SPIRIT FAMILY TREE

Leina Wann. SPIRIT FAMILY TREE. Otter Point of View Communications, 2023.

My friend Leina brought me a copy of her new book. It is wonderful. I’m so glad she followed through with it and did all the work to get it out there. I especially like: 1) the non-sensational way she shows what happened to people during the Communist takeover; 2) the references to the grandmother’s bound feet; 3) the way she has expanded upon the image to suggest binding in other ways, especially with unquestioned social expectations; 4) the way the section on spirituality is presented as the writer’s personal experience, learned in several different ways, and not as proselytizing or a “spiritual how-to”; and 5) the way her 'positively delightful' artwork (on beautiful paper) adds to the writing. 

I was reading an article about the coronation and came upon this quotation which reminded me of this story, if we read God = Beloved: In [his book] Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World (2010), [King] Charles argues against scientific rationality and for a practice of revelation, which he describes as “when a person practices great humility and achieves a mastery over the ego so that ‘the knower and the known’ effectively become one. And from this union flows an understanding of ‘the mind of God.’”