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
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  • 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
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Dreaming of Stones: Poems

by Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, REACE, OblSB

Paraclete Press 2019

Description

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.

No stranger to poetry, Paintner’s bestselling spirituality titles have often included poems. In this first exclusively poetic collection, she writes with a contemplative heart about kinship with nature, ancestral connections, intimacy, the landscape, the unfolding nature of time, and Christian mystics. It can be read for reflection to spark the heart and to offer solace and inspiration in difficult times.

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Dreaming of Stones Book Trailer

Praise for the Book

(Paintner) attends to what is around her as though it all belongs to the earth, whether the machinery of a hospital room or the blossoms, fruit, and leaves of trees at different seasons. . . All (the poems) offer new ways to understand. Paintner seeks to offer 'solace and inspiration for living well in the world.' --Review by Kate Clark in Presence: Journal of Spiritual Direction

Dreaming of Stones is a work of spiritual direction, inviting readers to pay attention to the world as a holy text, and find it transfigured." --Review by Danielle Davey Stulac in Presence Journal of Catholic Poetry

To enter the pages of Christine Valters Paintner's Dreaming of Stones feels akin to wandering the undulations of Celtic wilds, the barren landscape that cloisters timeless secrets and truths. It's not hard to imagine ancient ruins off in the mist-drenched distance...The poems here are distillations of the most enduring wisdoms — love, hope, heartache, the unfolding of time — penned with a painstaking eye on the earthly. Carved out of the raw stuff of existence, especially in these troubled times, these dispatches offer safe harbor for taking stock, seeing the sacred, absorbing the solace. ---Review by Barbara Mahany at The Chicago Tribune

Christine Valters Paintner explores the subversive angles created by the intersection of poetry and mysticism . . . If the connection between poetry and the monastic rhythms of silence, pilgrimage, and retreat is of special interest, this is a collection for you. ---U.S. Catholic

There is a sense in these poems of the momentary breaking through, a flash of insight, a moment of kairos. Call it liminal space or call it grace, there is a sense in these poems of those moments breaking through to us, even though ‘everything I love will end.’ . . . But where Paintner reveals her flashes of insight, of the contrast between the ticking clock with its whisper of death and the delightful textures of Queen Anne’s lace, bluebells, and dandelion seed, of ‘the ecstasy of wisteria and a soft persimmon sun,’ in those airy threads of thing and sound and soul, the collection soars, and we too, are borne aloft.” --Book review at Contemplative Light

Her poems share with her prose the influence of Celtic mysticism—she has lived in Galway, Ireland, for half a decade—and a general sense that our unimpressive and quotidian lives are full of the materials that could sustain our souls if only we’d let them. 'Our lives are filled with vessels,' she writes in a poem called 'Cup,' 'that save us each day' (ll. 21-22). Poetry, as she makes clear in her afterword, has been such a vessel for her, and she offers us her own poems in the hope that they can be of some use to us. . . There is no hope without despair, no wonder without repulsion, no love without ugliness. Paintner’s poems remind us of this truth—which we all already know instinctively—with beauty and grace." ---Book Review at Englewood Review

Christine Valters Paintner's poems have both a mystical and an earthy sensibility to them, drawing us to the transcendent as well as the immanent presence of the divine. Her poems, much like her nonfiction writing, offer the reader an experience of retreat and sacred encounter.”  -Richard Rohr, OFM

Christine Valters Paintner’s poetry is a worthy companion to the prose she has already produced. There, her thoughtful analysis of the foundations of modern society stretch the reader beyond any kind of idolatry of the present. Here, she goes even further in her commitment to wed vision to understanding. In this new work, she brings poetic insight to observation. She presents the flash of light, the kernel of truth that goes deeper and more mystically into the heart of the universe than fact and faith can hope to do. She makes a bridge for us between experience and wisdom and gives us a veritable holograph of life.”  -Joan Chittister, OSB

These are poems about things that really matter: the tides of time, the lure of landscape, our links to our forebears, our love of home. Paintner has a musical ear and an artist’s craft with colour and texture. The work is lushly sensual in its language, generous in its patient wisdom. Dreaming of Stones is a collection you will want to keep near you, as a source of comfort and inspiration.  Here, the profound is made warmly accessible; the ordinary made wondrous.”  -Susan Millar Dumars, poet, author of Dreams for Breakfast and Bone Fire

The sequences unfold like breath, a motif that holds the collection together. I found myself immersed in the flow of the poems, and the sprinkling of imagination-catching phrases like ‘brawl of light,’ until by the end I too was saying ‘yes and yes and yes.’” -Roselle Angwin, poet, author of A Trick of the Light: Poems from Iona

Paintner describes the kinship between the paths of the poet and the monk. She writes about our journeying to retrieve a lost intimacy with the world in poems sculpted as though from fine pieces of light: delicate things made beautiful for a road less travelled. More than anything I am drawn to poems inspired by the early Celtic saints of Ireland for whom nature and a God-created world were inseparable from faith. The stories they leave behind and the poems that tell them are pieces of wisdom for an age trying to travel too fast and too loudly.”  -Kenneth Steven, author of Coracle, Salt and Light, and Iona.

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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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