Risë (pictured in the image above) was my spiritual teacher and my guide, and I was blessed beyond measure to have met her when I was 21 years old in the mystical village of Tepoztlan Morelos Mexico in 1974.

Risë called her poems “notes”. In her book, Notes From A Seventh Seven Year Cycle, they were deliberately arranged in an order that was important to her. (I had a typewriter in Mexico, so I got to sit with her in the courtyard and type out each line in exactly the way she wanted it presented.)

She brought her notes together at this time, in this form, knowing she had a short time. She died shortly after completing this book in 1977 at the age of 49, her seventh seven year cycle.

These are a culmination of her life as a philosopher, seeker of wisdom, activist and then as a seer.

(I’ve had 50 years to contemplate the note she dedicated to me and I have come to realizations such as:

• “Divinely One” – that spark of the divine in us all, yet most of us don’t see or live in it
• “Those of us who are divinely one” – those few who speak and live in the holy Truth
• “your temple, my house” – she was abiding in the blazing splendor of Love that awakened in me through her example. It abides there still in my temple, and soon God willing, my house)