a prophetic voice-

The writing experience is a different journey for each one of us who embarks upon it. For me, many of my most deeply creative periods have been in response to the hard times in my life- challenges, crises, pain, loss...for whatever reason, these trips into life's valleys have been the places where I have been brought to a face-to-face confrontation with my fears...my hopes and dreams... with my innermost, deepest, truest self. And it is there, in the midst of the maelstrom, that words begin to emerge... The other greatest creative stimulus is always deep emotion: awe, gratitude, the overwhelming wonder of life itself...and again, words emerge...And yet, so often, I find myself writing about the mundane, the ordinary, the everyday....which perhaps means that the creative energy is ever-present, just waiting for me to release it. This was written on the twentieth anniversary of my son's death. After the night he died... (twenty years later) The storm blew fla...

Spent some time with my favorite poet last evening, reading some of the "gems" from Mary Oliver's latest volume, A Thousand Mornings. And as I read the words of one of them, "Poem of the One World", I wept, the beauty of the words overtaking me, astounding me, aweing me, bringing me to my knees, for I was hearing the voice of God coming from the pen of this seventy-eight-year-old poet. Thanks be to God!   POEM OF THE ONE WORLD by Mary Oliver This morning the beautiful white heron was floating above the water and then into the sky of this the one world we all belong to where everything sooner or later is a part of everything else which thought made me feel for a little while quite beautiful myself.