Enjoy Joseph Goldstein’s Poetry—and Support IMS
When he was 75 years old, IMS co-founder Joseph Goldstein developed a surprising new passion—writing poetry. “I was traveling with friends in Spain listening to the poetry of Ocean Vuong when a creative channel opened, and poems came tumbling out,” Joseph recalls.
His first attempts at writing poetry began 50 years earlier, when he was in the Peace Corps in Thailand in the mid-1960s. “Although I didn’t realize it at the time,” Joseph reflects, “it was the first inklings of the meditative mind—a quality of attention that’s sensitive to things that might normally be overlooked.”
“It can be a moment of seeing something new or having a new perception of something very familiar,” he continues. “In that space of openness and intimacy, new understandings can transform our experience of the world around and within us.”
Joseph’s rediscovery of poetry has filled him with “a newfound appreciation of the creative process being a wonderful aspect of dharma practice. It is precisely those qualities of mindfulness, intimacy, openness, and stillness out of which poetry is born.”
This year, IMS printed a collection of Joseph’s poetry, titled Dreamscapes of the Mind: Poems and Reflections. The book includes 21 poems and almost a dozen short verses.
