WATERS RISING, Poems from the Red Well by the Sisters of the Holy Pen. This gripping book of poetry was created by a group of California women writers who call themselves, unofficially, the Sisters of the Holy Pen: Verne Adams, Donna Blethen, Kathy Carlson, Pamela Eakins, Mercy Hopkins, Elizabeth Terraszas, Bella Tièr, and Maia Whitemare. The writers' use of the word “holy” indicates how important the act and revelatory nature of writing is in each of their lives. The poems, composed in a writing workshop, began as quick, five to ten minute sketches. To set the creative juices in motion and to hone writing skills, the writers drew a handful of words out of the Red Well, a bowl full with hundreds of words. They pulled out the words, arranged them quickly, and began to write whatever emerged from the deep, subconscious realm. This practice of “writing from the gut” unleashes raw intuition: undomesticated, unobscured, and ungroomed. The poetry floods like a creative spring. Pamela Eakins, writing teacher and the editor of WATERS RISING, says, “All we know and all we are, all that is embedded in our personal and cultural lives, ends up flowing into our poems from the combined and recombined words we are working with. Then, as we read our poetry aloud to one another, without comment, just sharing, we bear witness, again and again, to the power and distinctive nature of each of our voices. As we write and as we listen, we can feel our inner and outer worlds shifting by degrees. Thus, this practice not only strengthens our skills as writers, but becomes a healing process in our lives.” WATERS RISING is a book of inspiration. It not only draws the reader into the Sisters' provocative poetry, but it invites the reader to enter into her own “from the soul” creativity. Read WATERS RISING, join in the process of these California women writers, and feel hidden aspects of your own soul surging into view. The poetry of your life will become rich with meaning as the profound sense of your own purpose is symbolically unveiled.
Illustrated with the Tarot of the Spirit deck painted by Joyce Eakins. Centered on the Qabbalistic Tree of Life, this symbolism clearly explores the Minor Arcana as a representation of the four components of life: spirit, emotion, intellect, andbody; while it reveals the Major Arcana to be the keys to our emotional response patterns to the symbolic universe in which we live. Includes seven monthly meditations, individual readings, and layouts.
This autobiographical fiction is set against real historical events. It journeys through time and lifetimes to ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, in the company of the goddess-women of ancient history, and embraces the freedom of consciousness itself.
Blessed Events explores how women who give birth at home use religion to make sense of their births and in turn draw on their birthing experiences to bring meaning to their lives and families. Pamela Klassen introduces a surprisingly diverse group of women, in their own words, while also setting their birth stories within wider social, political, and economic contexts. In doing so, she emerges with a study that disrupts conventional views of both childbirth and religion by blurring assumed divisions between conservative and feminist women and by taking childbirth seriously as a religious act. Most American women who have a choice give birth in a hospital and request pain medication. Yet enough women choose and advocate unmedicated home birth--and do so for carefully articulated reasons, social resistance among them--to constitute a movement. Klassen investigates why women whose religious affiliations range from Old Order Amish to Reform Judaism to goddess-centered spirituality defy majority opinion, the medical establishment, and sometimes the law to have their babies at home. In considering their interpretations--including their critiques of the dominant medical model of childbirth and their views on labor pain--she examines the kinds of agency afforded to or denied women as they derive religious meanings from childbirth. Throughout, she identifies tensions and affinities between feminist and traditionalist appraisals of the symbolic meaning of birth and the power of women. What does home birth--a woman-centered movement working to return birth to women's control--mean in practice for women's gender and religious identities? Is this supreme valuing of procreation and motherhood constraining, or does it open up new realms of cultural and social power for women? By asking these questions while remaining cognizant of religion's significance, Blessed Events challenges both feminist and traditionalist accounts of childbearing while broadening our understanding of how religion is ''lived'' in contemporary America.
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