The Sacred Ordinary
The Odyssey of a Ninety-One-Year-Old Contemplative

From the Author: This is a book that's not about one thing, such as old stories, or spirituality, or how to think, or how to feel better. This is my life, ninety-one years of it. It is what I was and what I have become-my ancestral roots, the family I grew up with, the family I nourished, the places that nourished me; it is what I explored-how I became a contemplative, the music I heard, the visions I saw, what I dreamed, how I've lived as a woman during nine decades of this evolution of our culture. It is about dying-giving up embodied spirit-which, like art and music, is all at once wholly sensuous, physical, and spiritual. I have written this remembrance like music, a conversation of ideas, fragments, little flashes of illumination-juxtaposed, alluded to, reverberating, entangled, intertwining like counterpoint, always changing-heard in new context with richer meaning, transformed. It is a story-poem, using stories the way poets use words. It is about the way of the sacred ordinary. It is about how I loved. It is about how I love. Skip what you will. Don't agree with me. Go look for yourself. Live your own sacred ordinary. Remember. Remember who you are. - Urashan