The Soul We Share

Winner of the 2023 Aryamati Collection Competition. Through visceral and vulnerable poetry, Ricky Ray meditates on the pain and gratitude that arise from a keenly felt awareness of our fleeting existence. Recognizing his humanity as a facet of natural processes, Ricky measures the ache of living in a disabled body against the joy of 'being lived' by the places he inhabits. As we accompany him and his soul dog, Addie, through the scenic woodlands of New England, the concrete jungle of Manhattan, and the swamps of the Deep South, the lines between humans, animals and nature begin to blur and move in concert. Shifting between forms both physical and elemental, we read of an existence lived not 'upon / but as one' with the Earth, 'whose being we are throughout and beyond our brief sojourn as human'. At the heart of this collection is the transformative experience of Ricky's life with an old brown dog, which teaches that soul isn't merely something we possess-it's an animacy deeply shared.

Ricky Ray is a poet, essayist and eco-mystic who lives with his wife and his old brown dog in the old green hills of New England. He is the author of Fealty; Quiet, Grit, Glory; and The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself, a finalist for The Laurel Prize. He was educated at Columbia University and Bennington College, and his awards include a Ron McFarland Poetry Prize and a Zoeglossia Fellowship. He lectures on poetry, animism and integral ecology, and he serves on the advisory board of the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality at Harvard.