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What I’m reading this week:
Slow Time: Recovering a Natural Rhythm of Life by Waverly Fitzgerald
Waverly has a most wonderful website called School for the Seasons where she shares an abundance of resources for living more deeply into each season. She just published her book about Slow Time which is about transforming your relationship to time. Living contemplatively is one of my primary spiritual practices and her book is helping me think even more intentionally about time and how to live even more deeply into my own rhythms.
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On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea
by Pablo Neruda
This is a beautiful collection of Neruda’s poems about his relationship to the sea with English and Spanish versions facing each other and some very intriguing paintings accompanying the text. This is the poem I am living into at the moment:
It is Born
Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.
-Pablo Neruda
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Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke
by Ralph Freedman — I have long loved Rilke as a poet who can speak so beautifully of darkness. He was an Austrian poet who lived at the turn of the century, and in reconnecting with my own Austrian ancestry I have long wondered about the life he lived.
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What reading is keeping you company these autumn days?
-Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts
**Scroll down to the next post to respond to my Invitation to Poetry and read the marvelous submissions so far***
One Response
oh, books…my heart starts pitter pattering and i want to run to the nearest book store and add this list to my every growing reading stash!! the poem is breathtaking and reminded me of a quote i read in “The Dance of the Dissident Daughter” (which is one book keeping me company this fall.) from sue monk kidd:
“the thing we need to realize, of course, is that the place of expansion is always on the border. on the edge. if we’re going to turn from restrictive god-talk and images that confine the divine to one gender, if we’re going to become whole, we have to go to the edge.
now for the paradox. when we get there, we find it’s not the edge at all. no, the edge is still further in the distance. the thing is, you can never overtake the divine.”
blessings to you this day as you sit by the edge of the sea!