Spiritual book roundup
“To Hear the Forest Sing” by Margaret Dulaney, Listen Well, 252 pages, $15
A fine way to encounter the musings in this first collection from Margaret Dulaney, a playwright who in 2010 started the spiritual spoken-word website Listen Well, would be to read them aloud. They are words meant to be heard, yes, but they’re words that work their magic whether absorbed by listening or in the silence of reading.
“To Hear the Forest Sing” is a gathering of essays from 25 years of Dulaney’s morning walks in the woods of Bucks County, Pa., with her frolicsome dogs. She trains her thoughts on an “open faith,” a faith she alternately describes as “Christian-Buddhist-transcendentalist,” and “Everythingist” — “that is, one who is in love with all of the great faiths.”
A storyteller at heart, Dulaney writes with grace, and it doesn’t take many pages to feel you’re in conversation with a true and honest friend, one who tells you she was long ago labeled “learning-disabled” and unflinchingly bares her stumbles.
It’s clear you’re in the presence of a lively mind, one filled with the epiphanies of an awakening soul. She writes: “I have given up looking for the thunderous, and look only for those quiet, tiptoeing revelations that I have learned to recognize.” “My Friend Fear” by Meera Lee Patel, TarcherPerigee, 176 pages, $18
If your idea of church is plonking down in front of the big screen and tuning in to “SuperSoul Sunday,” “My Friend Fear” might be your prayer card. It’s a meditation on fear and a short tutorial on working your way to the other side. It’s the latest from Meera Lee Patel, a self-taught artist and author whose best-selling “Start Where You Are,” an interactive journal of creativity, mindfulness and self-motivation, earned an emphatic “must-read” from Oprah .com.
Her latest begins with a deeply confessional exploration of fear, one Patel enters into by exposing the “irrational beasts” of her youth — her fear of being seen as odd because her immigrant parents kept to their old-country ways as well as the bodily shame she felt because of a 17inch scar that runs up the back of her leg.
If you’re willing to put down your own defenses, “My Friend Fear” has the power to move you.
Besides her insistence that your fears might illuminate your deepest vulnerabilities and make plain those things you so emphatically wish for, Pateel offers this bold plea: Find the things that scare you and do them anyway. Tackle your fears, one after one. Find yourself more alive than you’d ever imagined while penned inside the fear-filled cage. “Almost Entirely” by Jennifer Wallace, Paraclete, 128 pages, $18
Jennifer Wallace’s poems, gathered in “Almost Entirely” — a collection that toggles between the sacred and profane, faith and doubt, love and unrequited love — earns comparisons to such masters as Scott Cairns, Mary Oliver and Christian Wiman — as well as the claim to her own poetic country.
Wallace edits poetry for The Cortland Review, and her religious orientation is described thusly: “after decades of avoidance and experimentation, she decided in her 50s to get serious about her spiritual practice and is now, mostly, happily settled within her Christian roots.”
What pulses through these prayer poems, besides an abiding knowledge of grief and a palpable faith in the afterlife, is the residue of Catholic imagery. Any one of Wallace’s poems might be a morning’s meditation or analeptic on a sleepless night.
Consider this haunting stanza, from her sevenpart “Requiem”: “Perhaps we are here to make of earth a minor heaven/ where birds will glide higher/ in an air made more full/ by the dead’s barely audible sigh.”
Barbara Mahany’s latest book, “Motherprayer: Lessons in Loving,” was published in 2017.