None of us is as smart as all of us

Christine Beregi has served clients of Dymun + CO as an account service and project production manager since Oct. 2008. This follows more than 20 years in the marketing/communications industry as a graphic designer, senior production artist, art director, writer, process manager, trainer, and facilitator of organizational transformation.

Additionally, Chris is a poet and, in her free time during the past two years, she has engaged in over 800 hours of pastoral visits with patients of Family Hospice & Palliative Care and at UPMC Shadyside Hospital.

We asked Chris to share some of her poetry here, and to talk about the connections between her personal avocations and her professional career.

I have always envisioned advertising as a lot like poetry. It seeks, with quintessential words and images in the forum of a graceful space, to enchant, enlighten, enliven and engage audiences with the unique experience and virtues of an organization, commodity or service.

 I am ultimately interested in discovering and revealing essence — in individuals or organizations. As I see it, brand marketers are a bit like pastors and poets. We seek first to deeply listen and observe; to discern, clarify and elicit; and then to evocatively communicate the soul purpose and unique product or service that each organization and business contributes to our highest collective good.

 For inspiration, please enjoy Chris’s poetry below. How would you describe the soul of your organization or business? How do you communicate its essence?

YOUTH, HONEY HUNTING IN THE HIMALAYAS

Who lowered this ropey ladder

aswarm with bees

like angels descending, ascending?

He who climbs through clouds

high above the ravenous gorge,

sweat-glazed, weighted with gear of the hunt,

his veins bulging like the thick vines

clutching the mountain,

must have the faith of Jacob.

Though virginal,

he too must truly believe

that his descendents, like the rock-mingled dust

sloughing from the cliff at each debriding touch,

will people the blessed earth,

and that the hive above

flows like a river of gold.

CONSTRUCTION ZONE

The Last Apples

On the final precipice,

above bulldozers and snorting backhoes

that gouge and rout the raw earth,

an old apple tree,

its roots exposed by the gnawing beasts,

rears its gnarled and heavy head.

A wild breeze electrifies its leaves,

and a shock of sunlight

irradiates the gold and ruddy fruit.

As jackhammers fire artillery-like rounds

at the road below, and dump trucks

haul the vanquished land away,

the air on this last hill remains

rife with bees

and the pungency of falling apples.

THE SEPARATION

These redwoods that we loved,

cloud-wrapped on the California coast,

are more committed than we.

Pillars of individuality,

each has sprung from secret, ancestral roots;

each has sounded for centuries the long “I”

while lifting insects, birds and mammals

in a solitary skyward quest.

Yet with solidarity they stand,

a tenured intercourse of limbs,

branches so wed, so intricately knit

that even the stricken trees among them

stand upright in the weft.

Even the mist assists them,

the morning mantle of fog vaguely drifting west

as, in the east, at the forest’s edge,

the boughs of one great tree, its left side still enmeshed,

grope the free air toward distinction.

POETS

We are ocean

hauling treasures from the depths,

heaving them on shore

with tranquil

or tempestuous throes.

A wanderer,

lonely with longing,

stoops to lift a seashell from the sand;

admires its honed,

exquisite beauty

and, pressing it against an ear,

hears, at last,

clear voices of the ageless deep

echoing

the vast, unspeakable soul.