At the Foot of the Mountain: Nature and the Art of Soul Healing (Paperback)

At the Foot of the Mountain — Nature & the Art of Soul Healing

Poems By Alla Renée Bozarth

This remarkable work proves that a time of devastating change can result in magnificent growth and illumination. In these intensely personal and universal ponderings, Episcopal priest, author-poet, and therapist Alla Renée Bozarth relates the wrenching decisions that caused her to move from her “exile” in the Midwest back to Oregon, to her place “at the foot of the mountain.” She takes us through her grief at the death of her father and of her young husband, then shares her gradual healing through the creative process of writing this book.

As she finds strengths to minister to herself, she ministers to us. In introducing us to her special places and symbols, her teachers, we are moved to discover our own healing metaphors for ourselves.

From the Introduction:

"This book catches me on the wing. It is a book of Between. So it is a true-to-life book, a soul-making book. But unlike tidy fiction, it has no plot. My life and soul have no plot ~ only themes. Here are themes of flights, as in music, as in a fugue."

When I wrote these themes into form some years ago, I was on the way. I was up in the air. My only map was faith. I had embarked on a destiny journey with no idea of my destination. I was telling a true story, but I was in the dark about its plot, its details, and its resolution. Now some of these things have been revealed because I have lived through them.  . . . The light breaks through into what is essential for me~ the sweet and stinging divine Mystery.  . . . [It] includes the limitless importance of people in my life. The themes of my sense of exile and homecoming are present in this book, but locked inside them are deeper themes . . . . 

Of Nature as teacher and healer, death as utmost transformation – of Grace, of courage, of willingness, surrender, wonder, of breath-taking moments of splendor in the lives of Creation around me . . . the salmon's steadfast swim out to sea and heroic return at life's end to the finger lakes where it was born, diving up waterfalls on the way and trying not to be eaten by bears or ripped in human machinery . . .  then love and rebirth at the end.

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