María Zambrano's writings are a testimony to her uncompromising love of wisdom and unrelenting quest for knowledge. She dedicated her long life to philosophical inquiry and reflection under extremely adverse circumstances: discrimination for being a woman since the early stages of her career; uprootedness, statelessness, and exile as a result of her Republican convictions since Spain became a fascist state; economic precariousness, if not poverty, due to her inability to obtain employment as a political refugee; intellectual marginality for the non-academic, essayistic, fragmentary, and sometimes hermetic quality of her writings which often explore unconventional or off-limits subjects for a philosopher, such as the soul, the divine realm, poetry, and dreams. Despite the extraordinary challenges she faced most of her adult life, Zambrano managed to produce a corpus that stands out for its philosophical depth and verbal richness. In 1988, she received Spain's Cervantes prize, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish language.

Chief among her works is Claros del bosque (1977), which translates as "Clearings in the Forest." This philosophical and literary tour de force is a series of meditative fragments that culminate Zambrano's lifetime quest for knowledge of the soul. This book belongs to "the culture of interiority" in Western thought and, more specifically, the "Rheno-Flemish model" of spirituality (39), which gives prominence to the contemplative life and the quest for the divine within. What distinguishes Claros del bosque from the works of this model of spirituality is that Zambrano approaches the realm of the spirit as a poet, as a humanist, and as a phenomenologist.

In Claros del bosque Zambrano offers a direct phenomenological account of the experience of awakening the divine within. It is phenomenological because it describes the experience of the divine as it unfolds while, at the same time, it offers a philosophical reflection and narrative about the unfolding of this experience. It is a "direct" account because Zambrano does not rely on the accounts given by canonical mystical authors but relies on her own personal experiences and resources.

In this presentation, I will limit my discussion to the concluding chapter of Claros del bosque, which is significantly titled "Los cielos" ("the Heavens"). I will show that "the Heavens" summarizes the process of attaining gnosis and awakening the divine within.

Dr. Hugo Moreno grew up in the border city of Juárez, México. He joined the faculty at Lewis & Clark in 2014. He has also been a faculty member at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Western University, Ontario, Reed College, and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. He has written peer-reviewed articles on Mexican and Hispanic poetry and philosophy. In 2008 the American Philosophical Association awarded him its annual Essay Prize in Latin American Thought. In 2014 he co-edited a special issue on Hispanic aesthetic thought with Elizabeth Millán for Symposium: The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy. Hugo Moreno also writes fiction. He is the author of the novel Donde se acaba el Norte (2020) for which he received a silver medal in the 2021 International Latino Books Awards. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon.