A Mystic in the Mystery: Poems of Spirit, Seasons, and Self

By Mary E Berg

In this collection, rhymed and unrhymed verses capture the nebulous double thread that connects our inner consciousness and our outer reality. The poet reflects on how one's core spiritual nature intersects with the physical landscape. She sees the glistening diamonds on a blade of grass, notices the fog piercing the early morning river valley,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bending Wave Books
• Release date: Mar 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798218366629

Mary E Berg

Mary E. Berg has studied writing at the Loft Literary Center, the Madeline Island School of the Arts, and the Split Rock Arts Program. Her poems have appeared in "Unity Magazine," "Daily Word," and "The Phoenix Spirit." She lives in Apple Valley, Minnesota.

Book preview

Preface

Over three decades ago, I wrote a rhymed poem to celebrate the adoption of our daughter. Ten years prior to that poem, I’d started sporadically keeping a journal after hearing Christina Baldwin speak about her book One to One: Self-Understanding Through Journal Writing at a Minnesota Home Economics Convention. I bought a copy, read it, and started filling notebooks with thoughts, recorded dreams, glimpses of life’s myriad facets, and descriptions that captured vistas and visions while out walking. In 1998, I submitted a Christmas poem to Unity Magazine. It got accepted. Overjoyed at this first official publication, I had a copy professionally framed. Craving recognition in my large, extended family, I gifted the magazine to my parents and siblings.

That hint of success propelled me to take writing classes, some at the Loft Literary Center, and then a weeklong poetry seminar at the University of Minnesota’s former Split Rock Arts Program in Duluth. I continued to fill lined spiral notebooks, occasionally getting essays and poetry published in regional and national magazines. I changed my focus to memoir and spent over a decade attempting to craft a dark time of my life into a publishable narrative. In 2020, after I had set the memoir aside, a friend encouraged me to submit a poem for publication. Right Where You Are was immediately accepted by Daily Word, a daily devotional magazine published six times a year by Unity Worldwide Headquarters. The success of having three additional poems published in Daily Word led me to revise, write, and compile the current collection. The volume captures the nebulous double thread that connects our inner consciousness and our outer reality. The poems relate the comfort I find in writing about the beauty of the natural world as well as in life’s ages, stages, and changes.

We are all connected. This is a truth revealed by modern science and spoken of by ancient mystics. We are part of a Holy Mystery. The title of this book, A Mystic in the Mystery, reflects my desire to participate in that Mystery. I can’t capture it with words. Yet I try to pay attention to the real world and write what comes to me in common moments and moments of great beauty. A quote I read in one of Father Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation emails by German theologian Dorothee Sölle sums up my efforts: This life we are living is ineffable. There are no words sufficient to encompass our experience.

Part 1

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A Mystic in the Mystery

Letting Ourselves Be

Maybe it is the simple things we do

that in the end determine who we are:

walking with a child on Sunday afternoons;

writing verses for a friend;

picking up garbage on a deserted stretch of beach.

We are glorious creatures, dreaming grand dreams

and scheming still greater ones.

Perhaps it is the unpretentious that really matters:

kind words to a former spouse;

plots of land that preserve some piece of wildness;

the long, moody walks taken to feed our poetic soul.

Perhaps, after all the striving we have done,

life comes down to this:

it is in simply letting ourselves be

that we also come to know

what it is we are to do.

Be a Mystic in the Mystery

Be a mystic in the mystery

contemplative, serene

search within for meaning

drop into the dream.

Let suffering transform you

humbling, stumbling, blind

mold, rebuild, and form you

soften, make you kind

Sit in meditation

through the questioning and pain

connect your path with others

let your losses be their gain.

The struggles may transform you

bring you to your knees

open you to others

ripen you for peace.

You can serve with mercy,

do your humble part,

reach out to the hurting,

hold cracked and broken hearts.

We Are . . .

Stardust and moonbeams,

rivers and streams,

vast oceans, prairies,

visions and dreams.

Composed of particles,

light beams and waves,

neurons, protons,

dualities, caves.

Darkness and brilliance,

valleys and heights,

mountaintop experiences,

cold, bitter