"Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga reveals Susan McCaslin's transformational and endearingly human journey with English born, Canadian Olga Park, integrative creative and mystic. McCaslin interweaves her poems, prose, photos, art, visions and struggles with those of Olga Park. Their polyphonic insights assure this reader that raised consciousness is accessible and joyful, not a hallucinogenic state. McCaslin, a gifted poet and visionary herself, illuminates Park's interior knowing, synthesizing myriad systems or spiritual stepping stones, drawing on her own deep knowledge of many wisdom traditions. McCaslin's book is wise, humble, and courageous. Her lyrical, receptivity entices this reader into a more loving, honest dasein or being in the world. May this treasure, organized in numinous vignettes, touch many souls."--Katerina Fretwell, poet and author of Class Acts and Angelic Scintillations"Not all of us who aspire to a mystical life are fortunate enough to have such a teacher as Olga Park, whom BC writer and poet Susan McCaslin studied with for decades.
In this spiritual memoir, McCaslin shares her experience of the Canadian mystic who so inspired and encouraged her. McCaslin acts as guide to Olga Park's writings as well as her own, drawing on a broad reading into mystical tradition.McCaslin offers the reader a place to stand, a sense of deep interconnectivity which Olga Parks describes as "between time and eternity." McCaslin has the ability to articulate ineffable experience with the well-thought-out clarity of a philosopher and the felt acuity of a poet. We are drawn into the mystic's "depth of field," the wider ecology that bridges an inclusive continuum of matter and spirit. Let Into the Mystic lead you to explore hitherto untranslated dimensions. Let this book lead you home."--Penn Kemp, poet and playwright, editor of Jack Layton: Art in Action.