Sacred Letters

Longtime yoga and meditation teacher Michael David Sowder is an author, poet, and professor of poetry, religious studies, and yoga studies at Utah State University. With a PhD from the University of Michigan, Sowder is the author of two collections of spiritual poetry, The Empty Boat and House Under the Moon, and two chapbooks of poetry. Feminist poet Diane Wakoski chose The Empty Boat to win the 2004 T.S. Eliot Award. His chapbook, A Calendar of Crows, won the inaugural New Michigan Press Poetry award.

Sowder’s writing explores themes of yoga, Buddhism, mystical experience and contemplative practice, wilderness, and fatherhood. He has appeared in MuseIndia, The Bombay Review, Shambhala Sun (now Lion’s Roar), American Life in Poetry, Five Points, Green Mountains Review, Sufi Journal, New Poets of the American West, and The New York Times Online. He frequently travels to India, where in 2014, he was a Fulbright Scholar. Trained in a Tantric yoga tradition, he has been practicing and teaching yoga and meditation for almost fifty years. The founder of the non-profit, Amrita Yoga Institute of Logan, Utah—which teaches yoga, meditation, contemplative practice and philosophy—he founded the first prison meditation program in the Alabama prison system in 1978, as well as prison writing and meditation programs at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Facility and at the Cache County Jail in Logan, Utah.

“In the opening pages of Michael Sowder’s Sacred Letters, we learn the astonishing fact that the name of the Sanskrit script, devanāgarī, means ‘city of God.’ An alphabet understood as both divine and human, a sociality of fire. Drawing from his years as a student of yoga and Indian spirituality, Sowder meditates on the revelatory proximity of language, holiness, and embodiment in this elegant volume. He reflects on our most humane impulses as connected beads along a chain and as beauties worthy of contemplation for their own sake, his developing narrative fusing the personal to the mythic, to the transformation of both. ‘The teacher comes singing,’ Sowder writes; we his readers are fortunate to listen.” —Kimberly Johnson, PhD (Berkeley), poet; National Endowment for the Arts scholar; professor of classics, Brigham Young University

“Sacred Letters is a tantric text, woven of two gorgeous books. First, in clear bell-like tones, Michael Sowder provides instruction to the Sanskrit language, its sounds and syllabic letters. The second book, vivid as last night’s dream, is a pensées. It strings memories, visions, and reflections on a thread of sound. Follow the thread: a host of teachers—from gnarled old-apple Thoreau to radiant Mā Indirā Devī—lead you by torchlight up the mountain of yoga.” —Andrew Schelling, author of Love and the Turning Seasons: India’s Poetry of Erotic and Spiritual Longing

“Rather than confining words to their original origins or etymology, this book invites them into a broader, personal context, blending them into a cultural and philosophical framework. It is a rich intersection where philosophy meets life.” —Semeen Ali, poetry editor, Muse India

“Sacred Letters evokes and embodies the living breath of meditation and heart-centered contemplation in this inspired journey through the Sanskrit ‘alphabet’ and its many archetypal permutations. These masterful meditations uplift readers with him into the realm of the ecstatic yet remain solidly anchored in the felt material world, where the personal, historical, mythic and spiritual all meet.” —Alan Botsford, author of Walt Whitman of Cosmic Folklore

“Sowder presents fifty Sanskrit letters as doorways into profound insights about yoga philosophy, mystic revelations, natural beauty, holy pilgrimages, and a spiritual memoir of awakenings. Each letter reveals a brilliant aspect of divine love, like the many facets of a diamond.” —Robert Sternau, poetry editor, Sufi Journal

“Sowder charts his spiritual awakening, powerfully captured in life’s moments when the divine and the everyday intersect. With a poet’s eye and a scholar’s mind, he rescues these epiphanies from forgetfulness and illuminates them for fellow seekers.” —Sue William Silverman, author, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences