The Well at the Desert's Heart

<p class=ql-align-center><em>What breaks when the heart is broken?</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>Not the heart</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>Only the thin shell I wrote my name on</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>Only the house that stood for years shaking.</em></p><p> </p><p><em>The Well at the Desert's Heart - Verses of Healing </em>offers a trove of insights in verses of remarkable beauty and perception that emerge through the depths of grief and heights of love into a wider appreciation of life. </p><p> </p><p class=ql-align-center><em>Alone wraithlike I walk through this landscape</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>With the ghost of a child for company.</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em> </em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>I follow him walking in his footsteps</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>He is leading me back back to the place</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>Where my soul first woke to the world's beauty</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>When the limitless sky and I were one.</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em> </em></p><p>This book explores the soul's moments of deep anguish and grief finding a way through the greatest losses while processing difficult emotions.</p><p><br></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>Speechless by the sea in the early dawn</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>Watching the buzzard climb the spiralled air</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>I can't reach you my love with my tired words</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>So I build with my prayer a bridge of light.</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><br></p><p class=ql-align-center>In Bowland's evocative descriptions of being  out in the fenland landscape of Cambridgeshire meditative and reflective words act as a healing balm finding a wholeness in the natural world - </p><p class=ql-align-center><br></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>I seek the quiet places by the river</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>And I stand still for hours in the clearing</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>Till I know my self as the quiet place</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>And the clearing for the indwelling light</em></p><p> </p><p>Encouraging us to  examine our sense of identity and advising 'To this moment surrender your story' this collection promotes integration on an individual and collective level a rejection of othering and a deeper connection to ourselves to one another to nature and to God. Drawing on Sufi mysticism and informed by an anti-war stance it presents a healing vision of oneness and conveys the essential message in our polarised world that 'No 'identity' needs to self-defend'.</p><p> </p><p class=ql-align-center><em>Listen who we are is mysterious</em></p><p class=ql-align-center><em>there is no 'you and I' no 'us and them'.</em></p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>