Exploring Art and Creativity as a Space for Healing, Connection, and Hope
In this course, join in our exploration of how art and creativity bring healing, connection, and hope—through conversation, writing, poetry, music and sound, film, visual arts, and more.
Throughout our 50 years of work healing people and the Earth, Commonweal has always embraced the power of arts and creativity in bringing inspiration, vision, and healing in our bodies, souls, and communities. From expressive arts like painting, Sandtray, writing and poetry, music, and movement, the Cancer Help Program offers expressive art therapies that help people to find meaning in their experiences; find inspiration and beauty even in the midst of grief or pain; and find healing even in extreme uncertainty or illness. Today, creativity and the arts run through all of our programs, and we have several programs dedicated to developing leadership and community for youth through the arts.
Art credit: “Radical Hospitality” by Jon Marro
Course Material
Art for Our Common Good: Creativity, Health, and Civic Life | Part 1
What role can art play in helping us meet this moment? As communities face growing loneliness, burnout, environmental anxiety, and civic division, the arts can create spaces for healing, connection, and hope. Join us for part 1 of this podcast, a conversation with Former National Endowment of the Arts Chair Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, Stanford Arts Director Deborah Cullinan, and Host Lisa Simms Booth.
Invitation to Land All Around Us
In this invitation to Land All around Us, Summer 2025 Visiting Scholar Craig Chalquist invites us to join him as he embarks on his residency. In his worldview, imagination, story, and creativity let us tune in on a Greater Conversation unfolding continually within us and with the land around us. He asks: How are we called to respond deeply and soulfully to our turbulent time? Might that response include joining others to weave into being a new worldview?
Songbath Sanctuary
Rest and renew in a rich sonic atmosphere created by Deborah Koff-Chapin.
An Afternoon of Indian Classical Music
Join us for the third in a series of sacred music celebrations at Commonweal, this time with Manik Khan (sarod) and Nilan Chaudhuri (tabla). Held at the solstice and equinox, the concerts—and gatherings afterward—are designed to bring people together in a convivial setting around music which delights, inspires, and elevates the soul.
Living by Poems
Join Host Michael Lerner for a reading and conversation with poet Jane Hirshfield, a lay-ordained practitioner of Soto Zen.
Isabel Lena Fernandez and Anika Velasquez, with Host Ladybird Morgan
Join TNS Host Ladybird Morgan for a conversation with two young women filmmakers about how the arts shape the voices of culture and about their view of what is happening in our world.
Things As It Is, A Roving Discussion of Zen in the Vernacular, Crow Poetry, and Beyond
Join Host Steve Heilig as we bring back author, actor, and local celebrity Peter Coyote to Commonweal New School to talk about Peter’s recent books—Zen in the Vernacular: Things As It Is, and Tongue of A Crow—and ramble across many other topics.
What Do We Know? Exploring Non-Western Approaches to Wisdom
Join us for a new kind of collaborative learning experience hosted by Commonweal Narrative Director Susan Grelock Yusem.
Kathleen Dean Moore, Hank Lentfer, Host Kyra Epstein
Join author Kathleen Dean Moore and Naturalist Hank Lentfer in virtual conversation with TNS Host Kyra Epstein to celebrate the earth’s wild music and creatures.
Rachel Naomi Remen and Michael Lerner
Join Rachel Naomi Remen and New School Host Michael Lerner as they share some of the poems (and sayings) that they live by.
Festival of Sacred Music
Join us for the first in a series of sacred music celebrations at Commonweal, designed to elevate the soul and be a source of inspiration and delight for the months in between concerts. In this first concert of the series, join us in welcoming pianist Maryliz Smith, who brings pieces of her own composition as well as other inspiring and sacred music.
Let’s Celebrate Gratitude
In a special presentation for the holidays, join us in welcoming Commonweal's own Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, and musician Karen Drucker: two feisty women of a certain age who have been friends for years. In this episode we sing together, hear stories together, and tell some of our own.
Quartet San Francisco
~Co-presented by KWMR radio~ Join us for a concert by three-time Grammy nominees Quartet San Francisco, a non-traditional and eclectic string quartet led by violinist Jeremy Cohen.
