Let's talk about women's holy words and writings
You're invited to a special event!
Hello, friends! I know it’s been a while since this letter has landed in your virtual mailbox. I have been in big time burnout since the end of last year. I was writing to you from my website newsletter when my book came out, and that platform did not give me the inspiration I would like to feel when I write to you. So, here I am stumblingly returning to this venue while attempting to put my anxiety on hold long enough to share what I have been working on.
This Friday evening (in two days!), I am joining my lovely friend Kathryn Knight Sonntag for a discussion of our books, both of which are fresh off the presses this year. If you would like to feel uplifted and journey through your inner thought worlds in new and exciting ways, you’ll love Kathryn’s work. She is an environmental writer who works a landscape planner and designer.
For the past ten years, Kathryn has dedicated herself to studying the feminine divine, and in particular the Latter-day Saint doctrine of a Heavenly Mother. The fruit of this study has been two glorious books, in addition to numerous poems, articles, and podcast interviews, all of which feed the soul. Her most recent book, The Mother Tree (Faith Matters Foundation, 2022), offers a series of meditations on a cosmology where the feminine divine is the anchor and the axis of spiritual practice.
Who is Heavenly Mother, and do we have an individual imperative to seek Her as we do the Father and the Son? If so, how do we come to know Her? In The Mother Tree, poet and landscape architect Kathryn Knight Sonntag addresses the rising world-wide hunger to know a Mother God by asking these and other stirring questions. What follows is an exploration into the symbolic realm of the tree of life, Mother's chosen metaphor in scripture, to discover Her regenerative powers in root work, the sturdy now of Her trunk, and the divine wisdom of the heavens in Her leafy crown. The Mother Tree presents a generous new framework for spiritual ascent—the feminine path of transformation through the archetypal tree—as a complement to the more familiar masculine way, pointing ultimately to the harmony of feminine and masculine wisdom; it is a balance needed for the healing of the soul and the world.
Kathryn gave me the opportunity to edit this incredible book, and it is one that rewards subsequent reading with new insights and depths. Kathryn has an exceptional knack for writing classics—her words reach straight to the heart. Kathryn synthesizes scholarship and experience, offering a holistic literature that connects the vital work of intellection and feeling. Although this is a work of theology and as such is holy writ in its own right, Kathryn invites readers into a spiritual process of becoming through reflection, introspection, and application. Scripture is not meant to be merely contemplative or stationary but actively transformative. In this way, The Mother Tree is a scriptural work.
I have long tried to touch the sacred with my writing. Poetry has often been a place I go when I want to say something to or about God. It’s where I go to claim my divine right as a woman to speak holy words. I believe all people have this right.
Writing The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms and Observations was my attempt to grapple with intense feelings of alienation from God after my brain injury. I wrote poems as prayers or meditations or wanderings and consider the book to be a collection of sacred writings that memorialize my struggle to reach after the divine. I don’t feel as though my journey needs to be conclusive, or as I described in this Instagram post, that relational repair with God from that experience needs to be complete.
I am always yearning for belief, but sometimes I need a break. I like to believe that God honors our pauses, our need for time to ourselves, our desire to know who we are in the whole holy conversation. I hope this striving to write with, to, and about God will continue my entire life.
When women are left out of theological conversations and are not allowed to share their experiences as holy, whether written or otherwise, we lose a crucial portion of the spiritual picture. I’m looking forward to this conversation. Please join us!
Fruit
A few pieces of my creative work have come out into the world recently, and I want to share them with you.
I loved seeing one of my illustrations from The Brain’s Lectionary featured in the “Opposition in All Things” issue of WKWNDR Magazine, alongside a story of a woman who felt plunged into spiritual darkness after being told by the Spirit that she would survive surgery to remove thyroid cancer.
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought published three of my poems in their summer 2022 issue. I loved that they turned the poetry from this issue into a podcast with professional narration, and it was fun to hear my words read and set to music. You can listen here.
I pause on the path, drop my sticks, and bend to read them like runes. Tell the stars, They said. So I do daily— I chart their breathless turning as I gather berries in the bush— Each twig’s finger marks celestial points— North is Reckoner’s Compass. South, Theory’s Backbone. West, God’s Thumbs, and East, Mount Moriah— Yet, I see more: Beyond—within—the navigable wilderness above, 18 quasars guard the edge of the universe, like many-petaled amaranths. I peer into time—my tongue bends to liquid fire, tells of trillions of suns flung from these orange hives. Now I perceive the beehive of beingness, honeycomb of allspace, linking stars into cells full of honeyed light throughout alltime.[1] I remember again words the Lord clapped in my palm—Write the stars. Write the stars. Write the stars [1] I was inspired in my description of the universe by Mark Penny’s unpublished poem exploring a brain created from many separate parts that “are linked / and make each other glow / like crowded insects / all without a queen. . . . Each in its little comb hears from the others, / tugged by its tiny spider-strands of fire.” I expanded this neural honeycomb into the fabric of spacetime, with stars as the honeyed symbolic nodes.
Always, thank you for your kind support of my work. My publisher let me know that my book has sold over 100 copies in the first half of 2022, which is amazing! It’s amazing how many connections one creative neuron can make. What have you been creating lately? I’d love to be inspired with you and cheer you on. Much love to you, friends.