THREE COLLECTIONS OF SACRED POETRY
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The Voice is Movement: A Life in Poetry Selected Poems, Prayers, Celebrations, and Laments Diane Elliot began writing poetry at an early age. From earliest childhood she understood poetry as a way of seeing and being, of distilling knowing and presence into language capable of evoking flashes of insight and waves of feeling in others. This very personal volume collects works spanning 50 years of living, learning, connection, loss, and recognition. Each poem essentializes an encounter with a place, a person, an occasion, or a generation, and reaches for a deeper understanding, a more authentic experience of the other. Here the living and the dead, the dreamed of and the concrete, meet, converse, and ultimately bless one another, inviting readers to steep in the blessings of their own lives. order at amazon.com or directly from the author |
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Unbounded Heart, Poems and Prayers Experiences of the divine, the sacred, and the holy, in nature and in the everyday unfolding of life, have inspired poets and spiritual seekers throughout the ages. Such poetic distillations, preserved in Jewish sacred literature in the Psalms, the lyrically erotic Song of Songs, the mystical visions of the prophets, and other ancient writings, form the bedrock of the traditional Jewish prayer liturgy. They give us tastes of the essence of religious experience, which Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has described as "radical amazement" ––sheer wonder at the astonishing variety, beauty, awesomeness, ugliness, and fearsomeness of this cosmos. In Unbounded Heart, Rabbi Diane Elliot shares encounters with traditional Jewish liturgy and sacred text, as well as with life's ordinary moments, seen through the eyes of wonder and awe. Here each prayer becomes a poem, each poem a prayer meant to awaken eyes and ears, heart and hands to "thisness," the mysterious and sacred Presence that radiates through all existence. available at amazon.com or directly from the author |
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This Is the Day, Ha-Yom Yom: poems inspired by the practice of counting the Omer This book embodies the intersection of spiritual practice and creative process. The poems arose from simple day-by-day awareness, cultivated over a 49-day period through the ages-old practice of counting the "Omer." In ancient times an Omer of barley, a sheaf, was brought as an offering to the Jerusalem Temple just after the start of the Passover observance. The priest was to wave the sheaf and to count each of the 49 days between the Israelite pilgrimage festivals of Passover and Shavuot, the crucial days of the growth of the summer wheat crop. Retooled by the rabbinic sages as a historic journey from freedom to revelation and by the 16th century kabbalists as a means of personal spiritual refinement, this potent practice enjoins us to wake up, moment by moment, to the depth and value of our unique lives, to offer ourselves fully to the path of liberation through wisdom. These poems and the accompanying guide for practice are also an offering, an expression of one practitioner's journey on that path and aninvitation to deepen your own creative engagement with the Spirit that radiates through your own life. Available on amazon.com or directly from the author |