Favorites have to stir the heart, and the following really stirred me up this year. Blessed to have enjoyed them, & happy to pass them on!
Cat Stephens was looking for a hard-headed woman. Truth features four. Ranchers all, with a past that has them snared like barbed wire and a 300-mile-long pipeline that's about to suck their arid Nevada ranch dry. Who gets the water—Las Vegas or the Jorgensens? Be ready to eat dust and ride the rangelands to find out. Richman can really write desert. And the pipeline is not fiction. See my favorite cause below. |
My apple tree, which produced five blossoms. I was so excited I couldn't hold still! | Van Gogh's "Poplars at Saint Remy"—at the Denver Art Museum, until January 2. |
With this year's Phils'osophy, the writers reached new heights. I would buy multiple copies of this book to give away, if only someone had published it! Phil for the holidays!
The writing in Kissed is easily as beautiful as the cover. Stuckey explores our basic connection with nature which we've largely forgotten but which has not forgotten us. Philosophers, biologists, mystics and economists all join voices with Stuckey to pinpoint and resurrect our profound state of being not just one with nature but being nature itself. Let the fox kiss you. Let an eagle catch your eye. Let Stuckey's restoration of a creek in Oakland sing along with her recovery from severe sorrow and isolation. Kissed celebrates the up close and personal power of connection. |
If you have any gift-giving ahead in your holiday, the Goshute Legal Fund deserves
to hear from you.
God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open.