Bøger af Helen Valborg

Odyssey To My Daughter: Discovering motherhood in an ancient culture.A girl, who dreams of being an ancient warrior, finds it difficult to meet cultural expectations in California. Lacking her mother's understanding and affection, she finds no model for womanhood and mothering that she can relate to. Her attempt at marriage fails and, in her confusion, she manages to lose custody of her daughter.Thus begins an odyssey away from the modern world and into an ancient way of life where the author slowly learns to embrace and understand the woman and mother within her. On her odyssey she encounters women who treat her as a daughter and she enters into a world of archaic beliefs and social mores. She works in the fields, participates in the cycles of living and dying, and develops a deep love for the people in the village where she lives, and the wild and rocky splendor of Inner Mani surrounding it.. The myths and stories she has absorbed since childhood come alive there, people named after mythical heroines, and the poetry of lamentations that hark back to the fall of Troy. Not far from where she harvests olives in the groves lies the entrance to the Underworld described by Homer in the Odyssey. It is a world that merges the echoes of her youth with a new confidence in her womanhood. When news comes of her father's immanent death, she is torn between wanting to stay where she is and returning to California to see her daughter and her dying father.

The remarkable essays in this volume were written for the expressed purpose of helping both the newcomer to spiritual thinking as well as the skilled practitioner to see the everyday objects - from the wind and ships to deserts and lakes - and subjects - from dogs and ravens to dolphins and whales - surrounding us as concrete embodiments and living symbols of the fundamental spiritual Essence from which everything has evolved. These universal symbols are not just accidental mental constructs but are living realities that not only point to spiritual dimensions far beyond themselves but profoundly embody those spiritual realities. Learning to see the world around us afresh in the light of its spiritual dimension reorients us to taking up again the age-old task of treading the Path and aids us in activating our higher spiritual capacities which, when awakened, shed the pristine light of universal Theosophy on the path of spiritual self-regeneration in the service of humanity. The 28 wide-ranging articles in this volume span a wide spectrum of human thought: from the Tetraktys to the Cross, from the Altar to the Mirror, from the Pentagram to the Dodecahedron, from the Dog to the Dwarf, from the Heart to the Fool; indeed, from Shamballa to Paradise. These essays reveal the fundamental religious, philosophical, and scientific aspects to the most mundane and most refined realities of our common, everyday world. Both the serious reflection upon and casual reading of these essays is a joyous expedition through the all-too-common truncated perceptions we have of our world to a higher level of awareness of the myriad ways in which the life of the universal Spirit is made manifest.