Teacher, therapist, and poet, Paul Weiss has made his home in Maine since 1969. A student of zen and tai chi since the mid nineteen sixties, he has also studied in China over many years. He founded The  Whole Health Center in Bar Harbor in 1981, which offered counseling, holistic health care, workshops, and meditation retreats. Its Town Hill location closed its doors just this past summer, but he continues  to counsel and to teach both locally and beyond. A lifelong poet, he has given many readings,  including his concert collaborations with the duo Timbered Lake (Crow Suncloud and Diana Newman). His published work includes the collection You Hold This (2012), as well as two books of poems,  commentaries, and teachings -– Moonlight Leaning Against an Old Rail Fence (2015) and The  Dharma of Direct Experience: Non-dual Principles of Living (2022).

Crow Suncloud (aka Tom Newman) was born in 1955 and grew up in Southwest Harbor, Maine where his deeply rooted love of Mount Desert Island and his mixed heritage of Passamaquoddy and Scotch continues to inform his spirit and his writing. Crow’s poetry is offered as a non-secular representation of his experiential journey through personal encounters that have, over time, become transformed from estrangement and suffering into alignment with multidimensional, redemptive gifts of sobriety, self-forgiveness, and wellness. His contemplative poetry is characterized by references to the natural world, spiritual principles of non-violation, and respect for the arts as primary vehicles for clarity and healing of both the individual and the collective during these pivotal times.