Literature of Restoration is a path to wholeness. It speaks the missing stories; it names the fragments whose absence has diminished the world; it bears witness to the particulars of earthly and human unraveling and recognizes the inextricable link between them.

Several of the writers whose work appears on this site have been writing together, and with Deena Metzger, for many years. In fundamental ways, we have made – are making, a journey together, companions in the mysteries that have undone and remade us. In the process, we have found rigorous solace in Literature of Restoration.

Together, we searched for guidance: at first, when it came, it was so unexpected, so searingly clear, that it took us down. It was an initiation. We were being reconfigured. This is what is required to restore the broken world. We must shift from being human-centered to being Earth-centered, and from individual to relational identity. To accomplish this, we must apprentice ourselves to the Natural World. We must train our gaze on unseen realms. Literature of Restoration is a reckoning that makes space for the magic exiled by modernity.

Over the years, we listened as stories and insights poured through us into the circle. Earth and ancestors came in unmistakable ways, as if they had convened us, waiting patiently across lifetimes for us to recognize the patterns and learn to speak them. Again and again, dreams came and signs appeared, along with animals and plants, to train us in relational listening and the courtesies of alliance. We had to empty ourselves. We had to become the vessel in which to cook the sacred meal.

Looking back, I can say that Earth and the ancestors have been reborn through us. They recognized our longing for images and insights, for essential stories and ways to tell them that traverse the chasm between wonder and brutality.

Nature’s language is mutuality. Her processes are circular, spiral, fractal, and holographic, because complexity is communal. Ever-changing and continuous. That, too, is one of the lessons of this Literature: it requires a circle because restoration cannot be accomplished alone. Listening is a form of reciprocity. Service to reconnection makes for a beautiful life. Writing as devotion requires everything. Though the world seems more precarious than ever, what is intact has grown stronger. More visible. Literature of Restoration illuminates the threads of reweaving. We are its scribes.

-Cynthia Travis