Comments & Reviews of
Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time: Indigenous Thoughts Concerning the Universe

 I have been reading Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time..., and it has been one of the greater reading experiences I have ever had. I have only gotten to read excerpts of some and a few shorter ones to Amy (she is blind) so far, but I shared with her on our walk yesterday how I felt about what I spent hours overnight reading. Here is how I see this book when I read it. All these native writers and artists are connected by the threads you have used to connect them to you, MariJo. It is like you are a kind of Spider Grandmother and you have connected each of us with each other with this incredible book, that is this extraordinary web. You gave us the chance to express appreciation to Vine, and all those teachers we have had on our journeys. They came from different places, like us. They came from different tribes, and blood, like us. But they were all indigenous, like us. This book shows this so powerfully. So defiantly. It is like this book is our tribe, our nation, born of struggles we can each identify with and all of us expressing this profound love and respect we have for the Great Mystery of Creation, and the Earth, the Moon, and all the universe. It is born of our connection to those who have made their Great Changes (death), and we share pages with their words! What an honor! And for one of the great poets, maybe her last poem? How humbled I am. At first, those old childhood poisons that Trace writes about clawed at my mind. I heard my inner voice say about me, You shouldn't be in such a book. Who do you think you are? You don't deserve to be is such a book? But I walked outside and the Java plum is losing her big yellow leaves. So many, I thought. And then I looked up and the tree looked so much greener and healthier, and I know that I must let go of those things in life that serve no purpose in my growth, and now I feel proud of my, and my beautiful wife Amy's, inclusions along with each of our brothers and sisters, young and older, and I am also so deeply humbled, and grateful. We live! We are still here! The indigenous perceptions of the world and the universe lives! This book is that living proof. We say it with our experiences. We say it with our hearts. We say it with our intellects. We may have felt isolated, and still might from time to time, but Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time brings us together all at once, and says, We are not alone. These are our people! This is who we are. This is what we do. These are my people! So, if you do feel that notion of being alone conjuring in your mind, pick up this book and hold it over your heart, and you will know, you are not alone. We are here with you.
  And, if you want to truly live, America. To know what it truly means, to love one's country. Of what Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time, is saying.... Take heed!
 Thank you, MariJo, and Trace too, with all my heart for this gift of life.

~~From Contributor Gabe Horn

 This is an interesting, at times compelling, collection of poems, stories, personal essays and declarations. They champion and reflect an understanding of the sacredness and inter-relatednesss of all life. These beliefs not that long ago were dismissed by mainstream American thinking as superstitious and primitive yet they resound with a deep sense of humility, respect and gratitude for all forms of life.
 The book is organised into five parts in and around the theme of indigenous traditions and understandings of the cosmos: the interconnectedness of all life; cosmologies of medicines and ceremonialism; prayers, dreams and visions; stories and weavings; and sacred spaces and spiritual energies These at times are interlinked with commentaries about the theories of life emerging from the work of atomic physicists.
It's a poetic and lyrical dance, a continual weaving and reweaving of the micro and macro.
 Thus Kim Shuck (Tsalagi) when she writes in her beautiful, moving piece `Tangled' in Part Three that she `sings to the world rich with mystery with exploration', to the `trickster state of being', and in particular, those deft lines about the young girl, `small small mystery that she is, (who) doesn't know how to control medicine, she only knows how to be a secret'.
Titles themselves become immediate entry points of reverie, as in Lois Red Elk's (D/Lakota) poem in Part One, `I am related to the Day', where the weather is personalised as a relative in the rich interweaving of life. And in John D Berry's (Cherokee/Choctaw) piece `Green Corn' in Part Two, where `Dawn's Light/Prayers on the Wind' carries the ancestors into the future, the future back into the present.
 Time is cyclical, seasonal, rhythmic, continuous.
 We see that most poignantly in Stephanie A. Sellers (Cherokee/Shawnee) wondrous writing (in Part Three) about her father, who died on 12/12/12, the day of planetary confluences boding the end of one epoch, the beginning of another. Her father `who spent every living hour/governed by the turning of the sun' returning home to the world of spirit on a mid-winter's day. It's a beautiful, sublime piece reminding us of the continual process of becoming, returning, re-coming.
 As MariJo Moore (Cherokee) writes in her introduction to Part Three: dance, speech, prayer are not just things said or done; they are experienced.
 As MariJo Moore (Cherokee) writes in her introduction to Part Three: dance, speech, prayer are not just things said or done; they are experienced.
 Similarly, Mary Black Bonnet (Lakota) in Lel U Kunpi Kin Cante Mawaste (Because we are here, my heart is good) dances and sings with her daughter, not just doing those actions, but being them, being singing, being dancing. `I dance', she writes, `to honor my journey from my people (when I was adopted by non-natives) and my journey back to my people'. And that dance, that going forth and returning, she shows, embodies, is, celebration.
 Hence too Trace A. DeMeyer (Tsalagi/Shawnee) when she tells us in her "Four Souls" in Part Two: `Our purpose here is to "create", not just live' and that are `Our souls exist to journey, to experience, to give thanks'.
 This is also a book of recovery, of remembering, of piecing together that which has been fragmented, dissipated, overwhelmed by centuries of repression, genocide, alienation, separation.
Carole W. Bachofner's (Abenaki) adroit, powerful question (and answer) in her poem We Speak the White Man's Language in Part Three : Where did the language go when the black robes/threw holy water on it? Did it disappear/when the switch was on our backs? Into the trees/into the streams, into our wombs to wait' - are words of an inextinguishable faith.
 Or Kim Shuck when she exalts: I am singing connection to a wildly entangled world.
 Prayer, words, ceremony not only help create a world of beauty and medicine, they are medicine, they are, in Carole W Bachofner's inimitable words, when honoured, when spoken and lived truly, a `clearing, a place for fire'.
 Just as too, Denise Low (Delaware/Cherokee), in exploring the power of words, reminds us `a breathed word is a living being', that life and landscape are textured with language, so that `migration stories are journeys of geography and...the soul'.
 Everything is alive, everything is storied. `We are story stones', MariJo Moore writes in her introduction to Part Four, `on which sacred carvings are added daily'.
 Such words are celebrations, such celebrations and stories pathways to the sacred, to sacred places and sacred spaces. These in turn are repositories of memories, knowledge and, in Vine Deloria Jr's (Standing Rock Sioux) carefully woven words in Part Five, The Spiritual Universe, speak of - and are - relationship, connection.
 Unravelling the Spreading Cloth of Time is a book one can read as a whole or in parts and return to, dip into, like bathing in a clear stream. Often it's the small, deft details that evoke the humanity of writers such as Stephanie A Sellers, where sparse descriptions give us space, allow us to fill in the details the way that dappled sun ripples into leaves, revealing their veins.

-----Keith Mac an Fhigheadair (MacNider) is an historian and clairvoyant and is also studing creative nonfiction at University. He loves being a husband, father and grandfather, as he loves too, the sacred in life. He writes an occasional blog at www.placecdreaming.com and can be contacted on twitter @meezeyk.

 "Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time, MariJo Moore and Trace
DeMeyer's brilliant anthology, explores an uncanny tension between
Indigenous understandings of a moral, interconnected universe and the edges
of western science and philosophy that -in time- come to the same
conclusion."

----- Dr. Phillip J. Deloria, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate
Professor of History and American Studies, University of Michigan, author
of Playing Indian and coauthor of The Native Americans

 Fantastic! After reading this book I want to find a place where I can sit and listen to all of these authors while they tell all their stories. This anthology opened the universe and all that I have missed growing up this far without these stories, poems, essays, etc. Past present and future do meld in the universe to teach us from one generation to another, and I must admit I had/have a world of knowledge to learn, share and create. I recently learned that my Great, Great, Great Grandmother was Native American and I missed out on sitting with her learning such wonderful wisdom and stories. Please read this book, you will never regret it and I am certain that anyone who reads this anthology will be blessed through generations and open some long-closed eyes. Marvelous!

----Deborah A. Bowles is of Irish, English and Dutch ancestry. She grew up in Winder, Georgia. She received a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Mercer University Atlanta College of Arts & Sciences. She currently lives in Washington, DC. Her work appeared in Birth from Scorched Hearts Women Respond to War in 2008.

Comments & Reviews of
A Book of Spiritual Wisdom for all days

MariJo Moore wears many hats, as anyone who knows her work can attest. She is sober (a feat of which she is justifiably proud), she is a poet, an artist, a psychic, a mom and grandmom, a woman whose blood is Cherokee and Dutch and Irish.
Moore is a spirit-blessed woman who works with clients near and far to help them settle the disturbances in their lives. She gentles them, admonishes them, instructs them.
That admonishment is also present in her book of wisdom.  At the end of each week's essay is a brief couplet reflecting on the value lessons of that week.  Each one ends with "Be strong"—invitation, advice and warning, all rolled into one terse phrase.
The book is not quite pocket-sized, but still easily transportable. Which is a good thing, because you may want to have A Book of Spiritual Wisdom for All Days close by when the going gets tough.
The little book is divided neatly into months, with an essay for each of the four weeks. The facing page of each lesson is blank for the reader's reflections on the writing and how it may have affected their outlook on the issue.
Listen—
July. Week One.
Spirituality and creativity are deeply connected in children. This connection needs to be fed if children are to believe they have a place in this world… Inspiring them to produce creative works through that spiritual connection can become one of our greatest joys in life.
Here's one from September—
Week Three.
Whatever you feel is dragging you down is simply trying to get your attention… Time to search your heart and find what it is you should be doing. Time to live instead of exist.
Simple. Direct. Personal.  This book is loaded with opportunities to retool and re-focus our thinking.
In her introduction, Moore gives us a little of the backstory on the creation of this book. She has taken quotes from her other work—you may be familiar with her tiny books, including "Crow Quotes" and "Tree Quotes"—to highlight the theme of each essay. She writes of her gift for working as a vessel for Spirit and speaks of the work she does when she is not writing or creating her collage-art.
I've lived with this little book since April of this year and I pick it up sometimes during my morning meditation time. It is very easy to use—the print is a good size and the book is user-friendly.  Starting with the beginning quote, I pause and think, meditate, pray. Then I move through the essay that follows. Not all of the entries resonate with me but even those are intriguing and give me a more thoughtful start to the day.
This book will also make a good gift for someone going through a challenging time—and who isn't doing that these days? Too often, we find ourselves at a loss to bring comfort and cheer to those we love. Here is a handy tool for the sort of deep work that many of us find ourselves engaging.
And be sure to check out the author picture in the back of the book.  It'll knock your socks off.

A Book of Spiritual Wisdom for All Days is published by rENEGADE pLANETS pUBLISHING and is available at local bookstores or through the author's website at www.marijomoore.com

By: H. Byron Ballard
H. Byron Ballard is an Appalachian woman with deep, gnarly roots in western North Carolina. She holds a BA from UNC-Asheville and a MFA from Trinity University. Her writings have appeared in local and national print and electronic media. Byron is an organic gardener and a beekeeper. She is the author of Staubs & Ditchwater: an Intro to HillFolks’ Hoodoo.