Böcker av Sheldon H. Clark

In Water Voices, author Sheldon Clark presents a moving series of spiritual reflections grouped together under three general themes: Calm, Storm, and Peace. Readers will find both insight and reassurance in these meditations and remembrances, spanning the lifespan from birth to final years. Evocative illustrations enhance the meaning of the poems and prayers included in the book.A word from the author:In the summer of 1958, my brother and I rode horseback into the hill ring surrounding a cattle ranch near Gunnison, Colorado. We followed a creek to its spring, dismounted, and we and our horses refreshed ourselves with cool clear water. We felt history flowing down our throats. We felt at one with the eternal source sending cleansing blood through our veins. We gave thanks for this natural baptism. I could only wish that people everywhere could give thanks for the unmerited gift of pure water. Water voices are heard in varieties of music from classical, gospel, country and western, folk, easy listening, and rock. Water voices are seen in drawings, paintings, and photography, as representative, abstract, and mood inspiring. Water voices in literature appeal to the five senses and express inner thoughts. Words are the instruments used to articulate passionate love, reflect on grief, loss, danger, and death, and are intentionally chosen to provoke a response. Water voices are as constant as sunrise and sunset. They possess character. They are as soothing as divine mercy. They are as gentle as the lion that lies down with the lamb, as violent as unbridled war and storms at sea, as miraculous as spiritual conversion, as nourishing as Mother Earth, and as mysterious as love. In listening to water voices, we hear the divine replenishing Creation, itself. The narrative poems in Water Voices were inspired to acknowledge each person's experience as they bring their welcoming capabilities to our essential source of existence. In these uncertain times of climate change, it is incumbent upon humanity to listen to water voices as friendly sounds ever so subtly appealing for human help to achieve the goals of balance, conservation, restorative justice, and mutually assured survival.

The minimalist approach in After the Fire A Still Small Voice heeds the pseudo-proverb, "One picture is worth a thousand words," and the advice, attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, "Preach the Gospel. If necessary, use words."Selected quotations are from the authorized King James Bible. The challenge was for the author to write, and then for the artist to sketch, their respective inspirations. The pattern was to select a quotation, compose a meditation, and then ask the artist to create a drawing to add still other voices to the ancient, and yet, contemporary story of human encounter with the divine from beginnings to future hope. The creative interface between the poems and the abstract-expressionist charcoal drawings is devised to complement one another.The astute reader will discern thematic development from ancient Hebrew texts to C.E. accounts of causation, dynamic settings, particularities of time and place, emotional struggle, maturation, and insight hidden in the paradoxical shadow world of the perennial divine mystery. Light and dark are juxtaposed to produce dynamic tension. What is implied is as important as what is explicit. Imaginative projection, connotative values, and non-traditional creative interpretation are keys to expanded transformative understanding.The observant art aficionado will see in the Abstract Expressionist charcoal sketches little of representative reality. Instead, the artist created from swirls, dark specks (voices?), vertical horizontal circular energy, emotive forces, light source, silhouetted figures, womb-like contours, explosions of presence and absence, intensity, the chalice viewed Daliesque from above, disregard for convention, and tendered security in the eternal sway between the earth-bound and the transcendental. ---from the Foreword by the author