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Maggie
Steincrohn Davis
Glory! to the Flowers : A Celebration
Anywhere's home where the flowers grow. September 18,
2000
Maggie and Cara have created one of the most beautiful books I
have ever seen. When Maggie's pen touches paper, inspiration
blooms and grows in your own heart. You feel a sense of kinship
when you read her books. It is as if you were destined to read
them from the beginning of time.
Perhaps the author gained her inspiration from her
surroundings in East Blue Hill Maine. She is living my dream!
She writes in her cabin in the woods, which is surrounded by
wild flowers.
Before you even begin reading Maggie's words you will be
captivated by Cara Raymaker's joyful and detailed expression of
the words. I truly hope to see more of her art in children's and
inspirational books.
"Flowers help us feel better, we know. Anywhere's home
where the flowers grow." --Maggie Davis
I love Maggie's sing-song poetry and her writing in this book
reminds me of the way a child sees the world.
"One day when I was young and walking with a friend, a
field dry as straw bloomed with flowers." To me, this
represented how we can walk through life and create happiness
where there was none, or make life better and make someone
smile. Perhaps I see this in her writing because she has devoted
her life to caring for others and has brought a smile to my face
with her writing. She knows that when we reach out to others we
receive happiness in return. No one can tell you how to get to
the path where you will see the flowers growing, you just have
to look inside your own heart, and then you will know how to
make the flowers bloom.
"Find one work in your life that never bores you. Make
sure the work is joy for you to do. Then do this work, no matter
what. It is your gift to the world. It is your blessing to
yourself." -- Dr. Edward Bach
In this work, she is celebrating nature and the life of Dr.
Edward Bach. The Dr Edward Bach Healing Trust is a Registered
Charity formed in 1989 to help the elderly, the poor and others.
It makes donations to good causes and to those working in
difficult circumstances to help others. He believed that the
mind and emotions create bodily conditions for disease to
manifest itself. He also created Bach Flower Remedies based on
the belief that flowers have healing properties. The flowers are
still prepared by infusion methods and are used to help remove
negative emotions that can impede overall health. Here is a
quote from "Heal Thyself" written by Dr. Edward Bach
in 1931:
"The real primary diseases of man are such defects as
pride, cruelty, hate, self-love, ignorance, instability and
greed; and each of these, if considered, will be found to be
adverse to Unity. Such defects as these are the real diseases
(using the word in the modern sense), and it is a continuation
and persistence in such defects after we have reached that stage
of development when we know them to be wrong, which precipitates
in the body the injurious results which we know as
illness.......But yet there is no cause for depression. The
prevention and cure of disease can be found by discovering the
wrong within ourselves and eradicating this fault by the earnest
development of the virtue which will destroy it; not by fighting
the wrong, but by bringing in such a flood of its opposing
virtue that it will be swept from our natures."
I was very pleased when I learned that the essential oil of
roses can remove anger. It is also interesting that men will
sometimes give women flowers when woman are angry at them. Could
this have some deeper message? I could completely relate to this
book as I take Echinacea and believe we can heal our bodies with
plants and also prevent disease.
When I read the first few words of this book, I remembered a
day my nieces and I once went to a favorite park. On the first
visit we had walked in the dry grass. On the second visit,
Ashley ran into the park and exclaimed with delight: "It
happened, it happened, my wish came true." "What
wish," I asked. "I wished that the next time I came to
this park it would be filled with flowers." Ashley got her
wish and now I will give her this book. She knows the flowers
can bring happiness with their faces turned to the sun and their
petals fluttering in the breeze. |
Also look for:
Choices of a Growing Woman
Roots of Peace, Seeds of Hope: A Journey...
My Father on a Bicycle
 The
Pleasure of Description, July 10, 2005
Patricia Clark takes great pleasure in describing memories of
life in Seattle and Tacoma. She is also inspired by rivers and
Lake Superior as she describes grief, wonder, joy and yearning.
The first few poems are almost an introduction to her style, but
I wasn't fully captured until I read Inflorescence: Fennel. In
this poem she describes cooking with fennel and I had just mixed
up a spice mixture with fennel seeds. While she is cooking with
the fennel root, I still had a sense of the licorice flavor
permeating the flavor of the fish. She describes the aroma as a
prayer rising through the rainbow trout's flesh. I though the
prayer image was beautiful and gave the poem a sense of
reverence. Anyone who loves to cook will relate to the images in
this poem.
Hiking Near Paradise was a real delight and will be for anyone
who found a field mouse as a child. The Sound of a Mother
Scolding Her Grown Daughter presents a scene from Orcas Island.
The island is mysterious and Patricia Clark truly captures a
contrasting moment in a very peaceful location. Here she feels
vulnerable, longing for her mother's appreciation and
understanding. She finds herself "ghostly," pretending
to read a map while crying. "I'm hunched over, trying to
stop my hands / from shaking, doing what I can to wash the taste
/ of her words from my mouth."
"Missing" was the moment where I found myself crying.
I read this poem three times in a row because the feelings are
quite conflicted and Patricia Clark captures a moment of time
where you can no longer move forward because the past is too
strong and will not yet release you. As the river moves forward,
Patricia is left wondering how she can even go to the riverbank,
where such a tragedy has occurred. The images are of a river
moving forward and a woman caught in the whirlpool of her own
emotions, in total conflict.
One of my favorite poems is the mysterious: Spirit Bundle. Here
we find the poet at Lake Superior, crafting a container made
from birch-bark curls and rugosa rose petals. She seems to be
taking all her feelings and sending them off into the watery
depths. Each object she uses to craft the small vessel seems to
symbolize a part of her she is releasing into the unknown.
"Then I laid it down - the baby ache, the grief
in the night, the hard knot wrestled free
from my chest."
To me, "Grove" symbolize all the longings a woman can
have to be one with nature or to return to the imaginative world
of her childhood.
"on a blanket dappled by clouds, reverting
to childhood, or dream of last fall
ankle deep in leaves, when I envisioned
a dress knitted together from the delta shapes
of cottonwood leaves. Wearing it, I'd be
the trunk of a swaying thing, half-tree,
half-woman, leaf color changing day-today,
mood-to-mood, river stories of the past
soaking into me..."
Throughout the poems there is a theme of life well lived amongst
the inevitable and momentary conclusions of existence. In the
few poems where Patricia Clark feels deep tragedy, we feel
deeply too. When she soars in the beauty of nature, we cannot
help but follow her into her bliss. If you have lived in the
Pacific Northwest, then you will feel the chill of a dank rainy
day, take pleasure in the peaceful images of lakes and
understand all to well, the danger of rivers.
I would like to say that this book inspired me to write a poem.
As I turned the pages, I felt a poem emerging. It was rather
magical, to feel so inspired. It was as if Patricia Clark's
depth of emotion awoke my own sense of longing.
~The Rebecca Review
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