Dancing Through the Fire Door

I am more than my body is the title of a poem that runs midway through this thoughtful, visually stunning collection. It is the pivot on which the journey rests, though the waystops are many and readers are invited to take sanctuary in the visual and poetic prompts which are portals into the self.

In Dancing through the Fire Door, Cindy Rinne has created a multi-textured lexicon of line, word and image which asks the reader to join the ceremony which challenges our losses and converts their energies into the cycles of life and rebirth. How can we peel back the bark which bares our past? To enter, fearless – to engage on all possible levels is to relinquish the destructive hold of history and redirect the soul’s arrow toward infinitude.
Lois P. Jones, Author of Night Ladder.

Dancing through the Fire Door is a book of healing and change, repair, and metamorphosis. How does trauma recovery become rebirth? The author offers no formula, as she—delicately, playfully, but with stark honesty—unfolds her own labyrinth for the reader. Look! The maze has morphed into a garden. Come inside, bridging over “the gap between me and myself,” and you’ll learn “to see obstacles like pebbles, not boulders.” Keep dancing. In the end, the journey and the self are one.
Toti O'Brien, author of Alter, Alter

In Dancing Through the Fire Door, Cindy Rinne reveals the skills of a healer offering wayfarers insight, while invoking deities from many traditions to assist them integrate Body, Mind and Spirit, which is the Journey’s intention. Her path encourages compassion, forgiveness, surrender, and the slowing-down-grace of meditation to purify the soul. Pauses create the space to open the heart promoting inner strength. Stunning photographs, together with the magic wisdom of her poetry, function as the cosmic power unifying the scattered Self.
Alicia Viguer-Espert, author of Holding a Hummingbird

This beautiful book, its interrelatedness, its reciprocity of all things —fire in the stone and facets of memory, shapes of incandescent earth and water’s chosen path, watchful moon and sleeping bees — await our enduring discoveries. These poems of intuition and vision, with their elemental images beside images of the elements, help guide us through profound challenge to mindful liberation, even as we explore the mythos of who we are and return to our feet the topography of our spiritual journey.
William O’Daly, author of The New Gods and translator of Pablo Neruda’s Book of Twilight