Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Quicksilver of the Heart
    Quicksilver of the Heart
    Quicksilver of the Heart
    Ebook99 pages40 minutes

    Quicksilver of the Heart

    By Brenda Peddigrew

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Invite these poems to companion your heart and let them stretch your soul.
    Brendas spare, simple words say big things. In this very intimate collection we
    are offered messages of lifes mysteries in a language as clear as any fine spiritual
    direction. Throbbing through the poems is her Celtic sensibility, offered in the
    calm dialect of a sagacious heart bred to thrive in Newfoundland weather. Taken
    as talismans of transformation, these poems beg rereading, like stories retold over
    strong tea to take off the chill and to strengthen the heart. We are whispered secret
    courage to engage life, open-eyed and ready. The stanzas give voice to the quiet
    satisfactions of honest, open-hearted awareness and offer a travelers guide into a
    soulscape both delicate and wild. From a knowing of winters graced grit to the full
    out exhilaration of the greening again spring, Brenda opens to us the experience of
    a woman stepping into elder-hood well versed in living close to the heart of things.
    Look, she says to us, despite any initial evidence to the contrary, small moments are
    thresholds into soul size transformations and no less than lifes best gift. (Gabriele
    Uhlein OSF, author and artist, Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateAug 24, 2010
    ISBN9781450246590
    Quicksilver of the Heart
    Author

    Brenda Peddigrew

    Brenda Peddigrew encounters the natural world mainly from her home in the Algonquin Highlands of Ontario, Canada’s “near north,” which she photographs as often as she writes about. She is an international facilitator, spiritual teacher, retreat guide and sometime adjunct professor(online) in the D.Min. program of St. Stephen’s College at the University of Alberta.

    Read more from Brenda Peddigrew

    Related to Quicksilver of the Heart

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      On the Trail

      Feb 7, 2018

      MARY ALLEN is the author of a memoir, The Rooms of Heaven: A Story of Love, Death, Grief, and the Afterlife (Knopf, 1999). She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship

      7 min read

    • Article

      Why I Walk

      May 5, 2021

      Why I Walk
      4 min read

    • Article

      TWO ESSAYS from FINGER EXERCISES FOR POETS

      Nov 1, 2022

      Russian Formalists have a word, “ostranenie,” which means constantly attempting to discover new ways of looking at everyday things. There are almost always two realities rubbing up against one another in every poem, whether they are specified or not,

      10 min read

    • Article

      Komorebi

      Nov 6, 2023

      Komorebi
      6 min read

    • Article

      Whale Of A Poem

      Jun 14, 2021

      Whale Of A Poem
      3 min read

    • Article

      Prayer Consists of Attention: On Reading as a Spiritual Practice

      May 9, 2022

      I realized that all words, even those contained in secular literature, have the potential to become prayers. The post Prayer Consists of Attention: On Reading as a Spiritual Practice appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      On the Trail

      Feb 14, 2018

      MARY ALLEN is the author of a memoir, The Rooms of Heaven: A Story of Love, Death, Grief, and the Afterlife (Knopf, 1999). She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship

      7 min read

    • Article

      Reading as Sanctuary

      Nov 7, 2021

      As a young child, reading took me to imagined worlds. Adventures had and literary friendships made. I still remember faking a sick day so I could stay home and read Matilda in one sitting (sorry, Mum) – one of my first (and only) displays of childhoo

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Vitality of Opposing Energies: The Millions Interviews Paul Lisicky

      Mar 17, 2020

      I was very conscious of trying to write about emergency—how do people survive when they can’t take for granted they’re going to be around in the morning? The post The Vitality of Opposing Energies: The Millions Interviews Paul Lisicky appeared first

      9 min read

    • Article

      All This Blood and Love

      Nov 22, 2017

      All This Blood and Love
      6 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2019

      She grazes in a meadow, sulphur blossoms spillingfrom her jaw.At this moment she seems so calm, she could be holyif what that means is something like beingwholly unaware of the good she gives,how even her rooting tills the soiland even her shitting f

      2 min read

    • Article

      What We Found in Writing

      Jun 10, 2020

      What We Found in Writing
      17 min read

    • Article

      Sacred Play

      Feb 27, 2024

      NATURE HAS ALWAYS soaked me in waterfalls of wonder. In a redwood forest, when I crawled into the hollow of an ancient tree and listened to its centuries of stories. By a lake, as I watched thousands of flamingos suddenly take flight. In the ocean, w

      3 min read

    • Article

      On Healing

      Sep 4, 2020

      In 2016 my partner and I bought a wooden cottage on 10 acres of land, on an ecotone where the woodlands meet the foothills of the mountains. The area had been logged relentlessly in the 1950s. One by one, the tall trees of the old growth cedar forest

      7 min read

    • Article

      Reports From Near And Far

      Nov 25, 2021

      susanne paola antonetta MY HOMETOWN of Bellingham, Washington, is a last corner of the continental United States, a final chew of land before the long drink of the Pacific. We’re bound to the west by water, to the east by mountain, and twenty miles t

      17 min read

    • Article

      Song Of The Woods

      May 23, 2022

      Song Of The Woods
      7 min read

    • Article

      Walk Your Labyrinth

      Aug 19, 2022

      Walk Your Labyrinth
      6 min read

    • Article

      Your Poetry

      Apr 30, 2021

      I once was a chestnut, I hung from a tree,Like all of the young, I longed to be free.One day I landed, it felt like a mile.I need not have worried, I was in Hutton soil.My work had just started, ‘twas about 1803.That’s when I knew, I’d become a tree.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Reasons to Believe

      Nov 10, 2019

      Reasons to Believe
      2 min read

    • Article

      A CLOSER LOOK AT Being a Fox

      Nov 1, 2017

      A CLOSER LOOK AT Being a Fox
      7 min read

    • Article

      Writing From The Edge

      May 1, 2019

      One outreaches language in poetry when the inseeing elements of consciousness ask the unseen of life to come forward. My aim has been to unseat what we assume about time, about the verities of love and death, of the consciousness of those other senti

      9 min read

    • Article

      An Interview With Xueyan

      Jun 24, 2023

      An Interview With Xueyan
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Quicksilver of the Heart

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Quicksilver of the Heart - Brenda Peddigrew

      Author’s Preface

      Like many of the poems in this book, the title Quicksilver of the Heart arose out of a very ordinary encounter in a very ordinary event. I was removing an old thermometer from the side of a tree where it had served well for a few years, when it slipped out of my hand and the glass part of the thermometer hit a large stone just at the foot of the tree. Mercury spilled out and over and around. In my rushed and futile attempts to gather it up, a thought began to grow: isn’t this like my own heart? Haven’t I been doing this work of gathering up the fragments of my heart for most of my adult life, and with the same results? Might it be time to try another way, like surrender? This decision changed my life.

      The poems in this collection continue the journey begun in When the Bones Find Their Singing Place and continued in SoulWinds: poems of transformation. The poems in Quicksilver of the Heart move visibly deeper into spiritual questioning and the presence of the Divine. They have taken me into wells of grief and planes of light. They illumine the natural world and have given me glimpses into the sacredness of every single living thing without exception.

      But what is the one work and why are these poems of the one work? In a recent winter, while shoveling snow, that necessary beautiful engagement with the world, I realized that work outside and work inside are really the same. When I listen to my heart and my soul and take their guidance seriously, I am really working in the outer world as well, for the quality of my presence changes then and my influence for good increases. As I get older I can see this more directly, more concretely, and the poem The One Work says it best. Being and doing are married, and one without the other loses transformative effect.

      Finally, I am often asked how it is I write poems. There is no set time. There is no plan, or any carefully thought-out intent. There is no sweating over particular words or agonizing over length or form. The closest I can come to describing my writing process for poetry is that – like William Blake - I take dictation. Most of the poems were written during the half-hour silent writing time of the bi-weekly Saturday morning meeting of the Algonquin Highlands Writers’ Resonance Circle. Sitting silently, I open inside and wait for a word or phrase; when one comes I write it down and the rest follows, often with one or two poems being written in that half hour. Similarly, when I’m doing other things anywhere, a word or phrase will arise inside and I will endeavor to write it down as soon as I can. These inner words have a particular luminous quality which I have learned to respect over years.

      May the poems of Quicksilver bless, guide and protect you.

      Brenda Peddigrew

      Algonquin Highlands, ON, Canada

      June 2010

      Closing Windows Against the Rain

      I used to think that God

      was present only when I did

      sacred things: sitting in silence

      on a cushion, or in a pew, for example;

      praying in a Church

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1