GISELA

From fragments of history, Marcus Speh captures the mysterious spiritual journey of a woman who lived when only men’s lives were recorded: Gisela, a Bavarian princess married off to be the first queen of Hungary, then a prisoner, then an abbess and — some eight centuries later — a saint. As a child capable of communing with horses, our Gisela realizes "her body is connected to every other body," and "glory…only a reflection in a puddle of words." Never losing faith with her inner light even as her life ends, she is "strangely serene and happy to embrace a blue beginning." To read the story of Gisela is to discover a magic that will never stop "as long as the sun shines and the stars turn."