Half A Shade Braver – Foundational Elements of A Courageous, Everyday Life,

In Spring of 2019, David sat down for lunch in Seattle with Catherine Meeks, Executive Director of the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing. After a spirited conversation, Catherine invited David to come to Atlanta for a public event in fall 2020. Because of the unfolding of Covid-19, it has been moved online, so we warmly invite you, wherever you are, to attend this special event and support the center and the important work they are doing:

The Absalom Jones Episcopal Center for Racial Healing is pleased to invite you to the Bishop Frank Kellogg Allan and Elizabeth Allan Inaugural Lecture which honors them for their decades of generosity and service to the Episcopal Church, educating children and commitment to creating space where Beloved Community is invited to form.

In addition to this, their love and commitment for the arts is clearly demonstrated by them through their personal engagement with them and their untiring efforts to encourage and create resources, opportunities and spaces for others to have greater access to the arts and the healing energy generated by them.

It is in keeping with this spirit of the gifts brought to us from the arts, that the Poet/Philosopher David Whyte has been invited to deliver the lecture to inaugurate this ongoing tribute to them which will occur on a biennial basis.

Half A Shade Braver: Foundational Elements of A Courageous, Everyday Life will explore courage as more than acting bravely against an outer foe, but as a measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with community, a work, a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. David will guide us to look into some of the bold, sometimes courageous, always robustly vulnerable and sometimes painful steps in bringing our seemingly interior states out into the world, to be and to do, to achieve and above all to give.

Kind regards,

The Many Rivers team