Bøger af Loren Cruden

The final book in the Faye's Leys trilogy, finds the healer, Faye Stewart, whisked away to Victorian Scotland, into unwilling companionship with a powerful Kabbalistic magician. Contending with issues of identity, desire, and belief, Faye becomes the target of a witch hunter, as well as the victim of her own fears.

The nine women in these stories (Agnes, Bloudeuwedd, Brigit, Broudica, Derdriu, Medb, Nimue, Rhiannon, and Scaahach come from various Celtic backgrounds. For these nine women, as for many modern women, freedom of choice seems part of what was found worthy of risk, whether it was the choice to love, to make independent decisions, to participate in a world of moral vagaries, to excel in male-dominated arenas, to refuse subjugation, or to confound fear and doubt.

The poems in The Dogs of RockCut Road and other poems of place come from a backwoods way of life in rural America and Highland Scotland. Concrete and intimate, they chronicle a lifetime of relationship with what belongs to itself.

This second book in the Faye's Leys trilogy takes healer Faye Stewart traveling her mountain's Ley lines across time and space. Entering into the worlds of both New Age and Iron Age druidry, Fay reaps the consequences of going public with her abilities.

A wildlife biologist deep in a Virginia cave may be the last person alive, in the story of a devastated planet. The question: is survival alone sufficient when the web of interconnected life is so profoundly torn? Diary of Stones & Feathers is a dialogue of one, exploring possibilities in how we touch and are touched by the natural world.

Aware Practice looks at meditation, heightened perception, trance, and lucid dreaming from the perspective of direct experience. As a concise guide, it cuts to the core of understandings -- the emphasis is on living in awareness, whatever the individual practice.

Faye Stewart's rustic, reclusive life on an Eastern Washington mountain takes a fantastical turn when a prince from the other world appears. This first book of the Faye's Leys trilogy sets out themes of belonging and assimilation, laid bare in the collision of mortal and immortal vantages.

Shapeshifter tells the story of a woman who is sometimes human and sometimes a mountain lion. Set mainly on the Isle of Skye in the 1980s, the fate of this woman plays out through the conflict between two cousins -- one who falls in love with a lion and one who hunts her.

This collection of essays revolves around themes of relationship with place and culture. Using personal tales, humor, and invented Coyote stories, Cruden casts lines of inquiry far and wide, from the Isle of Skye in Scotland to eastern Washington's rural landscapes -- looking into music, language, communication with wildlife, and what constitutes community; looking into what binds us to place, and to one another.

The thirty-two pieces in this collection are not at all the abstract discussions that "essays" can connote, The emphasis is on storytelling, often with humor, pieces full of robust observation, feelings, relevancies, and revelations about engagement with the world. Personal experience is set within the context of bit-picture issues like immigration, modern lifestyles, education, and civil protest. The prose pieces, coupled with poems, are strongly individual, yet universal in terms of human circumstances: "The single seed containing the expressing the entire harvest."

This is the re-telling from the Ulster Cycle that feature Cu Chulainn, playing with how modern minds might imagine events, but sticking with the original plot, dialogue, and characters. Bits of the stories are condensed or left out; some narrative passages are paraphrased or modernized.

In this follow-up to Aware Practice, Cruden uses her personal story of "growing up weird" as a springboard for insights about truth of being. Her inquiry into "lucid perception as a child, and experiences in an ashram, as a midwife, and while being mentored by a Medicine man, were part of a map-less journey that flowed through 35 years of spiritual teaching, healing, and counseling. Together, Aware Practice and No Practice offer an off-the-beaten-track view of awareness, with compassion at its center.

Diary of Fire & Ice takes place in the Canadian Arctic, in the aftermath of world catastrophe. Like its companion book, Diary of Stones & Feathers, this story pares reality to its solitary bones, in a setting stripped of physical comforts and familiar ways of perceiving the world. The young California Indian at the heart of this story is absorbed into an Inuit community, then finds herself on her own in a harsh winter landscape. The letters she writes to a dead friend are a chronicle of nature's potential to both kill and heal.

In this updated edition, Aware Practice looks at consciousness itself and the way meditation, altered states, and subtle perception are used and misused in seeking enlightened perspectives. Rather than promote a belief system, Cruden encourages direct inquiry into assumptions about spirituality. Whatever the path of practice, the need for clear inquiry is the same. Aware Practice strips away the jargon and esotericism surrounding the issues, to address what lies at the core.

In the newly united Scotland of the 850s, elite poets -- like druids in the past -- are power brokers. Aidan, poet to the High King, Kenneth MacAlpin, treads a precarious path between contentious chiefs, and old and new religions, as he guides his foster-sister through the equally precarious terrain of Second Sight. Historically based, full of lyric imagination, The Stringless Harp looks to one of Europe's oldest cultures in a tale of timeless integrity.

Circular Time is a detailed guide to Scotland's stone circles, cairns, standing stones, brochs, and Celtic crosses. This thoughtful journey through time is arranged as a tour of Scotland's most intriguing antiquities, taking visitors to more than 250 sites. Handy ordinance map coordinates are provided for every site, leading explorers to some of the country's most beautiful, and sometimes hidden, locations.

Old title but lovely writing from US and Scotland