This is happiness. It comes in two interchangeable types, happiness up and happiness down.

Slurshal abs winfi, mimbo weft
Yurl shafe umb shasso mish

These are just a few of the lines I’ve ended up with after taking part in Paul Matthews’ ‘Standing by Our Words’ workshop at the Beaney yesterday.

I can honestly say I have never taken part in a workshop like it before, it was absolutely fantastic! I wanted to share a flavour of it with you.

We threw bean bags, played clapping games, and created surreal poems with random spoken words. We wrote poems in made up languages and chanted them like spells, brought together our magical inner and outer worlds, and learned about Naming things, Mercury, and the healing power of language, and much more.

Paul encouraged us to embrace ‘silly’ as a way into ‘soul’, and this created the most joyful workshop I have ever experienced. It was more than a writing workshop, he was teaching us new ways to think and we had so much fun doing so. I felt my brain stretch over the course of the day as it took on new concepts and perspectives – and brain stretching and learning is something I always love :)

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