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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.”

In this special IMS Online conversation, Joseph Goldstein and Dan Harris, host of the Ten Percent Happier Podcast, will discuss Joseph’s rediscovery of poetry later in life. They will cover such topics as mindfulness, perception, and the creative process, aloneness and silence as sources of inspiration, as well as themes in Joseph’s poetry, from intimacy and relationships to rebirth, aging, and death.

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.”

Want to read Joseph Goldstein’s poetry?

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. We have made copies available for a suggested donation of $12 to support IMS’s Retreat Center scholarship fund (shipping to U.S. addresses only). For a copy of Joseph’s book, visit give.dharma.org/JGpoetry.