The Mother's Song by Meinrad Craighead & Illuminating the Threshold by Jan Richardson

While going through a self-guided retreat last month, this book, The Mother's Song by Meinrad Crighead was quoted. I am so glad it snagged my attention enough to request it from the library. It is an unforgettable book filled with the creative art and prose of the author. 

From the Introduction:  I draw and paint from my own myth of personal origin. Each painting I make begins from some deep source where my mother and grandmother, and all my fore-mothers, still live; it is as if the line moving from pen or bush coils back to the original matrix. Sometimes I feel like a cauldron of ripening images where memories turn into faces and emerge from my vessel.  

 The retreat was Women's Christmas Retreat  Illuminating the Threshold by Jan Richardson. I have shared this retreat and link with several as it was very encouraging for me. Here is Jan's explanation of Women's Christmas Retreat:
 

Did you know that in some parts of the world, Epiphany (January 6, which brings the Christmas season to a close) is celebrated as Women's Christmas? Originating in Ireland, where it is known as Nollaig na mBan, Women's Christmas began as a day when the women, who often carried the domestic responsibilities all year, took Epiphany as an occasion to enjoy a break and celebrate together at the end of the holidays.
Whether your domestic duties are many or few, Women’s Christmas is a good time to pause and take a break from whatever has kept you busy and hurried in the past weeks or months. As the Christmas season ends, this is an occasion both to celebrate with friends and also to spend time in reflection before diving into the responsibilities of this new year.

It's become a tradition for me to create a retreat that you can use for Women's Christmas—or anytime you're in need of a space of reflection. This year's retreat is titled "Illuminating the Threshold." I have a lingering fascination with thresholds, those betwixt and between places that emerge when we have left what is familiar but have not arrived at what lies ahead. This retreat offers an invitation for you to engage your own thresholds and do some reflecting and dreaming there.

Here is her website if you are interested in downloading the retreat: http://sanctuaryofwomen.com/blog/
You will also be impressed with her style of art and poetry.

Ancient Furies A Young Girl's Struggfles in the Crossfire of World War II by Anastasia V. Saporito

This book was extremely hard for me to put down and since it isn't a "skimming kind" of book, I put in a lot of late night reading hours. I finished it last week on the 70th Anniversary of Liberation for Auschwitz and International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This memoir isn't about a Jewish family, but a "stateless" Russian family who were living in Belgrade, Yugoslavia when the forces of Nazi Germany invaded and destroyed the city. As the author died before this book was ready for the publisher, it was finalized by her husband.  Here is the dedication given by Anastasia Popova Saporito:

This book is dedicated to my children, who have a right to know more of their mother, her background, and therefore their heritage than time, or circumstance, or the pain of remembering ever permitted me to tell them; to my parents, who gave me both life and the "foundation" needed to prosper; to Kristina, who has lived always in my heart, and whose memory so often guides me in my own kitchen; to my husband, whose constant love, urging, and editing finally brought this memoir to completion; and finally to the millions who lie in unmarked and/or forgotten graves throughout the world, victims of armed conflicts they neither sought nor under stood.

 Quoting Desmond Tutu from Made For Goodness: In an extraordinary way, we can return to goodness more quickly when we have a clear vision of the present. That clarity about the present is rooted in making peace with the past. Putting words to our pain begins the process of building that peace. In speaking the truth of our pain, we start to collect the memories of what we have done or experienced. When we retell our stories we can be heard into healing. We can be heard back to wholeness, back to goodness, back home to ourselves. Being heard into healing is a need experienced not only by the perpetrators of heinous crimes.  It is a basic human need that we all share.

Read Ancient Furies and be part of the healing as you listen to story of Anastasia.