Quickwater Oracles: Conversations & Meditations

by Ruth Thompson

Overview

When award-winning poet Ruth Thompson decided to learn to channel in 2018, she wanted to deepen the intuitive connections with nature that inspired her poetry. The skeptical product of a scientific family, she did not expect the doors to fly open to a vast multitude of birds, trees, faeries, dragons, and a host of other nonphysical beings. "Quickwater Oracles," Thompson's record of their channeled conversations - expansive, uninhibited, tender, hilarious - will be published by Two Fine Crows Books in December, 2021.

Conscious channeling involves intentionally connecting and communicating with nonphysical fields of consciousness. Thompson's poetic gifts make her translations of energy communications so vivid that for the reader it is almost like experiencing them in person.

Although she began in despair at the state of the world, these messages were filled with exuberant celebration. As one of the channels says: "We say, change your spectacles to joy. To joy!"

Inspiring yet unsentimental, Quickwater Oracles can be used for daily meditation, journaling, and discussion, or read as one woman's channeling journey. Readers who loved Ross Gay's "The Book of Delights," Aimee Nezhukumatathil's "World of Wonders," and Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris's "Lost Spells" will treasure Ruth Thompson's gift of "joy-making and singing."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781736525814
Publisher:	Saddle Road Press
Publication date:	10/15/2021
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.37(d)

About the Author

RUTH THOMPSON is an award-winning poet. QUICKWATER ORACLES is her first collection of channels. She has published four books of poetry: Whale Fall & Black Sage, Crazing, Woman With Crows, and Here Along Cazenovia Creek. She began writing in her fifties, after freeing herself from an abusive marriage, about which she wrote in Woman With Crows. Her "fierce, gorgeous, sensual poems of earth-as-body and body-as-earth" have been praised by Stanley Plumly, Philip Terman, Irving Feldman, Frank X. Gaspar, and others. Her work has won New Millennium Writings, Harpur Palate, Chautauqua, Tupelo Quarterly, and other national awards, and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. Whale Fall was choreographed and performed in Hilo, Hawai'i by dancers Jenn Eng, Karen Masaki, and Colee Garr in 2018. Here Along Cazenovia Creek was choreographed and performed by revered dancer Shizuno Nasu of Japan in 2021. Ruth also performed with cellist Lee Zimmerman in Whitefish, Montana in 2019. Ruth received a BA from Stanford University and a doctorate in English from Indiana University. She has been an English professor, library administrator, book editor, and college dean in California. She lives in Ithaca, NY with her partner, anthropologist-writer Don Mitchell, where she is an editor of Saddle Road Press and teaches poetry, writing from the body, and embodied meditation. She was a contributor at AROHO women writers' retreats from 2011-2015, and has been writer in residence at Rivendell Writers' Colony, Rockvale Writers' Colony, and Walking Lightly Ranch in Montana. Along with Don Mitchell, she held the Williamson Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Eastern New Mexico University in 2019.Ruth talks about her work in a short video on her website. Poems, videos of performances, and further information can also be found at ruththompson.net.

Editorial Reviews

11/08/2021

In this philosophical, nature-minded collection of free verse, poet Thompson (Whale Fall & Black Sage) opens up about her experiences channeling a wide range of beings whose voices she has discovered in meditation. Inviting readers to think of the work as “translations or as a created artifact or as pure fantasy,” she shares her renditions of conversations with and revelations from dolphins, bears, water, birds, faeries, and other, hazier sources (she calls some “vast non-embodied fields of intelligence”) that, together, build an image of the world as interconnected and peaceful. These voices encourage Thompson to write, remind her to find joy in the world around her, and push her to reconsider her sense of her self as isolated (“you still think as humans do, and this is by distinction of one thing from another”) and her body as secondary: “ake your body the mistress of the household for a while and see how different you will feel.”

The poetry’s exuberance is a nice balance to its weighty themes. Thompson blends classical New Age ideals—“inside is just as real an experience as life around you”—as well as more contemporary understandings of interconnection and mindfulness: “Love ... is more a state of full awareness.” Sometimes the notions can be a bit puzzling, like Thompson’s channeling of Gaia, who views current environmental devastation as “just the playing out of choices” but has “no preference” for what happens, but the work can be viewed as prophetic statements that bear fruit from the process of trying to understand them.

Thompson’s channeled voices emit unique personalities. A laconic horse concludes a brief poem with “That’s all I have to say,” while the dolphins are more frenetic (“You make whoop-poems! Hahahahaha!”), and the dragons enigmatic beings of power who declare “ut know that vastness is vastness is vastness! We are not bigger than you!” Readers open to paranormal insights will enjoy Thompson’s idiosyncratic, unconventional poems and her mind-bending exploration of what the world could look like with some creative reorienting.

Takeaway: This joyful collection of free verse poses challenging alternative views of nature and humanity in a compact, unique style.

Great for fans of: Sanaya Roman, Isabel Martin-Ventura; Matt Buonocore’s Lost In Wonder.

Production grades Cover: B+ Design and typography: A- Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: B+

BookLife Reviews

"[W]hile Quickwater Oracles should be considered for any literary collection, this added value makes it a recommended pick for philosophy, self-help, and creative writers and readers, as well. The fervor of its voice, the unconventional pieces that eschew propriety for passion, and the many insights into personal power and integrity that wind through these reflections are poignant, revealing, and powerful. Ideally, Quickwater Oracles will reach a wide, diverse audience with its rich, joyful channeling of nature, purpose, and spiritual, spirited reflections." - D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

"In a new collection of 101 vivid channelings, a published poet shares the communication she receives from the natural world: from beings real and fantastic, plants, water, stars, and the land.... Each piece reinforces that everything is connected, that living in the moment is enough, that love for oneself and all things will bring joy, which is the natural state of the Universe. - BlueInkReview, August 2021

Reading Ruth Thompson feels like reading Rumi or Lakshminkara or Julian of Norwich. Rich, free, joyful, Quickwater Oracles expands me. Do I understand channeling? No. Yet whenever I return to Quickwater I find myself happy in ways I can't explain. Read it. You'll never be the same. - Mary Johnson, author of An Unquenchable Thirst

An accomplished, late-in-life author from a scientific and skeptical family discovers the delightful surprise of relinquishing the ego's strivings, to be more like the pine trees who whisper, "All is for no reason. It is for pleasure. It is for itself knowing itself." -- Jendi Reiter, author of author of Bullies in Love and Made Man

She has allowed herself to embrace a world she doesn't know, the world of channeling, of deep spirits, of all that earth is, ancient and true. - Esther Cohen, author of Overheard

What a book! What a way to use the presence of one's life! Thank you, Ruth. - Ailia Mira, artist and conscious channel, AiliaMira.com

Quickwater Oracles, by the accomplished poet Ruth Thompson, will open the door to your own inner magician and connect you to an amazing world of nonphysical beings and energies. Thompson shares the channelings that lifted her out of despair with the world and struggles with her inner critic, into deep wisdom and joy. Here are songs, conversations, and meditations so engaging that you may find yourself seeking a similar path to freedom and expansion of spirit. - Judith Slater, PhD, clinical psychologist and author of The World Imagined

Quickwater Oracles reads like a conversation with your wise elder .... [I]nspiration for daily life and beyond." - Helané Wahbeh, ND, MCR, author of The Science of Channeling and Director of Research, IONS

orld speaks-no, sings-through Ruth the whole web of life." r

From the Publisher