ABSTRACT
This poem integrates various experiences of the author’s own human becomings with some of the intellectual conversation partners of her adult life, in particular with the Alfred North Whitehead of Process and Reality. She is interested in processes that open human beings, both individually and communally, to quickenings of ethical social transformations, broadening the relational possibilities of and for the future. Such transformations seem to move simultaneously towards the development of individual identities through events such as coming publicly to voice and into affirmation and expansion of the complexity and plurality of relations between humans, between humans and that which surrounds us, and between humans and the Spirit of God, creativity's impulse or, as Whitehead says, the Poet of the World. Some aspects of experience that play a role in opening humans to such motion are deliberate attention or permeability to the breadth of the past in the present moment; death and grief; creative participation; beauty; intimacy, pain, humour and play; and community and processes of voices coming into conversations of integrity together. These aspects become the six parts of the poem: (i) a place and a moment, (ii) perishing, (iii) creativity, (iv) beauty, (v) intimacy, pain and humour (saying yes), and (vi) motions of voice. Together the six parts form a study of the dynamic of becoming, exploring the felt tracings of a moment or ‘drop of experience’.
