American Atheneum

Joe Wrobel

A Letter to the Mystery School

Thanks for making these poems possible. Most of them are for you and about you.They are intended as tributes to the experiences we shared, and honor the impact you had on me in my eight years as a participant.

From my first workshops with Dr. Jean Houston, she challenged me to express the events shared in them in poetry. In Mystery School I challenged myself to write a poem for each monthly session, usually a response to the other participants whose contributions inspired me. Jean once described the body of work as a “Spoon River Anthology for the living.”

In most of the poems I tried to triangulate three dimensions of my experiences in your company:
–– the specific events that you caused to happen
–– the mythic and archetypal patterns they evoked in me
–– their connection and resonance to my own personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings.

As one person I wrote about told me, “Because you saw my life in such a great and complex context, I was helped to do it for myself.”

Poems of Transformation are about what was to me the central theme of Mystery School: the shift to a higher, more encompassing vision of our human nature. And frequently, about the longing and yearning for that change.

Poems for Famous People are about exemplary people whose lives we studied, such as Michelangelo, Jefferson, Saint Francis, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Ghandi, and others.

Poems for Uncommon People are about you, the individuals who inspired me, beginning with Jean and the Mystery School staff and celebrating many of the artists, mystics, jesters, seers, listeners and lovers who shared the journey.

Recent Poems and Closing Poems are those I wrote after Mystery School, mainly poems of gratitude for the patterns and currents of the themes that were nurtured in my Mystery School years and still shape my life.

For those who shared those Mystery School years with me, I hope the poems remind you of magnificent times together. For those who are hearing and reading them for the first time, welcome to this triangular world.