The Guidebook
Poet, there’s a spark in you--a light. I feel my spark, my light, when I walk with the grasshoppers, as they pat along each piece of sawgrass in the marsh, as they support each other with their bodies, as they look at me, asserting their life, their step, their place in the wetlands, in Florida, on the earth. I hope that, with this guidebook, you will feel empowered to nurture a deep, intimate relationship to your own inner light, holding hands with nature along the way. Each chapter ends with an affirmation. There is also room at the end of each chapter to write. I do guide you here, but my hope is that you will also guide yourself. There is strength in interdependence, Poet, and I am so glad to bring this book to you.
“I remember a vast field I could not stop writing about—dandelions, a rolling hill or two, and so much green. I’d never seen anything like it, and I remember thinking, as I entered my family’s rented van, ‘I didn’t know places like this existed anymore.’ And I felt something new—an opening to be honest in my need for deep love, which I found that day in the earth, and in God, and—even though I may not have seen it this way at the time—in myself.”
—Ashley Inguanta, from her guidebook’s introduction
