How the Stars Get in Your Bones

Her work has been described as “breathtaking” by the Chicago Tribune. Now Jan Richardson returns with a new collection of blessings that go deeper still into what she has become known for: blessings that do not shy away from our human experience but enter into the full range of it.

With poetic honesty, How the Stars Get in Your Bones turns toward the hard things that each of us knows: the grief, loss, fear, and weariness that we live with. In her distinctive style, Richardson invites us to perceive what makes its home here, too: the joy, solace, grace, and, most of all, the love that moves through it all, illuminating and transforming what seems most hidden or hopeless.

“A blessing has the ability to enter into our pain,” Richardson writes in the opening pages, “not to dismiss or gloss over it but to name it, and to name also the love that connects us and holds us: the love that is continually working for our wholeheartedness.”

These blessings welcome us wherever we are, offer us a space of healing for as long as we need, and call forth our courage, that our broken heart might become a path back into the world.

To keep turning your heart
toward this unendurable earth,
knowing your heart will break
but turning it still.

I tell you,
this is how the stars
get in your bones.

—From the blessing “How the Stars Get in Your Bones”

Born of Richardson’s deep knowing of grief and love, these blessings are a luminous gift to savor and to share.