar—this time of profound collective unraveling that calls us to become more intimate with both loss and love. Together we'll explore the nature of the Long Dark and what it asks of us, engage in poetry and writing practices, discover how grief and love shape one another, and join in a communal micro-ritual with sculpting and song. 

During this gathering, we'll touch on Francis Weller’s gates of grief, including personal losses and the sorrows of the world, revealing how they can become medicine for the Long Dark. Come be part of this soulful space where we'll hold both the heartbreak and beauty of these times.

Holly Truhlar (she/they) is a grief therapist, group facilitator, and community organizer. She’s most known for her collaborations with politicized grief tending, collapse psychology, and soul activism. Over the last decade, she’s facilitated small and large groups (700+) using ritual, storytelling, creative processes, and Deep Democracy work. She earned a Doctorate in Law and Masters in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology, though she learns the most from her relationships with the Wild, including the land she inhabits, Ancestors, Hekate, and donkeys.

"Poetry, like bread, is for everyone." -Roque Dalton

Bread & Poetry is for people interested in language, particularly poetry, as a doorway to something sacred inside themselves. Mixing experiential writing exercises with lively Q & A and a range of featured poets, Bread & Poetry serves up language that dissolves borders between self and Self; self and other. It is a way to hold space for a community of undefended hearts, each speaking a love language at once personal and universal. As the poet David Whyte says, “Poetry is language against which you have no defenses.”