First, the Update …
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted! Here’s a brief update on other writing I’ve been doing.
I’m finishing a draft of a children’s fantasy novel called Because Of The Red Fox, and am posting chapters of this work-in-progress on my kids blog, FoxTales. Characters from the book speak about what’s happening in the novel, as well as comment on the goings-on in their lives on an island called Yonder. I invite you to check it, and share it with the kids in your life!
My website Wise Child Learning is devoted to herbal learning and nature’s magic adventures for kids of all ages. I’m posting about plants, my own herbal adventures, sharing herbs and nature with kids, and more on the blog there. If you’re at all interested, check that out too!
… And now, Prayer- Book Making:
Another project that’s up are Prayer-Book Making workshops that I am presenting with book making artist Julie Shannon.
As part of that project, I’ve decided to dive into an experiment in prayer-book making, which I’ve begun right on this blog. Prayer-book making can look and feel like anything with which you might experiment with creatively, from your heart. It is an expression of your journey with the Sacred, and how that looks and feels in your life. Really, (I’ll repeat!) that can be expressed in anyway you like–as a scrapbook, a journal, a collection of quotes, photos of loved ones, some mix of all of those or none of them!
In upcoming posts I’ll share some past prayer-books I’ve created, and glimpses of prayer-books that speak to me. But today I’ll just start by inviting you to view my new prayer-book, a web-prayer-book,which I’m calling Jane’s Book Of Deer.
Please don’t think that this web-book is any kind of expression of “how” one should create a prayer-book! It absolutely isn’t. But what I hope it does is invite you to view your life, your imagination, your heart, through the lens of the Sacred–something more than yourself, however you experience that more/beyond/forever-deepening.
I invite you to step into your conversation with the miracle of existence, and begin crafting your own prayer-book, a whirl of that magic, in whatever form flows from your being. A garden can be a prayer-book. So can a dance. Our lives are prayer-books. How do we celebrate and honor this conversation with the Divine, the Universe, the beyond-ourselves that lies within and around us and includes us? Let your prayer-book be that curious wandering and wondering!
Prayer Book - art by Jane Valencia (c) 2003