Holiday sale on new delightful books! Who doesn’t like free fancifulness? Each of my books released this year comes with a magic feather for a bookmark and a handwritten inscription, if you order from me. Plus, free shipping in the continental US throughout December!
After a very long wait, it’s out! My first full-length book, MY BONES ARE LOVE GIFTS, containing my poetry and drawings, is now available from Shanti Arts Publishing.
This book has a lot of magic in it. I feel like the world is at a low-energy place right now and we’re all shaken in our foundations and searching for ways to feel like life is meaningful and still beautiful. That’s what MY BONES ARE LOVE GIFTS is tapped into. It’s a channel into the intimacy of being connected with life, no matter what’s going on, and the power and beauty that can be found by claiming your own moment.
Even though I am currently dealing with many challenges, this book is full of a lot of the shiniest bits of me, with poems and drawings that span decades. It contains that inspiring light that spoke through me and guided me, that voice that’s mine but not mine, which I’ve been so grateful for throughout all the years that I wrote these poems and drew these pictures. Many of these poems are like old friends who have taught me a lot, and I’m happy to introduce them to you too.
I feel like I am fulfilling a goal of my lineage by being a woman publishing my soul truths and art in a world that has really tried to squash that and over-edit and silence me, like it did to so many women in my bloodline before me. But as you must know, there’s a lot of power that can come from listening to your soul and claiming your own multidimensional moment and sense of self. My hope is that this book is a touchstone that reminds you of your own private magic.
You can learn more about it here at the Shanti Arts website, where you can also pick up a copy, or you can order it at your favorite bookseller.
Just a tilt can do it. Some of my favorite times are the glimpsed patchwork memories that overlay a moment and suddenly have me living in two places at once.
Yesterday, as we drove through a rush hour intersection and I glanced up at the hanging green streetlight, was it the raised slope of my gaze that fired distinct synapses? Because then I found myself concurrently in a live memory of sitting by a lake house window almost three decades ago, gazing at the creamy sunlight shining past the green trees. Flash! I was there, drinking in the land and quiet. Just as I was when I was fourteen, there I was in Virginia again. And I’ve always been the same me whether fourteen or forty-two.
We drove on through the Albuquerque intersection, and was it that as soon as my gaze lowered the live memory was gone? Or did it escape along with my awareness of where my relaxation and visions were originating. In any case, I was more fulfilled for the memory, as we drove on past the drivers and orange construction cones, that I can go so many other places, and that I’ll always be me.
Our brains seem like such electrical operations, with currents and tiny connections that produce 3D miracles, and respond, just like a faulty radio, to a little tilting or even a good shake.
This life, huh? Who even knows about it, but we continue on anyway because it’s mealtime and someone has to cook. We strive toward ideals and then have to learn the skills to accept what actually happens. Society lauds lofty goals and impressive treasures, and then we each deal privately with the real necessities in life—fortitude, forgiveness, adaptation, love. Those are the ingredients that make or break a life. How do we keep going and make a good time of it. Part of creating a successful, valuable life involves looking past the highlighted targets and aiming at those subtle bulls’-eyes that would create the most difference, despite what others say, whether or not anyone else can see them. I don’t understand why there are these two realities so contrasting—the public view of life and the private. But so it is.
(This is what my left hand had to say today. It’s fruitful to give it the pen sometimes.)
Here’s a little piece I wrote almost a month ago, April 28, 2015. I just reread it and thought I’d share. It reminds me of how wherever we’re at, we’re mid-transition, all the time.
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Isn’t it nuts that it’s almost Beltane? It’s fascinating to feel the seasons turn inside me, to feel my soil churning and warming and observe the new growth pushing past my surface, knowing what to do all on its own, how to turn warmth and light and nutrients into all these new aspects of me, growing and strengthening and one day able to bloom. I even have some small blooms opening on me now—like ground-cover plants with many tiny white blossoms—seemingly unscented till you bend way down, get your nose right in there, and then you can catch its small sweet whiff. That might not seem so impressive unless you knew how thoroughly never-ending-winter I’ve felt, how I was trying to be okay with being fallow, since I couldn’t find a choice in the condition, how I thought winter was how I’d stay, so I struggled to swallow the clay and call it water. But now, standing on the raised lip on the edge of May, I see and feel the new shoots growing through my inner compost, breaking up the old death and rot, combining ingredients, adding heat and energy to waste, until my humble opening blossoms release a breath fresh and sweet. Miracles of life. It’s in the live moment that I receive the world and myself.
Dawn Sperber 
