Non-fiction debut from Hackney Literary Award-winning poet. - Focuses on much-overlooked tradition of female mystics and women’s religious experience. - Starting from a traditional Christian background, the author expands her understanding of, and relationship to, the sacred. Muddy Mysticism is a spiritual memoir, a lyrical articulation of an emergent feminist mysticism and a heartfelt response to the lack of mystical literature by women who have chosen a life of family, love, work and the world. Like many women Natalie Bryant Rizzieri found the faith of her childhood no longer fitted... yet still there is a longing for the sacred. Through poetry, reflection and experience she moves into the possibility of direct experience with the divine...beyond a belief system. Exploring the possibility of daily life in the modern world not as something to be transcended or escaped...but as a mystical path in its own right. Muddy Mysticism offers consolation to those who feel the truth and bewilderment that the late German Jesuit priest, Karl Rahner, touched upon when he said that the only way a person would survive with an intact faith in this century is by being a mystic. Natalie Bryant-Rizzieri is an award-winning poet. This is her first non-fiction title. With breath-taking lyricism, Natalie Bryant Rizzieri captures a new definition of the divine - one that shows us darkness can be holy, the prosaic a place of Mystery, and that the sacred can bleed in through the cracks. This searing provocation to reclaim what is sacred in our daily lives is tenderly excavated from the ruins of patriarchy and indoctrination. It is a brilliant debut: exquisitely crafted and an indelible classic. -Katherine Larson, author of Radial Symmetry Muddy Mysticism is a treasure-trove of wisdom for those who yearn for the mystic, but not by way of the cloister. It reveals a path that seeks spiritual presence amidst the ruckus and noise of everyday life, the struggles with children and partners, work and disappointment, loss and sorrow, through Rizzieri's blazingly honest telling of her own messy, holy process. It's not easy to be a poet and a mystic, with very young children, one still nursing at the book's beginning. For Rizzieri this difficulty is an opening into the healing mud of embodiment. Muddy Mysticism overturns conventional religious ideas that demonize desire, appetite, women's bodies, and the dark. Full of visionary gems, it offers a radical reorientation to the relationship between Body and Soul. She opens the door leading out of the Patriarchy; she shows you the Way to know the Real as Gift and Blessing. -Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, author of The Motherline, The Sister from Below, and The Faust Woman Poems Do you too stand frozen at the crosshairs of idealism and skepticism? Are you, like me, a spiritual agnostic disguised as an atheist? Let this book be your companion. Muddy Mysticism isn't muddy at all. Natalie Bryant Rizzieri shows us the way, clearing some much needed space for a mysticism rooted in the rawness of (all) women's lives. This intimate and humorous account of a woman whose sanity had been rendered threadbare by the combined demands of motherhood and urban life becomes all the more surprising when one discovers the poems inlaid at the heart of each chapter. Reach for this book the way you'd reach for a mug of tea in the kitchen of a dear friend. Appreciate its offer of fortitude and sanity. I did and do. -Cate Marvin, author of Oracle, World's Tallest Disaster, and Fragment of the Head of a Queen More women's stories need to be told. Particularly those that are magnificently honest and authentic, reflecting the resilience and creativity and generosity that's desperately needed in our world and religions right now. That's what Natalie's book offers us. Muddy Mysticism is an invitation into the Sacred through the portal of the raw realities of motherhood and feminine ways of knowing. -Victoria Loorz, co-founder of Seminary of the Wild, and author of Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred Muddy Mysticism is an evocative, powerful experience of a book, a profound soul's journey that is clearly set down to paper with palpable devotion and vast experience. The true heart of an immense mystic shines through in every word. Natalie Bryant Rizzieri has written with such grace and grit about the dark and often dirty places where the divine takes us through exile and in the search for belonging. Muddy Mysticism embodies and satisfies the essential longing of readers to connect in with this very earthy journey to the broken open soul. It is a landmark of a book. Brave, raw, vibrant. -Eila Carrico Kundrie, author of The Other Side of the River Natalie Bryant Rizzieri documents her struggles to find divinity in the world, in the body, in the overwhelming, repetitive tasks of motherhood, and in a marriage where she had subordinated many of her needs to those of her husband. This proves more diff