Читать книгу The Wisdom of Wild Grace - Christine Valters Paintner - Страница 6

These poems are invitations.

When I long for expansiveness and connection to something far greater than my own daily concerns and struggles, a walk by the sea or in the forest expands me.

We live in a time when Earth is threatened on so many fronts by human development. Slowly we seem to be awakening to the truth that our personal well-being is intimately woven together with the well-being of all creatures and plants. Many of us might have been taught by our religious traditions that humans have dominion over nature or that animals don’t feel pain or have souls.

The more we cultivate our own intimacy with the wild, the more we open to different truth. Wildness doesn’t mean we have to go out into the forest or travel long ways; the wild is a place within us.

Each poem here is a doorway into this inner wilderness, a call to sit and be present to what we discover beyond the borders of our neatly controlled worlds. Wildness is vulnerable, risky, spacious, and full of possibility. And this is where I invite you to sit and rest awhile and dwell with me….

I have long loved the stories of Christian saints who had a kinship with animals. They come mostly from the early Christian desert and Celtic traditions, but also feature later medieval saints such as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Julian of Norwich.

Ever since I was a child, animals have offered me a window into an aspect of the divine presence that is more intuitive, more instinctual, wilder. The monastic tradition held the conviction that this kind of connection and friendship with the animal world was a sign of holiness at work.

The heart of this collection is a series of poems inspired by the stories of animal and saint connections. I meditated with each story to listen to what it might reveal. Each story felt like a way into a new or renewed way of being in the world where nature is an intimate guide and companion. These stories remind me of some of the old fairy tales that hold wisdom for how to live well if we pay close enough attention.

Many of the other poems in this collection are inspired by the tradition of the psalms of creation, those prayers of praise that celebrate how everything conspires to share joy and gratitude for this beautiful world.

What we need most right now is a revolution of love. We desperately need to fall in love with creation so that everything we do reflects this love. If reading these poems supports you to see the world in a new way, to make time to sit outside and cherish the breezes, or to fall more in love, then my heart is full of gratitude and gladness.