About the Author | Anna Goodman Herrick works at the intersection of spirituality, sacred words, and human rights. She is a writer, poet, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary artist. Anna has performed her poetry across the U.S., including at the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Phosphorescence Poetry Reading Series, presenting “contemporary creativity that echoes Dickinson’s own revolutionary poetic voice.” She has performed her poetry at the El Paso border for Artist Uprising with V (formerly Eve Ensler), Bloomsday on Broadway and Radio Bloomsday, and at the Theopoetics Conference. Her recent poetry is included in Rattle, The Ekphrastic Review, Hevria Magazine, and Ritualwell. She has created work for television and branded content for Sony, ABC Family, Oprah Winfrey Network, and MTV and shared her work at the Library of Congress, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and in film, stage, museums and galleries nationwide. For more information visit: annagoodmanherrick.com and Instagram @annagoodmanherrick. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. BLESSING FOR DIASPORA AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICETo be alive is to attend a prayer service. To do the work of the heart in the temple of the world, to build the tender center of that temple inside yourself, is a blessing: to seek for that center again and again in everyone (each body a tent for conducting its own ceremony into ascension), to build the altar within you and decide what you will sacrifice and who you will not, to hold all the brokenness for the sake of any chance of repair, to welcome everyone exiled, everything broken from its origins, all holinesses ripped from their dwelling places, and chant together, here, here, here. Read more |