This is a multi-faceted gem of a book. Joan Ruvinsky's poetry is raw, honest, direct, funny, and soul stirring. But more than that, her words point to deep and universal truths, each poem reminding me of what I've always known but somehow lost sight of in the fray. As a woman, it was especially refreshing to find Joan powerfully speaking to the same nondual reality most commonly addressed by male writers, but in a markedly different voice. I feel changed as a result of reading these poems -- opened, renewed, grateful, embraced, invited into new spaces and ways of seeing. A deep bow to Joan's close student Kathleen Knipp for shepherding these poems to publication. I will be buying multiple copies of this book to share with friends. –

Our Way to Here, by spiritual teacher, contemporary sage and nature mystic Joan Ruvinisky invites us to love and receive love; it demystifies nondual spirituality, bringing us down to earth enabling us to recognize and remember what has always been here. Her beautifully written musings, poetry and essays evoke that which is beyond words. The unique, often playful expression of her lived understanding is a transmission of truth from a woman who has awakened and is eager to share the wonder as well as ordinariness of it all. Joan has presented non-dual spirituality with a heart grounded in everyday reality. This is a book to savor and sit with in silence, reading a passage after quieting the mind, just being with the flavor of stillness and joyful return home. 

Simplifying non-dualism is in itself a considerable undertaking, but to do it with poetry is an amazing feat!  Joan’s unique style invites us to apply the nondual approach as a steadying influence on the ups and downs of the material world.   By reading just one poem a day, Our Way to Here gently guides us toward a balanced, sacred life.    

Our Way to Here is a touchstone for me, honest, pure and inspiring. The poems and prose are raw and stripped of unnecessaries. Joan Ruvinsky’s voice is clear as a mountain stream that reveals the beauty and not-beauty of the stones and the mud as it tumbles toward the river of being and not-being, the ocean of love. This collection invokes chuckles and tears. Thank you Kathleen Knipp and all who have helped preserve and amplify Ruvinsky’s authentic voice. 

In Joan Ruvinsky’s poetry, we hear the immense silence of the desert, the mountain and the sky. Her words don’t tell us about this silence – they invite us into a state of joyous awareness in which the silence emerges from within. Our Way to Here gains poignancy and power as it slides from discussing the non-duality of life to the non-duality of death: the death of the author’s mother, the death of the author’s sister and finally, the death of the author herself. At the end, we are left like Joan on her deathbed. We are healed from “the misperception of separateness.”