Friday, April 13, 2012
Shirking grace
Restless in your presence, Lord. As if You detain me. As if I have so much to do to avoid You.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Reading for spiritual nourishment
This morning, while meditating, these words formed in my mind. "Some books are prayers, you say, if they tell the truth, unzip culture's tight corset, reveal the wild longing creature within, release her to fly."
I'd just finished reading Kathleen Jesme's Motherhouse for the second time and taken a lyric journey into a shared past. Each page shimmered with a mystery grounded in the earth yet daring to breach the galaxies. Even the structure of these poems, latticed throughout with readings from the rule book used by her religious community and quotations from mystics and saints, quiver with mystery. One line of verse eliciting wonder, three lines of insight,
"Rain and more rain. Dense. I dreamed of green worms.
Saw a moth "open-winged on a tree trunk, looking like
a piece of bark. Like my selves --
some so perfectly camouflaged they resemble me. "5/17 Wednesday, Feast of St. Paschal"
Harsh, tender, reflective, brooding ... poems like a rosary of light and dark. A perfectly lovely read.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
About Me
- Beryl Singleton Bissell
- Beryl is the author of The Scent of God: A Memoir published by Counterpoint NY in 2006 and A View of the Lake published by Lake Superior Port Cities Inc. in 2001. She’s been living on Lake Superior for seventeen wonderful years, and spent 10 years writing two popular columns for the Cook County News Herald: Newcomer Notes and Putting Down Roots. Beryl is past president of the Schroeder Area Historical Society and a long-time chair of its Oral History and Marketing committees. She is a past board member of the Violence Prevention Center in Grand Marais and committee member for the Grand Marais Art Colony’s first ever annual North Shore Reader and Writers Festival. She’s been published in the Sun Magazine, Minnesota Monthly, Lake Superior Magazine, and The Trenton Times and in the anthologies, Surviving Ophelia published by Perseus Publications in 2001 and The New Writer's Handbook, Vol. 2, published by Scarletta Press in 2008 and was named Best of Minnesota Writers by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She is currently working on her third memoir: the sequel to The Scent of God.