I am pleased to announce I have my first book of poetry coming out in May.

The book reflects my love of Francis and Clare of Assisi. In their love, a love that found expression through medieval mysticism, we find a conversation about our relationship with the Cosmic Divine. It is an exploration in relational consciousness, so is an aesthetic meditation, on neohumanist consciousness.

The illustrations are by my mother, Marjorie Bussey, who fell in love with the words, images and spirit of the text.

Clare and Francis: Conversations of Divine Love

This is a book about divine rapture. It is not an historical work, though it is laced with oblique references to the lives of Saint Clare and Saint Francis, who lived in the thriving hilltop town of Assisi in Italy at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Yet it is not a work of fi ction, but an evocation that pays homage to the evolving relationship between two beings of spirit and their growing sense of Cosmic belonging.

Clare and Francis shares the common cause of all mystic encounters in which small ego rubs up against the Divine. The sparks that fly from such encounters are what impassioned the author of the Song of Solomon and fired the hearts of spiritual giants such as Mirabai, Rabindranath Tagore, Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar, Rumi, Haffiz, St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross.

The Conversations of Divine Love that evolve become a deep dialogue between souls who each see in the soul of the other the Divine Lover after whom they yearn. Both transcend their ego states by reading onto, into and through their passion to an ecstatic state. This is what the mystic comes to understand: the Divine yearns for us as much as we yearn for It!

Download the flyer for Clare and Francis