From Chapter 1 November 17, 1989 Dear Cardinal Lustiger, Your Eminence: My name is Daniella Stonebrook Blue. I am-or was-by profession an astronomer. We are strangers to each other. Your name was given to me by a woman on a bus as we were traveling across New Mexico. Because of her insistence, I am writing to you about this dark period of my life. I need to speak to you about the matter of light. Light is the alphabet of God. I knew this when I was born and then I forgot. This is the first time I have understood it as an adult woman. Even as I prepared to write these words, I didn’t know what they implied until they appeared on the page.

Poetry arises from the search for sacred language that describes the awe and mystery of the real world. Deena Metzger is a contemporary poet who has aligned herself with this ancient tradition. This collection, that includes selections from her earlier books of poetry, Dark Milk, The Axis Mundi Poems, Looking For the Faces of God, A Sabbath Among the Ruins and Skin: Shadows/Silence, draws on her life's work, more than forty years of devotion to the word, and aligns itself with such a quest for meaning that has increasing urgency because of the spiritual and political ruins of our time. It is no longer sufficient, she believes, for the poet to be an unacknowledged legislator of the world, for the committed poet is called to engage with full heart in the continuous activity of restoration on behalf of beauty, wisdom and the natural world. Here we meet the articulate voices of the otherwise silenced, the voices of the animals, the land and the elementals, rain, wind fire and earth, and our responsibility to them. This book combines a searing look at the horrors that we permit, the anguish of human cruelty, brutality, and indulgence, but carrying the fierce determination to live, act, and write on behalf of the soul in all its manifestations. In this collection, despair is acknowledged but not indulged, as Metzger engages in the meticulous task of reconstructing a world, informed by the past and history as language demands, but, extracting ourselves from its violence and caprices, looking toward a viable future and all its unexpected possibilities.

Though women have long felt kinship with animals, in the past, they seldom participated in the study of them. Now, as more women make animals the subject of their investigations, significant new ideas are emerging--based on the premise that animals are honored co-sharers of the earth. This unprecedented anthology features original stories, essays, meditations, and poems by a vast array of women nature writers and field scientists, including:

DIANE ACKERMAN - VIRGINIA COYLE - GRETEL EHRLICH - DIAN FOSSEY - TESS GALLAGHER - JANE GOODALL - TEMPLE GRANDIN - SUSAN GRIFFIN - JOY HARJO - BARBARA KINGSOLVER - URSULA LE GUIN - DENISE LEVERTOV - LINDA McCARRISTON - SUSAN CHERNAK McELROY - RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ - CYNTHIA MOSS - KATHERINE PAYNE - MARGE PIERCY - PATTIANN ROGERS - LINDA TELLINGTON-JONES - HAUNANI-KAY TRASK - GILLIAN VAN HOUTEN - TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS

In the tradition of Annie Dillard and Natalie Goldberg, this resource for writers and non-writers alike shows the act of writing to be a dynamic means of knowing, healing, and creating the body, mind, and spirit.