A Litany of Wild Graces

Meditations on Sacred Ecology

Sharifa Oppenheimer

Paperback
978-1-954744-62-2
US $18.95 Bookshop Amazon
eBook available
March 2022

We stand at a pivotal moment as the environmental crisis deepens. Scientists, environmental organizations, island nations, and the children of our world are calling for a vast encompassing paradigm shift. We search everywhere, seeking what can be done to turn the tide. Yet into this chorus, a new melody is arising, asking not only what must we do, but who must we become to meet this urgent need.

In A Litany of Wild Graces: Meditations on Sacred Ecology, Sharifa Oppenheimer points us toward an open secret. Through poetry, essay, litany, and dreams, she invites us to step out of a 21st century virtual reality and into the emerald earth. Here we rediscover our ancient neural core: kinship with all beings. In these pages we meet close relatives: woman-in-the-mountain, northern blue ice, our sun the father of all incandescence. We inhale the very breath exhaled by arctic phytoplankton.

It is through kinship through Love alone that we will be brought back to our senses, back home to the sensually alive inter-being that composes the living body of Gaia. It is, singularly, here at home in the one heart of earth that we will shuck off our husk of greed and domination. Here we can regain our humanity. We can rejoin the great conversation among beings. Step outside, open these pages and remember.

Sharifa Oppenheimer was the founding teacher of the Charlottesville Waldorf School and is the author of the best-selling book Heaven on Earth: A Handbook for Parents of Young Children and its companion workbook How To Create The Star of your Family Culture. She recently wrote With Stars in Their Eyes: Brain Science and Your Child's Journey Toward the Self. After writing extensively from her experience, wisdom, and love of young children, she has turned her hand toward writing about other aspects of profound connection. She has been a student of Sufism for many decades and has deep respect for other indigenous wisdom traditions which point humanity toward the sacred nature of the living earth. She offers Sacred Earth Sacred Self gatherings that explore humanity's biological and spiritual inter-being with our other-than-human relations. Her new book A Litany of Wild Graces: Meditations on Sacred Ecology (Red Elixir, 2022) explores these themes through essays, poetry, and litany. The mother of three grown sons and grandmother to many grandchildren, she lives with her husband in an enchanted forest in Virginia. sharifaoppenheimer.org

“Astonishing! I have never beheld anything like this collection of songs to the wild earth, to its unbounded elegance and heart-wrenching vulnerability, to its singular ability to penetrate our carefully shielded minds and deliver us directly into the arms of a love that lives in every cell of our bodies. These poems – these prayers – make me want to throw off my shoes, take down my hair and run into the woods. Then walk very slowly, lie down for a while, pay attention like I have never before paid attention. I thirst for the elixir Sharifa offers. I want everyone I know to drink deeply and be transfigured by the sacred wonderment shining from every nexus of these beautifully written poems.” —Mirabai Starr, Translator of the great mystics and author of Caravan of No Despair: A Memoir of Loss & Transformation and Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce & Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics

“Sharifa Oppenheimer’s Gaian hymns bear exquisite witness to the sacred mystery that flashes, murmurs, flutters, and blooms beyond the bounds of human ‘progress.’ In these pages, we are evocatively reminded of a world that has always been ravishingly whole and unutterably lovely.” —Pir Zia Inayat Khan, author of Saracen Chivalry, Mingled Waters, and Immortality

“In the poetry of Sharifa Oppenheimer you will hear the living voices of the natural world calling out to us. So many people today live in the midst of the deafening, hollow, numbing racket of our contemporary soulless world. Sharifa awakens us again to the natural abundance of life’s music, which arises from the Earth at every moment. Her message so beautifully expresses what is the essential practice for us at this time, and I find refuge, relief and reassurance in it. So many life forms have already been lost and many more are in present danger. Sharifa can teach us how to hear and respond to their songs and pleas; how to embrace the wholeness of our human journey. Thank you Sharifa, for honoring your call to write, so we may realize again that we are part of a living planet. Share these poems with as many people as possible.” —Atum Okane, is the founder and director of the international Spiritual Guidance Wisdom School

“A Litany of Wild Graces is a call to experience a sensuous encounter with the living Universe. Poems, essays and litanies are imbued with hymns to botany, biology, geography, cosmology and all life, inviting us to engage deeply, to create pathways of loving and honoring our sacred earth. When I received this manuscript, I went outside and opened it as a ritual under my favorite tree. Suddenly a large flock of birds made three wide circles over my head; a beautiful ayat ~ a sign ~ from the birds! Receive the grace and blessing of this beautiful book.” —Felicia Kainat Norton ~ author of An Emerald Earth, Senior teacher, Director Emeritus of Ziraat, Inayatiyya Order

“A Litany of Wild Graces takes us into the unseen territories of nature. In both her prose and poetry, Sharifa Oppenheimer walks us through interiors of mountains, under the bark of trees and alongside sun and stardust and minerals. This collection of Sharifa’s work brings comfort and companionship to all of us who steward the earth.” —Barbara Shinn, biodynamic farmer and vintner, owner of Shinn Estate Vineyards

“Whether to honor and revel in the myriad beauties of the world, or to mend our grieving souls, we will find this and more in Sharifa Oppenheimer’s words of praise for all that is. The unseen and inexplicable have found their reverent muse. A Litany of Wild Graces intertwines the sacred and quotidian with the urgency of now, to not only celebrate but also call us to reimagine our relationship to the Earth of which we are an integral part. Sharifa’s Litany, her profound project, gives me hope.” —Paige Hartsell, Education and Outreach Coordinator, Pfeiffer Biodynamics

“Sharifa’s devotional poems and essays define the need to be conscious of the reality of all-world-connectedness. Never in human history has this understanding been more needed. As we face our unjust and troubled world where, as she states ‘the past is imprisoned behind us and the future walks before wielding whips.’ Clearly we must wake up as defenders of our Mother Earth as She withers and rebels before our global desecration.
     No one speaks with more grace, beauty and authenticity. May we unite together as in Sharifa’s prayerful plea for ‘the human community to be woven together for a sacred moment outside of time.’ Together we can be the transcendent forces for the good, the beautiful, and the true that our times call for!”—Nancy Jewel Poer, co-founder of Rudolf Steiner College, author of Living Into Dying