{"id":8325,"date":"2023-11-29T11:03:03","date_gmt":"2023-11-29T18:03:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.poetry-chaikhana.com\/blog\/?p=8325"},"modified":"2023-11-29T11:10:56","modified_gmt":"2023-11-29T18:10:56","slug":"holiday-book-recommendations-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.poetry-chaikhana.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/29\/holiday-book-recommendations-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Holiday Book Recommendations – 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
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I know it is a challenging time in the world. Things might feel off kilter. But this is also a special time of the year. It is a holy time, a time to recall what is sacred. It is a time to reconnect with what illuminates our minds and awakens our hearts. We enter the cave of interior awareness during this darkest period of the winter and rediscover the light within ourselves, renewing ourselves for the new year.<\/p>\n

I thought this might be a good time share this meditation on the relationship between poetry and spirituality from the Introduction in my book The Longing in Between<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nMystics write poetry, universally. Saints and sages, shamans and seers, wise women and medicine men \u2014 they sing songs, they riddle, they rhyme.<\/p>\n

Numinous experiences are not easily communicated through words. The sacred can be witnessed and participated in, but not conveyed through limited concepts. Any attempt to communicate what is perceived in states of encompassing unity and mental quiet is necessarily an act of translation. Prose is a poor medium for the task. Its descriptive language works best with known definitions and accepted meaning. Prose is a language of boundaries. Yet the most profound experiences refuse to be contained.<\/p>\n

Poetry, on the other hand, does not define; it suggests. Where prose describes, poetry allows meaning to gather. It is this elastic nature that makes poetry well suited to the sacred, enabling language to relay truth without circumscribing it.<\/p>\n

Sacred experience is beyond word and form, yet the limited mind, in trying to understand what it has witnessed, reflexively interprets its experience in terms of the world known to the senses. What emerges is a primal language of metaphor, a rich and spontaneous pidgin that develops between the limited mind and the unlimited awareness. <\/p>\n

Bliss, perceived through the senses as sweetness upon the palate, evokes the taste of honey. The mystic\u2019s trembling ecstasy, accompanied by the sense of imbibing an ethereal drink, leads to language of wine and drunkenness. Profound stillness and the perception of an all-pervading light paints before the mind\u2019s eye scenes of the full moon glowing quietly above the resting landscape at midnight. The fiery rising of the Kundalini paired with the loss of ego inspires verses on the moth\u2019s ecstatic annihilation in fire.<\/p>\n

Regardless of culture and religious tradition, mystics everywhere fill their songs with these same metaphors.<\/p>\n

In mundane perception, when everyone and everything is seen as separate and isolated, at most one can speak in simile, recognizing that one thing is like another. In that mind-set, metaphor is merely artistic pretense. But to the seer, enraptured by the holistic vision of reality as a fluid interconnectedness, one thing truly is another. Metaphor ceases to be a literary device or a dramatic mode of expression; it is observed reality.<\/p>\n

It is from this visionary metaphor that sacred poetry is born.<\/i><\/p>\n

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It has been a two or three years since I last sent out a list of poetry books as suggestions for holiday gifts. I thought I should revive that annual tradition!<\/p>\n

Poetry Chaikhana Publications<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of course, first we have to list Poetry Chaikhana\u2019s publications! The Poetry Chaikhana has published several collections of poetry.
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