Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature |  | Author: Kathleen Dean Moore
Publisher: Trumpeter
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $9.19
as of 9/6/2010 21:24 CDT details
You Save: $6.76 (42%)
New (31) Used (10) from $9.00
Seller: allnewbooks
Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 69,950
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.6
ISBN: 1590307712
Dewey Decimal Number: 508
EAN: 9781590307717
ASIN: 1590307712
Publication Date: March 9, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9781590307717 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In an effort to make sense of the deaths in quick succession of several loved ones, Kathleen Dean Moore turned to the comfort of the wild, making a series of solitary excursions into ancient forests, wild rivers, remote deserts, and windswept islands to learn what the environment could teach her in her time of pain. This book is the record of her experiences. It’s a stunning collection of carefully observed accounts of her life—tracking otters on the beach, cooking breakfast in the desert, canoeing in a snow squall, wading among migrating salmon in the dark—but it is also a profound meditation on the healing power of nature.
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Navigating the Flow From Grief to Gladness May 17, 2010
Story Circle Book Reviews
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
I have to confess up front: I was afraid to read this book. Not because I don't know and love Moore's thinking and writing; I do. Her essay, "Testimony of the Marsh," from her book Holdfast is one of my favorites ever. I teach it in my creative writing workshops as an example of how to use lyrical nature writing to reveal truths at the heart of life. So I picked up Wild Comfort in delighted anticipation, until I read this in her introduction:
I had set out to write a different book. I had begun to write about happiness... But events overtook me. I guess that's how I'll say it. That autumn, events overtook me, death after death, and my life became an experiment in sadness.
I couldn't read more. I closed the book. For the past eight months, since my husband began seeing birds and was eventually diagnosed with brain cancer, my life has been an experiment in sustaining courage and balance. I didn't want to read about grief, sadness or any of their relatives. I wanted that book on what makes a person happy.
A few days later, I picked up Wild Comfort again. And reading on, I drank it in like a healing draught, like the smell of rain bringing life to my drought-stricken desert valley. This slender collection of essays moves as powerfully and inevitably as a tide, inching in, rising ever-so-slowly under me, until I am buoyed by the strength and truth that flow through Moore's words. It is like the sun shining through a gap in the clouds, spotlighting the exact place that makes us stop and stare, overcome with awe at how beautiful life is. Wild Comfort may be rooted in grief, in loss, in darkness, but Moore's words carry us inexorably toward light and hope.
I could quote an insightful passage from every essay, but here's the paragraph from the beginning of the book that hooked me:
Late on the night when I finished this book, I felt my way to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Clouds obscured the moon. I could hear the shifting of the dark sea but could only imagine the surge and ebb of its rim on the sand. Then the clouds slid out from under the moon. The advancing edge of waves gathered moonlight and pushed it toward land. The line of light wavered there, shaking in the wind, then slid out to sea. And so it was, up and down the beach, a rim of light riding in on the swash and slipping back into the night. I was happy then, standing in the surge with lines of moonlight catching on my rubber boots. This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.
Amen.
by Susan J. Tweit
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
 Lyrical, Lively, and Lovely April 3, 2010
Janet Mallot (Jacksonville, FL)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature reflects moments and experiences in the author's life in the wild through lucid, poetic descriptions that comfortably sway between the most minute details and broad universal truths. Her attentiveness to the facts of the moment at hand is keen, while her thoughts in understanding them may be scientific, ethical, or purely exhilarating...and sometimes all of these. Her appreciation and gratitude for the wild are genuine and contagious. She is a full participant...physical, emotional, and in her own way, spiritual...in the experiences she describes, never a bystander to them or an objective academic, although her credentials in philosophy invariably enrich her perceptions.
Moore turns to nature to nimbly and wisely yet subtly face with grace the loss of family members and friends, making choices, dealing with the complexities of modern life, and having patience, among other things. She offers lessons for us in how a heron eats, in a possum in a plum tree, in turning stones, and in a broken sun, reflecting that "[t]here is a wild comfort in the cycles and the intersecting circles, the rotations and revolutions, the growing and ebbing of this beautiful and strangely trustworthy world."
The impact of this book has been to revitalize (once again, for it is a neverending process) my own senses and mind in savoring how human life is inevitably interlaced with the wild, and that embracing and exploring that fact can only bring us closer to understanding what is true and real in both this instant and the timeless universe.
Thoughtful July 28, 2010
Dana K. Anderson (Edgartown, MA USA)
A pleasant, sometimes elegant series of pieces on the natural world and our relation to it.
|
|
|
