PLACE-BASED MEDITATIONS

Offered by spiritual companions who write in a wide variety of genres

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                                                               “Genre borders are only as real as our imaginations are small.”

                                                                                                                                                         ~ Ocean Vuong, 2019, p. 245

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“These writings integrate stillness and movement, solitude and accompaniment, fresh experience and memory. To integrate means to make whole and to renew. The attention you bring and invite through this writing does both. To witness what is here — in nature and inside ourselves — allows (and demands) that prior notions fall away. As these meditations instantiate, this is a creative practice and simultaneously a mode of recognition. It's not easy to embody or to articulate this awareness. With this writing, it’s as if you teach yourself how and in sharing it with us, invite us to learn with you. Thank you!” ~ Alice Lesnick, author of Practice Dialogues: Listening to the Wisdom of Care Work 

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“It’s prose that reads like poetry.  Style-wise. The lyrical flow, the plays on words carry a poetic freedom. In purport, the content of each works to enliven the prose beyond expectations. They read as fresh, in part because they’re not meditating about a place so much as reflections that are happening in a place. In so doing they’re inspiring connection beyond the place to how the reader places themselves, while taking in the reflections. Operationally too: The observations move up and down (another form of place) the levels of abstraction—from literal description to allusion to interpretive angle to suggestive possibility. They leave me feeling inspired to think more deeply on not simply more varied meanings but meanings that are collectively or cumulatively generative of further wonder.” ~ Roben Torosyan, author of "Teaching Integratively”

​"As with the best poetry collections and essay anthologies, each one of these meditations can stand alone on its own merit. Collectively, though, they take us to a deeper understanding and appreciation of our relationship to place: place as a geographical pin dropped on a map; place as our position in the world; place as not necessarily a static point, but one altered by time, perspective, and our shifting relationship to it. Included in the meditation about the New Mexico landscape, a photo captures the “layer upon layer” of sedimentation visible on the mesas and buttes of the area. These essays, too, explore the layers of our relationship to place and to the shifting nature of being alone in those places, from “solitary and alive to isolated and vulnerable.” The meditations, collectively, present a vast and varied landscape while each piece offers a unique form through which we come to understand our relationship to the natural world, with the people around us, and with our own self." ~ Vince Puzick is the author of In the Middle of Things, a memoir that explores his effort to understand his relationship with an absent father and, too, to discover his own place in the world.

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"I have spent much of my life writing about “coming out”—in one way or another—and am fascinated by the underbelly and power of a person who defines themselves and their work in a way that we are not accustomed to seeing. It is through this lens that I am drawn to Cook-Sather’s meditations. In her self-driven wanderings, I see a flag flying in the gentlest way. A flag for the beauty of observation and solitude. A flag for a true and deep loner. Cook-Sather embraces “aloneness”—not as loneliness—but quite the opposite. Her writing examines it and lives it in a way that says: this is an identity. And the dialogue with the self, with the observation, is a viable—perhaps even soaring—relationship in itself.” ~ Erin Cressida Wilson, writer

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