poetrybook.html

...Now available...

READER COMMENTS
"Touching the Spirit is a marvellous message within a collection of beautiful poems that fill the heart with emotion and peace. One would like to linger on each one of them since they contain so much love and wisdom."

Lena Tomatis, personal friend, wife and colleague of the late Dr. Alfred Tomatis,
researcher into human listening, author of several books, including The Ear and the Voice

*****

"It's beautiful! I love the cover and was doubly moved when I opened it to see the section on “Trust” looking right up at me. Very gentle, and yet powerful words throughout. My mind started turning right away on all the places I will share it and read from it-- my women's group, workshops, in my own work on trust and spirituality."

Gail Nielsen, author of Control Freak’s Guide™ to Living Lightly.

*****

"I was totally overwhelmed by the heartfelt emotion in every verse. It is a beautiful piece of work and you should be very, very proud of it. I'm sure everyone will love their copy as much as I do mine."

Beverly Koetsier, Grand Rapids, Michigan

For more information or to order this book, contact us at: nking@uwindsor.ca

Taken at Giverny, home of Claude Monet, on our recent trip to France

The words in these pages are an attempt to articulate experiences
that are deeply personal to each of us and yet felt by all of us.
It is hoped that the listener will hear his or her own self in these words.

What is most deeply personal is what is also most profoundly universal.
It seems that our deepest individual experiences are pathways
which open out to what is shared by all.
It is from this perspective that we share our attempts to give voice
to universal joys, sorrows, and longings.
Through poetry, we move closer to make these tangibly real,
and to touch the pulse of the universe.

The words in these verses are expressed in dialogue form,
yet they can be in dialogue with a person, a community, a place, a time,
and in a harmony that draws no boundaries
whether of gender, age, race, or species.

Love is a place from which flow and into which are gathered
all the thoughts and feelings of the human spirit.
There is within us a longing for a unity which encompasses,
yet reaches deeper than all the dimensions of human existence.
Still, this longing, however incompletely, is achieved
only in sharing that path with another.

We are entrusted with the gift of our own life.
This is a living gift to accept and to cultivate.
We discover that gift fully
when we are able to entrust it safely to another.

The essence of life
is to accept into our own hands
and to entrust to another
this living gift.

Human love encompasses and evokes a variety
of interrelated feelings and experiences,
that well up from inner presence, find outward expression,
and touch and indwell the heart of another
– openness, trust, vulnerability, healing, hope ... .
Love also involves moments of silence
in which that presence remains even more real.

The awareness of these feeling and experiences,
and of the love which flows into them and gathers them into one,
becomes more profound
when explicitly recognized, felt, and entrusted to another,
as to their safe and caring home.

Love also echoes the heart of the universe,
and flows in streams of joy and sorrow,
yet resonates with a oneness
that embraces and transcends all feelings.

Love is felt in a now that unites memory and longing, vastness and depth.
Love evokes gratefulness that such a precious thing exists,
a beauty that gives meaning to life.

* * *When, in speaking, we become more intense, yet more silent and more still,
our words well up from a deeper place,
and seem to have more a resonance of truth,
We find that there is a silence that encompasses us,
and a depth that is deeper than us.

We find that we are pushed or drawn to be truthful,
really, to be true, to each other,
and to be caring and compassionate to each other,
and, even more, that truth and caring, are inseparable.

This discovery is made, this awareness emerges,
in open, trusting conversation,
that spirals at once toward greater inwardness
and toward the articulation of that inwardness.
And within and behind that spiralling process is an immense longing,
a longing uttered in words, whatever their content,
whose context is a striving towards truth and caring.

Yet as the dialogue unfolds, there is a subtle and gradual movement
toward stillness, toward silence.
There is not so much a stilling of the longing,
but its realization, its fulfillment.
It is like entering a common space together,
where we know that we are truly loved and loving,
and truth and caring are one,
where our longing to love and be loved,
giving and receiving are one, and there is no difference.

These moments of silent oneness,
perhaps sacramentalized in gentle tears,
are of a oneness that is fulness
that contains, holds together, reconciles, and transcends all–
gift and call, gratitude and generosity, truth and compassion, inner and outer.
And this is peace.

Perhaps that deeper silence encompassing all
where truth and love are one
and longing arises and is stilled
is the voice
of mystery, transcendence, divinity
* * *
Now is but a brief moment in the journey between our past and our future ...
and yet perhaps the most crucial step on our way.

Our lives intersect and are intertwined with one another.
At times, for a time, not only do we share a present and a hope for the future,
but we may enter the past with one another.
Their memories become our memories,
their present our present,
and their hope, our hope.

Even if this is only for a time,
the shared memory and hope remains always,
and we live in the awareness that such a thing exists.

And so ...
Attend to those who walk with you,
for it is by walking together
that we may create
a deeper, truer, richer way of being