Forty Days In the Wilderness, Wandering

Mapping moments of deep attention and wonder, Forty Days in the Wilderness, Wandering invites its readers to contemplate the natural world, sacred wilderness, and devotional wandering through the 2020 Lenten season and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Largely composed in conjunction with walks through Wisconsin's national forests and state parks, the collection began as a Lenten intention - a creative response to Muthupandiyan's desire to find the divine in a world that has largely destroyed wilderness - the natural places which, within many religious traditions, devotional wandering has historically occurred.

Several days into the project, however, the themes of wilderness and devotional wandering took on new depth and urgency while the COVID-19 pandemic took hold and the world began collectively negotiating its way through various spiritual, emotional, and physical deserts of solitude, bewilderment, alienation, and fear.

Each of the poems and illustrations included within this collection was written and drawn during the first forty-five days of quarantine. The collection serves as a writer's journal on the deep wilderness and profound time of spiritual formation that humanity entered as the pandemic took hold. Read together, they chart a poetic apogee from joy to grief, exultation to death, desire to love without hope.

Poems and illustrations from this collection have also appeared in Chitro Magazine and the anthology

Sheltering With Poems: Community and Connection During Covid (Bent Paddle Press)