TARA: The Healing Power of Nature

Advance Praise for Tara, The Healing Power of Nature

A gripping, tragic story of negligence, abuse and secrets kept and survived through routines, communion with nature, and fantasy. The weave of details here will keep you reading and call you back to read again. The weight of what is recorded here will bring you back many times more.

—Scott Owens, Poet Laureate of Hickory, NC

“Mary Ricketson’s Tara, The Healing Power of Nature, is quiet, low-key, unsensational—and full of fire. It offers a tender portrait of a girl who moves beyond tropes of helpless victimhood to survive family struggles and incidents of sexual abuse which, with a wrenching accuracy to so many experiences of abuse, not one person ever notices. But Ricketson’s Tara finds a path to wholeness through an alchemy of dissociation, imagination, and an ultimate reclamation of herself, grounded in her profound connection to nonhuman nature. This is a book for those who have endured alone, unspeaking and unseen, with neither their wounds nor their strength ever fully recognized, who are making their own way toward healing on their own terms. ‘Search within myself guides me again and again,’ says Ricketson, and in her empathic treatment of her character’s suffering and renewal, we see one of the ways in which, sometimes, it can.”

—Catherine Carter, author of By Stone and Needle, Larvae of the Nearest Stars, Marks of the Witch

“Mary Ricketson’s compelling story in poems gives us Tara, a child with a rule-laden childhood, Have to do what I’m told. Every time. All the time; and with considerable charm: I might have been born creating sand art in the white grains of this hot southern beach. The poems master subtlety: Mother had trouble on her own; a father’s 18-month deployments: Silent fear hides in the shadows. Tara matures, acquiring a useful survival tool: Learn to ignore pain. We listen as her childhood ends: I freeze up inside myself. Powerful storytelling, offset by lyrical work, enables the reader to walk with Tara as she works through survival into a long, fruitful healing: One nightbird in the white oak out back calls to me, only me, sings ease, sings relief. Ricketson gives us insights into how the damaged heal: Make life work in parts I can control myself. This is a wondrous work.”

—Eugene Stevenson, author of The Heart’s Code and The Population of Dreams

“Mary's latest book, Tara, The Healing Power of Nature, takes us on an incredible journey with a young girl. Tara suffered more than one trauma, and shared with no one, until her imaginary friend, Cherie appeared.With Cherie and her connection with nature, she survived. For her courage and determination at a young age, Mary's sums it up perfectly in her book with the poem, ‘Protected by a Fairy,’ As long as pine roots stretch up to kiss an acorn, and oaks hold sun and shade, I believe in life, and I believe in love.”

—Glenda Barrett, author of When the Sap Rises, and The Beauty of Silence

About the Author

Mary Ricketson, MAEd, Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor, lives in Murphy NC, and has been a therapist for individuals and families since 1978.In addition to counseling people impacted by trauma, she led a five-year community task force, ultimately founding REACH, professional services for domestic violence and sexual abuse survivors, including a shelter for abused women and their children.In 1987, REACH named her Person of the Decade, honoring her continuing service to battered women and their children.

She’s a mother and proud grandmother.Mary continues to live in the house she built and homesteaded when she arrived in the mountains, where she tends blueberries, befriends animal and human neighbors, and daily sojourns with the flora and fauna that find resonance in her poems.

Her nine published poetry collections include Lira, Precious the Mule, STUTTERS: A Book of Hope, and Tall Flowers and Living Long.She won first place in the 2011 Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest 75th anniversary national poetry contest.Five of her poems have been set as a song cycle, Shards of Hope, by composer Andrew Wilson, London England.

www.maryricketson.com

My Own Way

I escape to oaks and pines in times of stress

of every kind, rest myself, and comfort with

Cherie, good fairy of my own. I count my blessings,

steady in all the basics of life and my own mind.

Inspired by birds in flight, renewed by free flowing

streams and trees that grow strong in simple soil,

flowers that seem to give more than receive,

I walk step by step, back to my daily life.