Abbey of the Arts

Transformative Living through Contemplative & Expressive Arts

  • Welcome
    • Prayer Cycle
      • Introduction to the Earth Monastery Prayer Cycle
      • Day 1 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Cathedral
      • Day 2 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Scriptures
      • Day 3 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Saints
      • Day 4 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Spiritual Directors
      • Day 5 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Icon
      • Day 6 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Sacrament
      • Day 7 Morning & Evening Prayer:
        Earth as the Original Liturgy
      • Prayer Cycle Leader Resources
    • About the Abbey
    • About Christine Valters Paintner
    • About John Valters Paintner
    • About the Wisdom Council
    • Monk Manifesto
    • Join the Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks
    • Subscribe to Our Love Notes
    • Website privacy notice
  • Books
    • Sacred Time:
      Embracing an Intentional Way of Life
    • The Wisdom of Wild Grace: Poems
    • Earth, Our Original Monastery:
      Cultivating Wonder and Gratitude through Intimacy with Nature
    • Dreaming of Stones: Poems
    • The Soul's Slow Ripening:
      12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred
    • The Wisdom of the Body:
      A Contemplative Journey to Wholeness for Women
    • Illuminating the Way:
      Embracing the Wisdom of Monks and Mystics
    • The Soul of a Pilgrim:
      Eight Practices for the Journey Within
    • Eyes of the Heart:
      Photography as a Christian Contemplative Practice
    • The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom
    • Desert Mothers and Fathers: Early Christian Wisdom Sayings Annotated & Explained
    • Lectio Divina–The Sacred Art: Transforming Words and Images into Heart-Centered Prayer
    • Water, Wind, Earth & Fire: The Christian Practice of Praying with the Elements
    • Awakening the Creative Spirit:
      Bringing the Arts to Spiritual Direction
    • Lectio Divina: Contemplative Awakening & Awareness
  • Poetry | Art | Music
    • Music + DVD
    • Poetry by Christine Valters Paintner
    • Poetry Videos
    • Dancing Monk Icons
    • Other Art Collaborations
      • Monk in the World art series by Kristin Noelle
      • Saints & Animals art series by David Hollington
      • Sacred Time art series by Alexi Francis
      • Mary block print art series by Kreg Yingst
  • Programs
    • Walk the Ancient Paths: Pilgrimage
      • Monk in the World (Ireland)
      • Writing on the Wild Edges (Ireland)
      • Poetry and the Sacred Garden of the World (Ireland)
      • Vienna Monk in the World (Austria)
      • Hildegard of Bingen (Germany)
    • Live Programs and Spiritual Retreats
      • Awakening the Creative Spirit: Experiential Education for Spiritual Directors in the Expressive Arts (Northwest)
    • Community Online Retreats
      • Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color
      • The Way of the Hermit:
        A Spiritual Survival Guide for Dark Times
        with Kayleen Asbo, PhD
      • The Spiral Way:
        Celtic Spirituality and the Creative Imagination
      • Journey with the Desert Mothers and Fathers (Lent 2021)
      • Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life (Spring 2021)
    • Self-Study Online Spiritual Retreats
      • Creative Flourishing in the Heart of the Desert:
        An Online Retreat with St. Hildegard of Bingen
      • Dreaming of the Sea:
        A women’s discernment journey through the story of the Selkie
      • Earth, Our Original Monastery
        A Companion Retreat to the Book (SELF-STUDY)
      • Exile and Coming Home:
        An Archetypal Journey through the Scriptures
      • Eyes of the Heart:
        Photography as Contemplative Practice
        (Companion retreat to the book)
      • Honoring Saints and Ancestors:
        Online Retreat for the Season of Remembrance
      • Lectio Divina:
        The Sacred Art of Reading the World
      • A Midwinter God:
        Making a Conscious Underworld Journey
      • Sacred Rhythms of Sky, Sun, Sea & Stone:
        A Creative Retreat with the Elements (SELF-STUDY)
      • Sacred Seasons:
        A Yearlong Journey through the Celtic Wheel of the Year
      • The Soul of a Pilgrim:
        Eight Practices for the Journey Within
        (a companion retreat to the book)
      • The Soul's Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seekers of the Sacred (a companion retreat to the book)
      • Water, Wind, Earth & Fire
      • Watershed Moments
        in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures
      • Way of the Monk, Path of the Artist:
        A 12-Week Companion Retreat to The Artist's Rule
      • The Wisdom of the Body:
        A 10-Week Online Companion Retreat to the Book
      • The Wisdom of Mary and the Sacred Feminine
  • Calendar
  • Reflections
  • Contact

Featured Poet Series

Featured Poet: Judyth Hill

Last spring we launched a series with poets whose work we love and want to feature and will continue it moving forward.

Our next poet is Judyth Hill whose work is currently centered on honoring the ordinary. Read her poetry and discover more about the connections she makes between poetry and the sacred. Listen below to hear Judyth read her poems: The Hand That Holds the Pen Can Rock the World, On Call for Life, Writing Home, and WAGE PEACE.

https://abbeyofthearts.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Judyth-Hill-Poems-Aloud.mp3

Wage Peace

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists
and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.

Learn to knit, and make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief
as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:

Have a cup of tea …and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

Themes of Her Work

Right now, my work is centered on honoring the ordinary… I have a daily practice of sitting with a cup of milky tea, (Bewley’s, actually…) my journal, and my favorite pen, and being available to what wants to be written.

My writing is usually driven by passion and impulse, so I’m finding this a sweet and surprising process, combining an interesting quality of empty with morning light and quiet. With nothing hot driving the poem…I love the patient practice of staying open, staying present, as words form on the page. Then – nearly always – mirabile dictu! – a poem emerges into the space the openness has created.

Traveling At The Speed

“He could work with fewer hints…”
Albert Einstein exhibit,
Museum of Natural History

Einstein loved what he didn’t know.

A good way to work, and probably the only way to think about light.

The constancy of love hides in that relationship.

No matter how we drag our feet to meet the Beloved,

Shine arrives at exactly the same moment,

as if we had hurried.

Poetry and the Sacred

Writing poetry is a practice of deep listening…and into that resonance of availability, comes Presence. The act of writing itself, that delicious surrendering to deep Mystery, is an invitation to the Divine to enter... a door opening. I love the feeling of being ambushed, the Call to Poem, the heart's shofar, summoning us, not to understand, but to stand under, make relation, to hold steady in wonder.

Studying and teaching: Bliss! New poems: pure Grace!

There's a great Hasidic story, of Zoyishe, who feared to meet God in heaven, because, unlike Moses, he’d done nothing great in his life. So God says, “Listen, I didn't need you to be Moses, I needed you to be Zoyishe!” For me, reading, writing and teaching poems is remembering to be Zoyishe…to live the Gift I’ve been given.

Poetry is threshold, entrance and exit to the Morada, that enigmatic place, the tender, raw, household of faith. The celebrants, secret, but kin to hummingbird and bear, moth and musk ox, sworn to brother/sisterhood, wrestling to articulate the aching to be said – or is it heard?

Where does the urge originate? I think we are both the catcher and the caught.

I am ever grateful for this Reciprocal Echo; this singing to and back from our so utterly amazing and Blessed world, this graciousstate we celebrate: our lives!

Last Time At The Buen

Say coyote and mean surprise.
Say fallen petals and mean the way you look at me.
Say espinaca and mean the color leaves learn at birth.
Say doorway and mean a courtyard from memory.
Say chocolate and mean little Buddha in the mouth.
Say febrero and mean first scent of sweet acacia on the wind.

When we are gone say lemon tree, say new buds, say palm fronds,
And mean that you loved it here.
Say maguey and mean thorny guardians of the heart.

Say mesquite and mean the rattle of later.
Say that twice and mean the rattle heard over long distances of night alone.
Say stars falling, and don’t mean that.
Say fish in the quiet pond and mean early rain.

Say starfish and I can’t tell you what that means.
Say cloud and mean a dream that wakes you.
Say glass table and mean the first step on a journey.
Say tamales and mean Kalamata olives.
Say I will give you what I have brought and mean voice.
Say doorway again and see what it means.
Say look one more time and mean thank you.

About Judyth Hill

Judyth Hill, poet, author, editor, teacher, educated at Sarah Lawrence, where she studied with Galway Kinnell and Robert Bly, is the author of nine books of poetry and the internationally acclaimed poem, Wage Peace, published worldwide; set to music, performed and recorded by national choirs and orchestras.

A recipient of grants from the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation, the McCune Foundation, and New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities, Hill served as the Literature Coordinator for the New Mexico State Arts Division.

She is the current President of PEN San Miguel, conducts poetry and memoir workshops and classes at high schools and conferences world-round, including the San Miguel Writers Conference.

Hill leads global WildWriting Culinary Adventures in France, Mexico, Slovenia and Italy, and edits memoirs, novels and poetry manuscripts.

She was described by the St. Helena Examiner as, "Energy with skin” and by the Denver Post as, “A tigress with a pen”.

Dreaming of Stones

Christine Valters Paintner's new collection of poems Dreaming of Stones has just been published by Paraclete Press.

The poems in Dreaming of Stones are about what endures: hope and desire, changing seasons, wild places, love, and the wisdom of mystics. Inspired by the poet’s time living in Ireland these readings invite you into deeper ways of seeing the world. They have an incantational quality. Drawing on her commitment as a Benedictine oblate, the poems arise out of a practice of sitting in silence and lectio divina, in which life becomes the holy text.

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Leave a Comment October 23, 2019

Upcoming Programs

The Way of the Hermit:
A Spiritual Survival Guide for Dark Times

January 22-24, 2021
with Kayleen Asbo, PhD

The Spiral Way:
Celtic Spirituality and the Creative Imagination

Hosted by the Rowe Center
February 1-21, 2021
with Christine Valters Paintner, PhD

Recent Reflections

  • Humility + Join us today for live prayer! ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
  • Hildy Tales 2: Tús maith leath na hoibre – by John Valters Paintner
  • New Book Club for 2021: Lift Every Voice ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess
  • Hildy Tales One: Dia dhuit, is mise Hildy! by John Valters Paintner, Your Online Prior
  • Celebrate the Earth Monastery Prayer Cycle podcast with us!

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