Sharifa Oppenheimer

A Litany of Wild Graces Sharifa Oppenheimer

We stand at a pivotal moment as the environmental crisis deepens. Scientists, environmental organizations, island nations, and the children of our world are calling for a vast encompassing paradigm shift. We search everywhere, seeking what can be done to turn the tide. Yet into this chorus, a new melody is arising, asking not only what must we do, but who must we become to meet this urgent need.

In A Litany of Wild Graces: Meditations on Sacred Ecology, Sharifa Oppenheimer points us toward an open secret. Through poetry, essay, litany, and dreams, she invites us to step out of a 21st century virtual reality and into the emerald earth. Here we rediscover our ancient neural core: kinship with all beings. In these pages we meet close relatives: woman-in-the-mountain, northern blue ice, our sun the father of all incandescence. We inhale the very breath exhaled by arctic phytoplankton.

It is through kinship through Love alone that we will be brought back to our senses, back home to the sensually alive inter-being that composes the living body of Gaia. It is, singularly, here at home in the one heart of earth that we will shuck off our husk of greed and domination. Here we can regain our humanity. We can rejoin the great conversation among beings. Step outside, open these pages and remember.