Bøger af Roger Housden

Great poetry calls into question everything. It dares us to break free from the safe strategies of the cautious mind. It opens us to pain and joy and delight. It amazes, startles, pierces, and transforms us. It can lead to communion and grace. Through the voices of ten inspiring poets and his own reflections, the author of Sacred America shows how poetry illuminates the eternal feelings and desires that stir the human heart and soul. These poems explore such universal themes as the awakening of wonder, the longing for love, the wisdom of dreams, and the courage required to live an authentic life. In thoughtful commentary on each work, Housden offers glimpses into his personal spiritual journey and invites readers to contemplate the significance of the poet's message in their own lives. In Ten Poems to Change Your Life, Roger Housden shows how these astonishing poems can inspire you to live what you always knew in your bones but never had the words for. "The Journey" by Mary Oliver "Last Night as I Was Sleeping" by Antonio Machado "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman "Zero Circle" by Rumi "The Time Before Death" by Kabir "Ode to My Socks" by Pablo Neruda "Last Gods" by Galway Kinnell "For the Anniversary of My Death" by W. S. Merwin "Love After Love" by Derek Walcott "The Dark Night" by St. John of the Cross

Poems can teach us in ways that surpass other forms of understanding, especially when the subject concerns matters of the heart. When the heart’s whispers are too faint for us to hear in ordinary ways, poetry can speak to us with another kind of eloquence. From the leap of joy that a couple takes on their wedding day to a fiftieth wedding anniversary that acknowledges the deep connection that a life together can bring, marriage takes us on a journey that passes through seasons and stages, peaks and valleys. This book honors that journey through twenty poems that celebrate and illuminate some of these major stages and provides not only inspiration for the journey but also solace and wisdom. Roger Housden, the author of Ten Poems to Change Your Life, provides essential insights into the poems, creating a collection of reflective prose and poetry that makes this an inspirational guidebook as much as a volume of poetry. In Twenty Poems to Bless Your Marriage, Roger Housden offers poems and essays that will give voice to your heart, offering up words and wisdom not just for special occasions but to act as friends and guides to refer to throughout the life of a marriage.

Sacred Journeys in a Modern World is a true story of the spiritual quest of a modern-day pilgrim. At the dawn of a new millennium, religion no longer holds a monopoly on what is considered sacred: we are all on a journey of discovery in which we are finding meaning for ourselves. Throughout his adult life, Roger Housden has regularly dropped his ordinary routine and gone walkabout in remote and urban regions of the globe. What makes a journey sacred for Roger Housden is not whether it follows some ancient pilgrim's path or leads to some holy shrine but whether it stirs our own authentic heart. It is sacred if it sensitizes the individual to the deeper realities of his own being and to the world about him. In Sacred Journeys in a Modern World, Roger Housden weaves together the inner life of the soul with the outer world of city streets, deserts, wild animals, and rivers. In the process, he redefines our image of a contemporary pilgrim. He takes us with him on journeys through the Sahara, the streets of Manhattan, and the savanna of East Africa, to Big Sur, to the tomb of the mystic Rumi in Turkey, and to the Monastery of St. Catherine's in the Sinai, where he turns up on the back of a Coca-Cola truck.

In his bestselling Ten Poems series, Roger Housden has shown an uncanny ability to choose and discuss poems that strike at the core of readers' concerns and needs. In this new volume, ten extraordinary poems, along with Housden's incisive essays, bring heartfelt insight and broad perspective both to our personal challenges and to our cultural and collective malaise. Ten Poems for Difficult Times is the perfect gift for oneself or for anyone in need of solace and inspiration. Ten Poems for Difficult Times ';Good Bones' by Maggie Smith ';The Thing Is' by Ellen Bass ';The Quarrel' by Conrad Aiken ';Cutting Loose' by William Stafford ';Rain Light' by W. S. Merwin ';How the Light Comes' by Jan Richardson ';Now You Know the Worst' by Wendell Berry ';A Brief for the Defense' by Jack Gilbert ';It's This Way' by Nazim Hikmet ';Annunciation' by Marie Howe

Is it possible to fully accept, even love, the life you have? Is it possible to drop the struggle to make yourself and your life different? Acclaimed teacher and bestselling author Roger Housden says yes in this profound alternative to nonstop striving and self-criticism. Whether about our relationships, careers, or spirituality, many of us judge ourselves as not measuring up. But fulfillment comes when we stop struggling and learn to trust the wisdom of what life presents us with. Housden wrote Dropping the Struggle as someone who, up until a few years ago, spent much of his time in a covert struggle with life. Despite his success, he often felt that something was missing. He struggled for years with an ongoing spiritual longing, with questions of meaning and purpose, with the search for love, with all the usual difficulties of being human, until he finally realized - though not with his thinking mind - that the only thing life was asking of him was to rest in a deeper knowing that was always there, usually silently, behind the arguments and strategies that would so commonly occupy his conscious self. "e;Struggle will never get us the things we want most,"e; Housden writes, "e;love; meaning; presence; freedom from anxiety over the past and future; contentment with ourselves exactly as we are, imperfections and all; the acceptance of our mortality - because these things lie outside the ego's domain. For these, we need another way. That way begins and ends in surrender, in letting go of our resistance to life as it presents itself."e;

Sacred America, in lucid and poetic prose, is the story of ordinary people who have dared to follow and trust the voices of their own souls in the midst of everyday life in the United States. It is also the story of another America, one not seen on the nightly news. What Roger Housden finds on his journey across the country suggests to him that, contrary to popular belief, the United States is among the most creative and spiritually vibrant cultures on earth. Sacred America is his proof.Just as Alexis de Tocqueville set out across our country in search of democracy, so too did Housden, an Englishman, travel throughout the United States in the waning years of the twentieth century in search of this country's heart. He discovered that, despite or perhaps due to the moral turpitude of Wall Street and Capitol Hill, the spirit of the American people is flourishing. Americans are continually redefining what it means to be human, what they want from democracy, and, most important, how a democratic society is an expression of the sacred.As an outsider, Housden was both surprised and impressed by what he found -- the extent to which the aspirations, genius, actions, wisdom, and compassion of people in all walks of life are woven into the social and cultural fabric of America. For Housden, this presence of Being in the midst of everyday life, rather than in formal places of worship (though he found it there too), is reinventing what a sense of the sacred means for the American individual at the turn of the millennium.Sacred America acknowledges that a spiritual materialism prospers here to an extent that would stagger any European mind; spiritual techniques and teachings have become major product lines along with everything else. Yet Housden also finds a genuine human spirit flourishing, found in small-town Wyoming, on a bus ride to Manhattan, on a remote Indian reservation, in an artist's cave in New Mexico, in the life of a letter carrier in California, and even in Hollywood. Further, he finds groups of people coming together to share their various faiths in a truly open spirit: at Wellesley College in Massachusetts; among the politicians of Washington, D.C.; at Habitat for Humanity; at a retreat center for ex-cons in North Carolina; as well as in churches, at an Islamic conference, in Buddhist meditation centers, and in the traditional Hispanic faith in northern New Mexico.What is significant, Housden discovers, is that no one is in charge of this emergence of the human spirit. No one is doing it. This other America -- so different from the image that much of the world holds of this country -- is not a cause that you fight for or a movement orchestrated by any religious or spiritual denomination. It is something at work, Housden suggests, in the collective psyche. It is something we participate in, rather than direct or control. A broader intelligence is at work not as some external force acting on us but from within us as a collective. It is changing the way Americans feel about themselves, restoring a sense of meaning and moral authority to the wellspring of individual conscience -- Housden calls it the intelligence of the knowing heart. Sacred America is emerging, Housden concludes, as that growing community of individuals who are interconnected not by the external dictate of creed or culture but by the prompting of the heart's intelligence.

Offers 98 of the finest poems from both historic and contemporary writers. This title puts a spotlight on the great spiritual voices of Christianity, a body of work that is unendingly rich, varied and inspiring.

Life-changing wisdom from ten poems that illuminate and inspire change.