An Incremental Life E-Book

Luci Shaw

• Herausgeber: Paraclete Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 58

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

"Luci Shaw is a legend" —Christianity Today This captivating collection of poems by beloved author Luci Shaw, reflects on daily ideas and activities as they arrive, bit by bit, to illuminate us with their wisdom and enlarge on the meanings of human experience. Like small messages from beyond, these incidents call us to pay attention. In An Incremental Life, Shaw breathes life into the simpleness of the every-day and finds God in the memory of the mundane. Through her verses, she explores the intricate tapestry of existence, from the tender memories of childhood to the profound questions of mortality. Her poems are like windows opening to the soul, inviting readers to pause, reflect, and savor the beauty of the world around them. INCREMENTS I live by increments, single breaths of an ambient air, marking off hours, days.   Apprenticed to grace, I tread statio in sequentiae, edging every step forward before venturing the next.   Staggering up towards the stony crests of the foothills, dusty, I am almost undone with weariness, only half believing that the view will widen.   In my falling upward into your home, O Faithful One, stay with me, your wind music playing the ear of my mind like an instrument.   "This is how life happens, one day at a time, in increments! And God is in each of them for us," Luci Shaw  

Leseprobe

Praise forAn Incremental life

“There’s so much to ponder, appreciate, and learn from Luci Shaw’s words. And so, once more, in this, her latest volume of poems, An Incremental Life. What especially strikes me in reading her this time around is how she manages to blend the music of poetry with what prayer can sound like, here in our dailiness—in the whisper of trees, the flight of birds, in preparing a meal and breaking bread for others, as well as in those recollections of youth and of those here now only in memory and the radiance of naming them, and then in meditating on our own mortality as the years go by. All of it made fuller by evoking the blessings—in light and in darkness—there for the taking, if we but took the time, like Luci Shaw, to see what is there before us.”

—Paul Mariani, author of Deaths and Transfigurations, The Mystery of It All, and All That Will be New

“Luci Shaw’s latest collection, An Incremental Life, sings of the bright intervals in a cherished soul whose life’s oeuvre hums with a perpetual, hopeful delight for our weary sojourners. In her ninth decade, Shaw’s flourishing world of flora and fauna continues to bear fruit and multiply in the garden of her richly allusive, metaphorical imagination. Here is a wellspring of musical wisdom and meaningful sustenance where the ‘Faithful One’ plays ‘the ear of / my mind like an instrument,’ blessing life’s very small yet vital increments of lived experience, tender and tenacious moments ethereal yet embodied as ‘single / breaths of an ambient air.’”

—Karen An-hwei Lee, author of The Beautiful Immunity and Duress

“For decades I have sat at Luci Shaw’s feet, listening to her lyrical wisdom, her playful music, her spiritual insight, and her deep connectedness to the natural world. In An Incremental Life, Luci Shaw shares her metapoetics choosing ‘words like matches, / striking them to see what happens next.’ As a nonagenarian, she acknowledges her shrinking life, yet invites us even into this experience. Still she wrestles with faith, and says to God, ‘Come, now. Fill / the gaps, mend the widening cracks in my aging /soul. I’m moving in your direction, but I move / more slowly, see more dimly, require more daily.’ As always, though, Luci Shaw is as wide-eyed as a child. ‘My heart,’ she writes, ‘is ambushed by simple beauty.’”

—D. S. Martin, Poet-in-Residence, McMaster Divinity College, and author of Angelicus

Also by Luci Shaw

POETRY

Listen to the Green

The Secret Trees

Postcard from the Shore

Polishing the Petoskey Stone

Writing the River

The Angles of Light

The Green Earth

Waterlines

What the Light Was Like

Harvesting Fog

Scape

Eye of the Beholder

The Generosity

Angels Everywhere

Reversing Entropy

FOR CHILDREN

The Genesis of It all

The O in Hope

WITH MADELEINE L’ENGLE

Winter Song

A Prayerbook for Spiritual Friends

Friends for the Journey

NONFICTION

God in the Dark

Life Path

Water My Soul

The Crime of Living Cautiously

Breath for the Bones

Adventure of Ascent

The Thumbprint in the Clay

2025 First Printing

An Incremental Life: Poems

ISBN 978-1-64060-979-2

Text copyright © 2025 by Luci Shaw

The Iron Pen name and logo are trademarks of Paraclete Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shaw, Luci, author.

Title: An incremental life: poems / Luci Shaw.

Description: Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2025. | Series: Iron pen | Summary: “In these poems, Shaw breathes life into the simpleness of the every-day and finds God in the memory of the mundane”—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024051571 (print) | LCCN 2024051572 (ebook) | ISBN 9781640609792 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781640609808 (epub)

Subjects: LCGFT: Religious poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3569.H384 I53 2025 (print) | LCC PS3569.H384 (ebook) | DDC 811/.54--dc23/eng/20241106

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024051571

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024051572

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All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Paraclete Press

Brewster, Massachusetts

www.paracletepress.com

Printed in the United States of America

As always, Karen Cooper has my deep gratitude for her help, over many months, in shaping these poems for publication.

INTRODUCTION

Amaryllis!

During the days of abbreviated daylight in later November and early December, and in the weeks leading up to Christmas, I feel the deep need to push back against the realities of winter darkness and chill.

One of the deficits I feel most deeply at this time of year is the way our garden’s growth has slowed, finally shutting down and going dormant for the winter. The slowing and gloom of those darker days is a kind of deficit that affects me emotionally and spiritually, as well as physically. I can almost balance it out by reminding myself that, though my soul is deprived of lush garden growth and splendid displays of color, winter is a season for a different scale of value.

I’m grateful for the activity in this phase of living that moves ahead in slower, more relaxed, often more gratifying increments. An incremental life is one of small gains, or victories, of growth achieved gradually, of actions occurring one at a time, in a more measured sequence than what is experienced earlier, when energy and motivation are at their peak.

One practical solution for the lack of a joyfully blooming garden in winter is to bring the garden inside. In our house, with its warmth and comfort, I find great satisfaction in creating a kind of inside garden. The large, west-facing windows in our kitchen and dining room give us access to the wide and restless beauty of Bellingham Bay and the islands of Puget Sound. In the light those windows provide I can watch my potted plants grow, their leaves greening and blooms gleaming as they flourish and decorate our interior living.

An inside plant is a joy to tend and observe the slow and deliberate changes in its vegetable life span. Sometimes, in my own wintering body, I am profoundly aware of the need to sit back and slow down in the pace of my living.

So, in November, I order half a dozen amaryllis bulbs, each of them holding a bright promise: a chance for us to enjoy some of the many varied combinations of vivid growth and color.

The amaryllis bulbs come packed individually in their pots, covered with a fibrous mulch, mangy-looking and decidedly unattractive, with their peeling, scaly husks. But I have faith, trusting