If you want to give your heart a good exercising, the art of Cara Leslie Berton will help you with that. In our highly accomplishment-focused culture, the surface of life may be all we get to be presented with, while our hearts have to live under the radar. So we don't get to know our hearts in their deeper, more longing capacities, and where that longing might lead us-into the darkness, but also through the darkness into light; into our human loneliness, but also through our loneliness into love and a larger Belonging.

The 98 original images in this book open us into that fertile territory of the heart. Her subjects include love and intimacy, suffering and redemption, family, longing and belonging (both human and religious), nostalgia, nature, the angelic world, aging, beauty, and more. And because she communicates all this through the wordless medium of her artwork, we get to encounter certain feeling places in our own hearts that we might not otherwise recognize. When we are conditioned to the glossy surface of ourselves, how much of us beneath the surface goes hungry? Someone has to paint the subtler realities of feeling, in its many dimensions-as Van Gogh did, as Rembrandt did-for us to know the fullness of ourselves and who we might become.

Cara Berton's drawings and paintings give us this.

As you go through this book, may you find in these graphic expressions what your own heart, soul, and spirit need for your own healing journey.