A Turtle On The Yellow Road The Transformation of a Modern Mystic

In this extraordinary little volume, Marian D. Kelley heeds the voice of time itself, and shares a lifetime of intimate experiences through the medium of eighty deceptively simple yet elegant poems. Written in plain, evocative, and declarative English, the poems themselves are immediately accessible visions of brief moments of life, guided by an observer’s eye that is strong, and almost scientifically detached from the object: “Come my friend, into the land of the daffodils.” Yet built on such material foundations, the vision quickly engulfs the reader in a new sense of reality: “come where space knows only closeness and yellow and green are the colors of love.” From the Hebrew prophets, to the mothers and fathers of the monastic movement in the Egyptian desert, and the passionate writings of St. Augustine, the Christian tradition of mystical writing combines the transcendence of the divine experience with the details of human life in a concrete time and place. Since poetry has its roots in the inspiration of oracular utterance, it is not surprising that poetry becomes an important medium for the communication of spiritual experience. The intense stretching of language to its transformative limits through poetry is a mirror for the simultaneous transformation of human consciousness which poetry both parallels and expresses. Mother Marian has given us a version of her spiritual autobiography through the accidents of poetry: “I have walked the past, and I know the Now.” Bishop Roberto J. FossMoving back and forth, to and fro, through time and space we glean insights into the unfolding creative process of Marian Kelley’s story. Whether running, climbing, playing, stumbling or simply walking the walk, the reader catches sight of the author as one with the creative process of life itself. Like the butterfly that repeatedly weaves its way in and out of her mystical sojourn, the reader is transported from the baffling angst of sorrow provoked by the Vietnam war that contributed to the confusion of her teenage years to the ecstasy of being ordained a priest and the fulfillment of returning to dance in stillness with the people of the sacred earth. The lengthiness of her travail to the place of at-one-ment with the beloved is reflected in the longest section titled “Searching.” There we experience the dark night of the soul of the author who purifies herself in silence, prayer, and meditation to emerge alas through the small opening in the sun where she proclaims her interconnectedness to all of life that was and is in the eternal NOW. Evocative of the mystical poetry of Teresa of Avila and the celebration of Holy Wisdom inherent in the Canticle of Canticles of the Old Testament, Marian Kelley’s, A Turtle on the Yellow Road, takes us to that place of inner knowing where we too, “begin twirling in the sun, becoming one with the stones, the pollen, and with the rhythm of Mother Earth.” Most Rev. Jorge Rodríguez Eagar, Ph. D., D.D