Scaffolding

By Peri Best

There is a spiritual scaffolding holding all physical reality together. It is made of the thoughts and ideas of God. We live in this experience and share it with each other. It is all made of love. Great fun is to be had exploring realms of cosmic experience through images close to us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sacred Signs Publishing
• Release date: Nov 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781738960118

Book preview

1.png

Scaffolding

Scaffolding

poems by

Peri Best

Sacred Signs Publishing

Box 2903

Grand Forks BC

Canada

V0H 1H0

[e-mail]

Sacred Signs Publishing

Box 2903

Grand Forks BC

Canada

V0H 1H0

[e-mail]

Copyright © 2023 by Peri Best

Front cover design by Gary Tonge

Interior design by Duane Johnson

Illustrations by Peri Best

All rights reserved. This books is protected by copyright.

No part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise

without written permission from the author.

ISBN 978-1-7389601-0-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-7389601-1-8 (ebook)

First printing: July 2023

With grateful thanks to all you angels out there

Keep up the good work

Love is the outworking of the divine and inner urge of life.

—Jesus, The Urantia Book, 174:1.5

Preface

Language, both spoken and written, has the power to change how we humans feel and think. The ‘coo’ and ‘no’ are our first orientations to life; the one cuddles us closer and the other stops us in our tracks. Words are made of emotional vowels and rational consonants, and together they shape experience. They have certainly shaped mine.

My father claimed I said the word microphone at the age of 11 months. Having had children of my own, I highly doubt it. Yet the myth remains. One of my first poems was Princess Alice written in Grade Two. Looking back at it, I can see a certain sauciness that is evident in many of the poems I write today.

Princess Alice is sick in the palace

Her fever’s a hundred and two

If you go in there and never come out again

You’ll know what happened to you

Princess Alice is sick in the palace

The doctors are coming by twos

They’re working on her toes

And they’re working on her nose

And soon they’ll be working on her CLOTHES

I fell in love with Shakespeare when I played Viola, the lead in Twelfth Night, at 17. I discovered that the words of the bard expressed exactly the emotion the actor needed to embody; all one had to do was feel them completely and allow them to resonate throughout the mind and body. Such a powerful experience for both performer and audience! Shakespeare’s words, along with my wonderful acting teacher Powys Thomas, taught me to speak, to act and eventually, to write.

Rumi was my next major influencer. Shakespeare’s words enlightened the world of human emotional experience, and now Rumi enlightened the world of spiritual experience. Our practice of the turn (the whirling dance of the Mevlevi Sufis) involved sitting in a freezing hall at 6:30 in the morning and listening to readings from Rumi’s Mathnawi (his collected poetical writings in the original translation from Nicholson–sometimes very dry as opposed to the more moving works of Coleman Barks) before we could actually get on our feet. With Rumi, God became something exciting to experience now, not just an Old Testament judge and executioner.

Next in my line of powerful influences is The Urantia Book.