The Soul of the World: A Modern Book of Hours

I bought a copy of this book in the 1990's and thought it was beautifully written and engaging. At the time I was working in a correction center in Washington State. I had a student inmate that was moving on to a pre-release facility and when she was there I sent her a copy of this as a good luck/going away present. Someone found it and reported it. You are not allowed to give gifts to inmates they said even though my job was as a teacher not a correction's officer. They fired me and it was my hero's journey - I never looked back and am doing so much better since leaving. My friend is still my friend. She is married and has a son in college.

This is a beautiful little book, lightweight and about 6 inches square, divided into seven days, Sunday through Saturday. Each day has a two-page spread for the traditional hours of prayer/meditation: midnight/matins, sunrise/lauds, 6 am/prime, 9 am/terce, noon/sext, 3 pm/none, sunset/vespers and 9 pm/compline. Each spread features, on the left page, one or two quotations or poems about the soul, our relationship to nature, etc. These inspirational thoughts come from philosophers, poets, novelists and many others, and the name, nationality and dates of birth and death are given. The right page contains a small picture, usually of a person, with the location identified.This book is very similar to The Soul Aflame by the same collaborators and published in 2000. This volume is a little smaller, and though the setup is the same, the quotes are different and the pictures here tend to feature natural settings rather than people .This book is lovely for yourself or as a gift to someone who is troubled or in need of solace or inspiration. It's a way to reconnect with those ideas and thoughts that you used to have but so often get pushed aside when one begins to worry about career, mortgages, totalitarian governments and all the rest.Find some peace. Find this book.

Please, reprint this book without changing a thing! It was beautiful and simple and somthing I wish I had the opportunity to give each of my friends. Please give me that opportunity again. I have found nothing that compare - intense and stunning photos and passages chosen to match.Here is what I wrote about it 11/1997:Saturday... 6AM Prime... "What is going on inside me I cannot tell. In the sky a thousand stars are magnetized, and I am glued by the swing of the planet to the sand... My dreams are more real than those dunes, than that moon, than those presences..." Antoine de Saint-Exupery The words faced a page picturing California's Death Valley, photographed in such a way that you could have entrusted your soul to that place for that moment and lingered in it's powerful and drawing stillness. This book took me for one week, in three hour intervals, through an adventure of the soul. For those who might have found themselves too lost in the daily grind, this book will assuredly take you back to that central part of yourself. Your focus will be turned to a much larger world and a deeper vision of an attainable, tangeable human spirit that might have gotten lost along the way. Presentation-wise, this book is graphically clean; both in typography and photography. It is the first book of all I own, that comes to mind when I think of a gift for someone with whom a share a special bond.

This small book's wisdom has given me the words to share for mourning, rejoicing, sickness, death and my wedding vows. I can't even bring myself to lend my own - I might need it at any time for my sanity. I've lost track of how many I have given to friends.

I just wanted to say that this book is THE VERY BEST compilation of wisdom and contemplation that I have ever read outside of the Bible itself. The photographs which accompany the text send your mind to dream-like places however they really exist on this world! Unfortunately for me, but fortunate for my good friend, I gave my only copy as a gift of love... I am going to get my eager hands (and my mind) on another copy right away! Do yourself a favor & get this book. You will not regret it :-)

Saturday... 6AM Prime... "What is going on inside me I cannot tell. In the sky a thousand stars are magnetized, and I am glued by the swing of the planet to the sand... My dreams are more real than those dunes, than that moon, than those presences..." Antoine de Saint-Exupery The words faced a page picturing California's Death Valley, photographed in such a way that you could have entrusted your soul to that place for that moment and lingered in it's powerful and drawing stillness. This book took me for one week, in three hour intervals, through an adventure of the soul. For those who might have found themselves too lost in the daily grind, this book will assuredly take you back to that central part of yourself. Your focus will be turned to a much larger world and a deeper vision of an attainable, tangeable human spirit that might have gotten lost along the way. Presentation-wise, this book is graphically clean; both in typography and photography. It is the first book of all I own, that comes to mind when I think of a gift for someone with whom a share a special bond.