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BOOKS | BEAUTIFUL BOOKS

​If you have a favourite book you would like to see listed here, please send me an email . . .Thank you. 
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A FIRE RUNS THROUGH ALL THINGS | Susan Murphy

Zen koans are a tradition of holistic inquiry based on "encounter stories" from East Asia's most radical Buddhist tradition. Turning this form of inquiry toward the climate crisis, Susan Murphy contends that koans can help us enter the mind of not-knowing, from which acceptance and possibility freely emerge. Koans reveal intimate, mythic, artful, playful, provocative, humorous, and fierce ways to engage the work of protecting and healing our world...

...In addition to her use of dozens of traditional and new koans, Murphy illuminates the little-known Zen resonance with the oldest continuous body of indigenous wisdom on earth, summed up in the subtle Australian Aboriginal word Country. Murphy draws from her study and coteaching with Uncle Max (Dulumunmun) Harrison, a distinguished Yuin Elder, to show how this millennia-deep taproot of intelligence confirms the aliveness of the earth and the kinship of all beings.

​Earth as Koan. Earth as Self. | Emergence Magazine

THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH | Matsuo Bashō
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Oku no Hosomichi (奥の細道, originally おくのほそ道), translated as The Narrow Road to the Deep North and The Narrow Road to the Interior, is a major work of haibun by the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, considered one of the major texts of Japanese literature of the Edo period. The first edition was published posthumously in 1702. 

​The text is written in the form ofa prose and verse travel diary and was penned as Bashō made an epic and dangerous journey on foot through the Edo Japan of the late 17th century. While the poetic work became seminal of its own account, the poet's travels in the text have since inspired many people to follow in his footsteps and trace his journey for themselves. In one of its most memorable passages, Bashō suggests that ‘every day is a journey, and the journey itself home’. The text was also influenced by the works of Du Fu, who was highly revered by Bashō.
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Of Oku no Hosomichi, Kenji Miyazawa once suggested, ‘It was as if the very soul of Japan had itself written it.’ (Wikipedia)

THE STAR THROWER | Loren Eiseley 

Long admired for his compassionate, probing mediations on the natural world, Loren Eiseley completed this volume of his favourite writings shortly before his death in 1977. It includes many selections never before published in book form and spans Eiseley's entire writing career - from his early poems through The Immense Journey and The Unexpected Universe to his most recent essays - providing a superb sampling of the author as naturalist, poet, scientist and humanist. 

"In creation these is not only a Yes but also a No; not only a height but also an abyss; not only clarity but also obscurity; not only progress but also worthlessness... It is true that individual creatures and men experience these things in most unequal measure, their lots being assigned by a justice which is curious or very much concealed. Yet it is irrefutable that creation and creature are good even in the fact that all that is exists in this contrast and antithesis." Karl Barth in Church Dogmatics (Introduction to The Star Thrower). 

A LONG ROAD TRIP HOME | John Allison

"Michael Harlow has written that the poems in A LONG ROAD TRIP HOME go to the heart of the matter. 'Invention,' he says, 'is one thing, knowing is another. John Allison knows that the wisdom of experience leads to poems of discovery and revelation. These are poems whose governance is the reality of the imagination and the imagination of reality. It is all there in the language. By turns insightful, thoughtful, tender and reflective. His handling of myth, metaphor and symbol is exemplary, where myth is sacred history that returns us to ourselves and to who we are becoming in the forging of personality. And what an astonishment of images: 'I cannot live by bread alone/ I become your hands'; 'Rocks and the dead make good companions–/ and these trees shredded by the wind from a bleak/ horizon'; 'the home paddock singing in the dusk/ and the foal is prancing, dancing . . .' Since feeling is first, these are poems of heart-warming care, whose intelligence is the thoughtfulness that fills that deep hole behind words. They also ask that inevitable and archetypal question: How is it that we are so mysterious to ourselves and to the world at large?" Cold Hub Press (NZ)

WEN FU | The Art of Writing | Lu Chi

Written in the third century, this is one of the earliest Chinese works about the use of language, preceded only by the Ta Hsueh (Great Learning) of Confucius. Written by Lu Chi, a soldier-poet, the Wen Fu , or The Art of Writing ( wen means “art”; fu is a poetic form), is intended for those who wish to engage the art of letters at its deepest levels. In sixteen sections, The Art of Writing discusses the joys and problems that face both writer and reader and provides basic insights about many techniques of writing. Beautifully and faithfully translated by award-winning poet, essayist, and Chinese scholar Sam Hamill.

SEVEN BRIEF LESSONS ON PHYSICS | Carlo Rovelli 

In this mind-bending introduction to modern physics, Carlo Rovelli explains Einstein's theory of general relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, elementary particles, gravity, and the nature of the mind.Everything you need to know about modern physics, the universe and our place in the world in seven enlightening lessons. 'Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking' These seven short lessons guide us, with simplicity and clarity, through the scientific revolution that shook physics in the twentieth century and still continues to shake us today. In this mind-bending introduction to modern physics, Carlo Rovelli explains Einstein's theory of general relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, elementary particles, gravity, and the nature of the mind. Not since Richard Feynman's celebrated Six Easy Pieces has physics been so vividly, intelligently and entertainingly revealed.

FAITH, HOPE AND CARNAGE | Nick Cave & Sean O'Hagan

Sean O’Hagan: Do you think people can change the world?
 
Nick Cave: Yes. I do. I think it’s our responsibility as human beings to, not just change the world, but save the world. We can be in the process of saving the world with every gesture or movement or thing we say or way we treat each other or… whatever. It’s all part of – it can be – all a part of a general rehabilitation of a world that’s in trouble. You know, there’s people who are doing mighty things and there are ordinary people, too, who can be part of that project, which revolves, I think, around ideas of basic kindness.
 
Without getting too woo-woo about the whole thing, I think you can walk out your door and, you know, treat your neighbour with respect, or walk into a shop and be courteous to the person behind the counter… these sorts of things, I think, work towards rehabilitating the world. 

Nick Cave & Sean O'Hagan in conversation

POETRY UNBOUND: 50 Poems to Open Your World | Pádraig Ó Tuama

This inspiring collection, edited by Pádraig Ó Tuama, presents fifty poems about what it means to be alive in the world today. Each poem is paired with Pádraig's illuminating commentary that offers personal anecdotes and generous insights into the content of the poem.

Engaging, accessible and inviting, Poetry Unbound is the perfect companion for everyone who loves poetry and for anyone who wants to go deeper into poetry but doesn't necessarily know how to do so.

Poetry Unbound contains expanded reflections on poems as heard on the podcast, as well as exclusive new selections. Contributors include Hanif Abdurraqib, Patience Agbabi, Raymond Antrobus, Margaret Atwood, Ada Limón, Kei Miller, Roger Robinson, Lemn Sissay, Layli Long Soldier and more.

THE SITUATION AND THE STORY | Vivian Gornick 

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of "Fierce Attachments" and "The End of the Novel of Love" All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question "The Situation and the Story" asks—and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.

SYNTAX of The River: The Pattern Which Connects | Barry Lopez & Julia Martin

​Barry Lopez had no illusions about the seriousness of our global crisis, yet he also felt a deep conviction about the power of hope and the sources of renewal in the living world. Syntax of the River  is an extended conversation spanning three days between Lopez and Julia Martin in which he explores what this juxtaposition means for him as a writer.

BURNTCOAT | Sarah Hall 

​In the bedroom above her immense studio at Burntcoat, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness is making her final preparations. The symptoms are well known: her life will draw to an end in the coming days.

Downstairs, the studio is a crucible glowing with memories and desire. It was here, when the first lockdown came, that she brought Halit. The lover she barely knew. A presence from another culture. A doorway into a new and feverish world.

'The absolute stand-out for me this year has been Burntcoat, the new novel by Sarah Hall. It's a slim, perfectly-formed gem of a book, an extraordinarily visceral take on sex, grief, creativity, disease, death and the strange mania of lockdown. I have no idea how she turned it around so quickly, but Burntcoat is absolutely the artistic response to the world that we need right now.'

Kirstin Innes, The List

AT THE POINT OF SEEING | Megan Kitching 

At the Point of Seeing is the extraordinary debut collection from Ōtepoti Dunedin poet Megan Kitching. Poised, richly observant and deftly turned, Kitching’s poems bestow a unique attention upon the world. Her eye is finely attuned to the well-trodden yet overlooked – the places between ‘dirt and thumb’ or ‘together and alone’ – and especially the weedy, overgrown and pest-infested places where the human impulses to name, control and colonise meet nature’s life force and wild exuberance. These compelling poems urge the reader to slow down and give space to the living, moving, breathing environment that surrounds them.- Otago University Press

EMBRACE FEARLESSLY THE BURNING WORLD | Essays | Barry Lopez

At once a cri de coeur and a memoir of both pain and wonder, this remarkable collection of essays adds indelibly to Lopez’s legacy, and includes previously unpublished works, some written in the months before his death. They unspool memories both personal and political, among them tender, sometimes painful stories of his childhood in New York City and California, reports from expeditions to study animals and sea life, recollections of travels to Antarctica and other extraordinary places on earth, and meditations on finding oneself amid vast, dramatic landscapes. He reflects on those who taught him, including Indigenous elders and scientific mentors who sharpened his eye for the natural world. We witness poignant returns from his travels to the sanctuary of his Oregon backyard, adjacent to the McKenzie River. And in prose of searing candor, he reckons with the cycle of life, including his own, and—as he has done throughout his career—with the dangers the earth and its people are facing.

With an introduction by Rebecca Solnit that speaks to Lopez’s keen attention to the world, including its spiritual dimensions, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World opens our minds and souls to the importance of being wholly present for the beauty and complexity of life.

JUNG'S APPRENTICE | A Biography of Helton Godwin Baynes | Diana Baynes Janson

Dr Helton Godwin Baynes was C.G. Jung’s medical assistant in Zurich, becoming the eminent psychiatrist’s close friend and confidante. Baynes introduced Jungian psychology to Britain and led the English Jungian community for twenty years. He started the Jungian Analytical Psychology Club in London (APC) and laid the foundations for a Jungian Medical Society with the three aims of providing therapy, education and research. Baynes was the author of the first two major Jungian books to be written in English: Mythology of the Soul and Germany Possessed, and together with his second wife, Cary, he translated all of Jung’s earlier writings into English. He arranged for Jung to visit England to lecture at the Tavistock Clinic, at the AP Club, to the medical students at Barts Hospital, and at Oxford University. Baynes brought a greater psychological awareness to war-time Britain in his lectures throughout the UK and his religious broadcasts with Archbishop Temple.

NOBODY HOME | Writing, Buddhism and Living in places | Gary Snyder in conversation with Julia Martin 

"In this thoughtful, affectionate collection of interviews and letters spanning three decades, beloved poet Gary Snyder talks with South African writer and scholar Julia Martin. Over this period many things changed decisively--globally, locally, and in their personal lives--and these changing conditions provide the back story for a long conversation. It begins in the early 1980s as an intellectual exchange between an earnest graduate student and a generous distinguished writer, and becomes a long-distance friendship and an exploration of spiritual practice. At the project's heart is Snyder's understanding of Buddhism. Again and again, the conversations return to an explication of the teachings. Snyder's characteristic approach is to articulate a direct experience of Buddhist practice rather than any kind of abstract philosophy. In the version he describes here, this practice finds expression not primarily as an Asian import or a monastic ideal, but in the specificities of a householder's life as lived creatively in a particular location at a particular moment in history."

ANGELIC MISTAKES | The Art of THOMAS MERTON | Roger Lipsey

"... With this book, Merton's art at last moves out of the shadows to be appreciated for what it is: a revealing expression of his state of mind and heart in the 1960s, and a visual correlative to his mature works of spiritual writing such as New Seeds of Contemplation and Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Roger Lipsey provides a fascinating analysis of the simple and striking images and their significance in Merton's journey. He find in them resonances with Asian calligraphy and American abstract expressionism, and relates them to the influence of Merton's wide circle of friends, which included such diverse figures as the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, the poet Czeslaw Milosz, the Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki, and the artist Ad Reinhardt among many others.

But the centrepiece of the book is the art itself, presented in a portfolio of thirty-four representative pieces that reflect the changing themes and methods of Merton's work. Each is accompanied by selections from his writings from the 1960s that reflect the inward and outward territories Merton was exploring in the period when these remarkable images were created.

SAND TALK | Tyson Yunkaporta

“There are a lot of opportunities for sustainable innovation through the dialogue of Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of living...the problem with this communication so far has been asymmetry - when power relations are so skewed that most communication is one way, there is not much opportunity for the brackish waters of hybridity to stew up something exciting.” Tyson Yunkaporta

Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?
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In this thoughtful, culturally rich, mind-expanding book, he provides answers. Yunkaporta’s writing process begins with images. Honouring indigenous traditions, he makes carvings of what he wants to say, channeling his thoughts through symbols and diagrams rather than words. He 'yarns' with people, looking for ways to connect images and stories with place and relationship to create a coherent world view, and he uses sand talk, the Aboriginal custom of drawing images on the ground to convey knowledge. 

The Conversation Factory | A conversation between Daniel Stillman & Tyson Yunkaporta

SOUNDS WILD AND BROKEN - Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity & The Crisis of Sensory Extinction | David George Haskell

We live on a planet alive with song, music, and speech. David George Haskell explores how these wonders came to be. In rainforests shimmering with insect sounds and swamps pulsing with frog calls we learn about evolution's creative powers. From birds in the Rocky Mountains and on the streets of Paris, we discover how animals learn their songs and adapt to new environments. Below the waves, we hear our kinship to beings as different as snapping shrimp, toadfish, and whales. In the startlingly divergent sonic vibes of the animals of different continents, we experience the legacies of plate tectonics, the deep history of animals and their movements around the world, and the quirks of aesthetic evolution.

Starting with the origins of animal song and traversing the whole arc of Earth's history, Haskell illuminates and celebrates the emergence of the varied sounds of our world. In mammoth ivory flutes from Paleolithic caves, violins in modern concert halls, and electronic music in earbuds, we learn that human music and language belong within this story of ecology and evolution. Yet we are also destroyers, now silencing or smothering many of the sounds of the living Earth. Haskell takes us to threatened forests, noise-filled oceans, and loud city streets to show that sonic crises are not mere losses of sensory ornament. Sound is a generative force, and so the erasure of sonic diversity makes the world less creative, less beautiful.

Conversation with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee | Emergence Magazine
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Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition  | Richard Holloway

Being human isn’t easy.We might think that consciousness and free will give us control over our lives but our minds are dangerous and unpredictable places.
Humans are susceptible to forces beyond our comprehension. We’re capable of inflicting immense cruelty on one another and yet we also have the capacity to be tender, to empathise, to feel.
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In Between the Monster and the Saint, Richard Holloway holds a mirror up to the human condition. The reflection isn’t always pretty. But by drawing on a selection of writings from history, philosophy, science, poetry, theology and literature, Holloway shows us how we can stand up to the seductive power of the monster and draw closer to the fierce challenge of the saint.

DISTANT NEIGHBORS | The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry & Gary Snyder

In Distant Neighbors, both Berry and Snyder come across as honest and open-hearted explorers. There is an overall sense that they possess a deep and questing wisdom, hard earned through land work, travel, writing, and spiritual exploration. There is no rushing, no hectoring, and no grand gestures between these two, just an ever-deepening inquiry into what makes a good life and how to live it, even in the depths of the machine age. [Orion Magazine]
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THE MYRRH BEARERS | Judith Crispin 

The Myrrh-Bearers is a book of love poems, describing real events and real people as the poet has experienced them. The worlds evoked in these poems are suffused with faerie tales, myth and philosophy. The genesis of this collection lies in a diverse engagement with different poetries: the influence of the Polish poets Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz is discernible, along with that of the French poets Henri Michaux, Rene Char, Rene Daumal and Alfred Jarry; there is also the sure presence of Gwen Harwood and Judith Wright as well as, more esoterically, William Blake and G. I. Gurdjieff. The pataphysical influence of Jarry, in particular, leads to a poetry which attempts to describe a universe supplementary to the one which we inhabit. The presence of music as a subject stems from the poet's close engagement with her musical mentors, Larry Sitsky in Australia, Emmanuel Nunes in France and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany.

​This is a rich and unusual collection which will reward readers interested in the way poetry can suggest new ways of looking at the world.

PAINTING ENLIGHTENMENT | Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra | Paula Arai 

Little known during his lifetime, the Japanese biologist and artist Iwasaki Tsuneo (1917-2002) created a strikingly original and exquisitely intricate body of modern Buddhist artwork. His paintings depict themes ranging from classical Buddhist iconography to majestic views of our universe as revealed by science--all created with the use of painstakingly rendered miniature calligraphies of the Heart Sutra, one of the most important scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism. 

Paula Arai presents over fifty of Iwasaki's paintings, elucidating their Buddhist contexts and meanings as well as their intimate connections to Iwasaki's life as a war survivor, teacher, scientist, and devout Buddhist practitioner. Having been posthumously recognized by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Iwasaki's paintings are sure to be regarded as an innovative and heartfelt contribution to the artistic legacy of twentieth-century Buddhism.
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THUS SPOKE THE PLANT -  A remarkable journey of groundbreaking scientific discoveries and personal encounters with plants  | Monica Gagliano 

​"In this revelatory new book, we are brought into the presence of gifted storytellers in three different forms: a scientist, traditional plant practitioners, and the plants themselves. Gagliano's discoveries uproot assumptions about the plant world as insensate, revealing their capacities to listen, learn and remember. This is a compelling story at many levels, simultaneously personal, scientific and spiritual. It will change the way you will see the world." Robin Wall Kimmerer

"She is a very good storyteller and takes you into a world she explores both shamanically as well as through her scientifically based experiments. Totally grounded, too.. " Peta Hudson

Article on Bioneers

DIE WISE | Stephen Jenkinson

Die Wise does not offer seven steps for coping with death. It does not suggest ways to make dying easier. It pours no honey to make the medicine go down. Instead, with lyrical prose, deep wisdom, and stories from his two decades of working with dying people and their families, Stephen Jenkinson places death at the center of the page and asks us to behold it in all its painful beauty. Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well. Die Wise is for those who will fail to live forever. Dying well, Jenkinson writes, is a right and responsibility of everyone. It is not a lifestyle option. It is a moral, political, and spiritual obligation each person owes their ancestors and their heirs. Die Wise dreams such a dream, and plots such an uprising. How we die, how we care for dying people, and how we carry our dead: this work makes our capacity for a village-mindedness, or breaks it.

FIGURING | Maria Popova

Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries - beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalysed the environmental movement.

Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists - mostly women, mostly queer - whose public contribution has risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience and appreciate the universe. Among them are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science; the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who did the same in art; the journalist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement; and the poet Emily Dickinson.

Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world: Are achievement and acclaim enough for happiness? Is genius? Is love? Weaving through the narrative is a set of peripheral figures - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman - and a tapestry of themes spanning music, feminism, the history of science, the rise and decline of religion, and how the intersection of astronomy, poetry and Transcendentalist philosophy fomented the environmental movement.

​SONGLINES: Tracking the Seven Sisters 

Created under the guidance of cultural custodians, traditional owners and artists, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters explores the history and meaning of the Dreaming or creation tracks that cross-cross the Australian continent, of which the Seven Sisters songlines are among the most extensive. Through artworks, stories and in-depth analysis, this book provides an inportant resource for those interested in knowing more about these complex pathways of spiritual, ecological, economic , cultural and ontological knowledge -- the stories 'written in the land'. 

SONGSPIRALS | Gay/wu Group of Women

Aboriginal Australian cultures are the oldest living cultures on earth and at the heart of Aboriginal cultures is song. These ancient narratives of landscape have often been described as a means of navigating across vast distances without a map, but they are much, much more than this. Songspirals are sung by Aboriginal people to awaken Country, to make and remake the life-giving connections between people and place. Songspirals are radically different ways of understanding the relationship people can have with the landscape.

For Yolngu people from North East Arnhem Land, women and men play different roles in bringing songlines to life, yet the vast majority of what has been published is about men's place in songlines. Songspirals is a rare opportunity for outsiders to experience Aboriginal women's role in crying the songlines in a very authentic and direct form.

WORLD RECEIVERS | Karin Althaus 

The exhibition "World Receivers" provides insight into an extraordinary and largely unknown chapter of modernism: Completely independent of one another, Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) in England, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) in Sweden, and Emma Kunz (1892–1963) in Switzerland each developed their own abstract visual language highly charged with meaning. With their works, all three strove to visualize laws of nature, the spiritual, and the supernatural; they followed their convictions with persistence and self-assertion.

Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, and Emma Kunz explored invisible forces and the transcendental; the works presented in this exhibition are the result of spiritual experiences and communication with a higher realm. 
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. . . As "world receivers," these artists were able to attribute the creation of their pictures to an external source. This gave them the freedom to overcome social, cultural, and aesthetic boundaries in their works, as well as the energy necessary to actually do so.

THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN | Thomas Merton

The Seven Storey Mountain tells of the growing restlessness of a brilliant and passionate young man, who at the age of twenty-six, takes vows in one of the most demanding Catholic orders--the Trappist monks. At the Abbey of Gethsemani, "the four walls of my new freedom," Thomas Merton struggles to withdraw from the world, but only after he has fully immersed himself in it. At the abbey, he wrote this extraordinary testament, a unique spiritual autobiography that has been recognized as one of the most influential religious works of our time.

ENTANGLED LIFE | Martin Sheldrake
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The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them. Neither plant nor animal, they are found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. They can be microscopic, yet also account for the largest organisms ever recorded. They enabled the first life on land, can survive unprotected in space and thrive amidst nuclear radiation. In fact, nearly all life relies in some way on fungi.

These endlessly surprising organisms have no brain but can solve problems and manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. Their ability to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the 'Wood Wide Web', is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.

Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into a spectacular and neglected world, and shows that fungi provide a key to understanding both the planet on which we live, and life itself.

VESPER FLIGHTS | Helen Macdonald

In Vesper Flights, Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep.
Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing massive migrations of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk’s poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds’ nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife.

IN LOVE WITH THE WORLD | Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

At thirty-six years old, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche was a rising star within his generation of Tibetan masters and the respected abbot of three monasteries. Then one night, telling no one, he slipped out of his monastery in India with the intention of spending the next four years on a wandering retreat, following the ancient practice of holy mendicants. His goal was to throw off his titles and roles in order to explore the deepest aspects of his being.​

He immediately discovered that a lifetime of Buddhist education and practice had not prepared him to deal with dirty fellow travelers or the screeching of a railway car. He found he was too attached to his identity as a monk to remove his robes right away or to sleep on the Varanasi station floor, and instead paid for a bed in a cheap hostel. But when he ran out of money, he began his life as an itinerant beggar in earnest. Soon he became deathly ill from food poisoning—and his journey took a startling turn. His meditation practice had prepared him to face death, and now he had the opportunity to test the strength of his training.

In this powerful and unusually candid account of the inner life of a Buddhist master, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche offers us the invaluable lessons he learned from his near-death experience. By sharing with readers the meditation practices that sustain him, he shows us how we can transform our fear of dying into joyful living.

SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT  |  Matthew B. Crawford

"Straight out of graduate school Crawford got a job as the executive director of an unnamed Washington 'think tank,' which he soon realized was being financed by oil companies to issue scientific studies questioning global warming. 'I landed a job at the think tank because I had a prestigious education in the liberal arts, yet the job itself felt illiberal: coming up with the best arguments money could buy. This wasn’t work befitting a free man, and the tie I wore started to feel like the mark of a slave.'

... Crawford argues that the ideologists of the knowledge economy have posited a false dichotomy between knowing and doing. The fact of the matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects...  All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations. They can’t be learned simply by following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty & failure."

THE TREES IN MY FOREST  |  Bernd Heinrich

"The soaring majesty of a virgin forest and the intertwined relationships of plant, animal and man are the subject of Bernd Heinrich's lyrical elegy. Heinrich has spent a lifetime observing the natural world, and now he shares his vast knowledge and reflections on the trees of the Northeast woods and the rhythms of their seasons. From the DNA contained in an apple seed to the great choiring branches far beyond a young boy's reach, Heinrich explores a natural world in scientific and personal terms. Heinrich is a scientist, but his words speak with the power and subtle grace of a poet." 

THE SOUND OF A SILVER HORN - Reclaiming the Heroism in Contemporary Women's Lives | Kathleen Noble, PhD 

"The women whose quests are described here are young and old, rich and poor, of all races and faiths. They set forth on their heroic journeys in circumstances as different as a stifling marriage, single parenthood, and an alcoholic family, and from places as diverse as a conventional African-American household, a Catholic convent, and a lesbian community." "The Sound of a Silver Horn highlights the heroic dimensions in every woman's life. It shows how the call to adventure, to a leap across the chasm of personal and social change, can lead us to new creativity, spirituality, and achievement."

BRAIDING SWEETGRASS - Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants | Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two ways of knowledge together.

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings - asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass - offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

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THE ASCENT OF HUMANITY - Civilization and the Human Sense of Self  |  Charles Eisenstein 

"Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self. In this landmark book, Eisenstein explains how a disconnection from the natural world and one another is built into the foundations of civilization: into science, religion, money, technology, medicine, and education as we know them. As a result, each of these institutions faces a grave and growing crisis, fueling our near-pathological pursuit of technological fixes even as we push our planet to the brink of collapse.

... As our old constructs of self and world dissolve in crisis, we are entering a new narrative of interbeing, a more expansive sense of self, and a more ecological relationship to nature. Our darkest hour bears the possibility of a more beautiful world—not through the extension of millennia-old methods of management and control but by fundamentally reimagining ourselves and our systems."

RADICAL WHOLENESS  |  Philip Shepherd 

"There are qualities we all yearn to experience in our lives — peace, simplicity, grace, connection, clarity. Yet these qualities evade us because each of them arises from an experience of wholeness, and we live in a culture that enforces divisions within each of us. In Radical Wholeness, Philip Shepherd shows the countless ways in which we are persuaded to separate from the body and live in the head. Disconnected from the body’s intelligence, we also disconnect from the wholeness of the present. This schism within us is the primary source of stress not just in our personal lives, but for the systems of the planet.

Drawing from neuroscience, anthropology, physics, the arts, myth, personal stories and his experiences helping people around the world to experience wholeness, Philip illuminates what true wholeness means and offers practices designed to help readers soften into the intelligence of the body. Radical Wholeness is a call to action: to recover wholeness and experience a new way of being."

NEW SELF NEW WORLD  |  Philip Shepherd 

"New Self, New World challenges the primary story of what it means to be human, the random and materialistic lifestyle that author Philip Shepherd calls our “shattered reality.” This reality encourages us to live in our heads, self-absorbed in our own anxieties. Drawing on diverse sources and inspiration, New Self, New World reveals that our state of head-consciousness falsely teaches us to see the body as something we possess and to try to take care of it without ever really learning how to inhabit it. Shepherd articulates his vision of a world in which each of us enjoys a direct, unmediated experience of being alive."

THE WAY OF TENDERNESS  |  Zen Earthlyn Manuel 

"In The Way of Tenderness, Zen priest Zenju Earthlyn Manuel brings Buddhist philosophies of emptiness and appearance to bear on race, sexuality, and gender, using wisdom forged through personal experience and practice to rethink problems of identity and privilege.

Manuel brings her own experiences as a lesbian black woman into conversation with Buddhism to square our ultimately empty nature with superficial perspectives of everyday life. Her hard-won insights reveal that dry wisdom alone is not sufficient to heal the wounds of the marginalized; an effective practice must embrace the tenderness found where conventional reality and emptiness intersect. Only warmth and compassion can cure hatred and heal the damage it wreaks within us."

THE STARS  |  Vija Celmins & Eliot Weinberger

". . . For the text, Weinberger assembled a catalogue of descriptions of the stars drawn from around the world, and from an array of historical, literary, and anthropological sources. This mythopoetic charting of the night sky evokes the vastness of the human imagination's response to a space itself vast and unknowable. Appearing in English and also in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Maori, the text supplements Celmins's images visually as well as verbally. . . " Goodreads 

​GOSSIP FROM THE FOREST: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairytales  |  Sara Maitland

"Maitland is concerned that children no longer play in woods, particularly without adult supervision. They don't know the names of trees and leave blackberries rotting in the hedgerows. This state of estrangement from the wild is troubling both for conservation reasons (it's hard to preserve what one doesn't know), and also for human health (the average child, she states, has already lost an hour a day of outdoor play this century). What's more, a lack of free, wild play means children are missing out one of the essential lessons of the fairytale: that harm and danger can be survived and make a person more robust. 'I seriously fear,' she writes, 'that we are failing to nourish the beautiful and precious quality of resilience in our children.'" Olivia Laing, The Guardian

MAGPIETY   |  Melissa Green

"Poetry is Melissa Green’s landbridge, her strongest connection to the wider world—though it would be more accurate to say that, through poetry, the rest of the world gains access to Green’s 'tremendous intensity and tremendous intelligence,' as Joseph Brodsky put it. Marie Howe has written that 'Melissa Green might well be a 21st century version of Emily Dickinson, poet of ecstatic states and extremity.' Like Dickinson, a careful repose allows Green to sustain the sensitivity that the machinery of modern life erodes." (from an interview with Daniel Evans Pritchard

POETRY FOR THE PLANET | An Anthology of Imagined Futures | Edited by Julia Kaylock & Denise O'Hagan

Eco-poetry has become a genre within which poets put up a searching and at times brutally honest lens through which to consider climate change, loss of biodiversity, the pollution of our air and water, and environmentally damaging industries such as mining and deforestation.

Poetry for the Planet showcases the work of one hundred poets from Australia and New Zealand. Despite an astonishing variety in style, poems are united in their plea to all of us to forge a new relationship with our fractured world, and move from an attitude of short-term exploitation to one of nourishment and sustainability.

​Litoria Press
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FOOLING WITH WORDS - A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft  |  Bill Moyers

This collection explores the vitality and diversity of contemporary poetry through intimate interviews and performance readings recorded durring the 1999 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Amiri Baraka, Stanley Kunitz, Coleman Barks, Lucille Clifton, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Paul Muldoon, Marge Piercy, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Deborah Garrison, and other leading poets share the rhythm, spirit, and passion of their art.

​LANDMARKS  | Robert Macfarlane 

“‘Those who wish to explain to politicians and others why landscape should be nurtured… face a daunting task where the necessary concepts and vocabulary are not to hand,’ wrote Finlay in a public essay, Macfarlane quotes. 'What is required is a new nomenclature of landscape and how we relate to it.'

This is the tone of Landmarks – generous, sensitive, yielding always to the words of others even while Macfarlane’s own exquisite feel for language and its inferences carry us along." Kirsty Gunn

THE LIVING MOUNTAIN | Nan Shepherd

"Each chapter of the book mixes field notes, lyrical memoir, oral history, natural history and an almost zen-like meditation of the nature of landscape and consciousness. Her subtle style is both witty and lyrical. It is at ease with the theological as well as the geological."  Robert Macfarlane  

ARCTIC DREAMS  |  Barry Lopez

"Lopez offers a thorough examination of this obscure world-its terrain, its wildlife, its history of Eskimo natives and intrepid explorers who have arrived on their icy shores. But what turns this marvelous work of natural history into a breathtaking study of profound originality is his unique meditation on how the landscape can shape our imagination, desires, and dreams. Its prose as hauntingly pure as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams is nothing less than an indelible classic of modern literature." Goodreads

POSITION DOUBTFUL  |   Kim Mahood

"Imagine the document you have before you is not a book but a map. It is well-used, creased, and folded, so that when you open it, no matter how carefully, something tears and a line that is neither latitude nor longitude opens in the hidden geography of the place you are about to enter."

Mahood is an artist of astonishing versatility. She works with words, with paint, with installations, and with performance art. Her writing about her own work and collaborations, and about the work of the [Australian] desert artists, is profoundly enlightening, making palpable the link between artist and country. (Penguin)

SILENT SPRING  |  Rachel Carson

Silent Spring inspired the modern environmental movement, which began in earnest a decade later. It is recognized as the environmental text that “changed the world.” She aimed at igniting a democratic activist movement that would not only question the direction of science and technology but would also demand answers and accountability. Rachel Carson was a prophetic voice and her “witness for nature” is even more relevant and needed if our planet is to survive into a 22nd century.  ​

ANASTASIA and THE RINGING CEDARS Series   |  Vladimir Megre

The first of nine books in the Ringing Cedars Series, Anastasia tells the story of entrepreneur Vladimir Megre's trade trip to the Siberian taiga in 1995, where he encountered an unusual woman, wise in the ways of nature, healing, spirituality, mathematics and more. . . During his three days with her he learned many things and was introduced to the region's sacred 'ringing cedar' trees.

GATHERING MOSS - A Natural & Cultural History of Mosses  |  Robin Wall Kimmerer

Kimmerer clearly and artfully explains the biology of mosses, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us.

Drawing on her diverse experiences as a scientist, mother, teacher, and writer of Native American heritage, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

THE WILD PLACES  |  Robert Macfarlane 

Macfarlane "encourages his readers to feel that while many of our fundamental connections have been broken or lost, many remain - if only we have the sense and tuned senses to appreciate them. This may not seem a particularly striking conclusion but it's well worth saying. And the journeys to reach it are so vigorously animated, they are well worth taking with him." Andrew Motion, The Guardian ​

THE ANTARCTIC DICTIONARY - A Complete Guide to Antarctic English  |  Bernadette Hince

"The world’s most isolated continent has spawned some of the most unusual words in the English language. In the space of a mere century, a remarkable vocabulary has evolved to deal with the extraordinary environment and living organisms of the Antarctic and subantarctic.

Here, for the first time, is a complete guide to the origin and definitions of Antarctic words. Like other historical dictionaries, The Antarctic Dictionary gives the reader quotations for each word. These quotations are the life-blood of the dictionary — more than 15 000 quotations from about 1000 different sources give the reader a unique insight into the way the language of Antarctica has evolved."

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING - Capitalism vs The Climate  |  Naomi Klein

"To change economic norms and ethical perceptions in tandem is even more formidable than the technological battle to adapt to the heavy weather coming down the tubes. Yet This Changes Everything is, improbably, Klein’s most optimistic book. She braids together the science, psychology, geopolitics, economics, ethics and activism that shape the climate question. The result is the most momentous and contentious environmental book since Silent Spring." (Rob Nixon | NY Times)

LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET  |  Rilke 

“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.” Rilke
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THE FOUR WISE MEN  |  Michel Tournier (translated by Ralph Manheim)

"An ornate, tooled approach to Christian myth by the ever-elegant Tournier, who's especially well-served this time by translator Manheim. The star-following visitors to Baby Jesus in the manger--Gaspar, King of MeroÃ; Balthasar, King of Nippur; Melchior, Prince of Palmyra--are joined in Tournier's version by the apocryphal, peripheral, yet perhaps most crucial royal pilgrim of all: Taor, Prince of Mangalore. Son of an Indian maharajah, Taor has tasted a piece of pistachio rahat loukoum (Turkish delight); so exalted is he by the flavor, he sets out to recover the recipe, a fruitless quest that takes him across western Asia and finally lands him in Sodom, where he's imprisoned (the last of many misadventures) in a salt mine. There, ironically, where there is no sweetness, he learns from a fellow prisoner the recipe for the quested-after candy; he also learns of the existence of Jesus. And so Tournier's Christian parable is capped off with dualities and paradox--a mighty man brought low, finding the uttermost sweetness in a place of saltiness--as Taor comes to represent Faith (while the other wise men illustrate the fates of self-worth, art, and power)."

THE FARAWAY NEARBY |  Rebecca Solnit

“Georgia O’Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, “from the faraway nearby.” It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together. Emotion has its geography, affection is what is nearby, within the boundaries of the self. You can be a thousand miles from the person next to you in bed or deeply invested in the survival of a stranger on the other side of the world.” Rebecca Solnit

MICROCOSMOS - Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution  | Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan

Microcosmos brings together the remarkable discoveries of microbiology of the past two decades and the pioneering research of Dr. Margulis to create a vivid new picture of the world that is crucial to our understanding of the future of the planet. Addressed to general readers, the book provides a beautifully written view of evolution as a process based on interdependency and the interconnectedness of all life on the planet. (University of California Press)

​CRACKING GEODES OPEN  |  Sherry O'Keefe

"In 'Cracking Geodes Open,' Sherry O'Keefe crystalizes moments of experience and memory gathered or chiseled from relationships. Her finds range from the mountains and plains of Montana, to the farms and villages of Ireland, and the streets of Manhattan. With a deft use of direct narrative and spare lyrical forms, O'Keefe turns over each stone, examining its weathered face, finding its one true seam. Once inside, we get a strong sense of place, a feeling of being at home in the world, among friends. These crystalline poems reminded me that, ultimately, we are part of a larger, more complex formation of relationships, a constellation of old and new friends, loves, acquaintances, and close or distant relations, some of whom we have not yet met." Scot Siegel, Untitled Country Review

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF TURQUOISE | Ellen Meloy

In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise—the color and the gem—to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape.

From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great beauty and great desecration. Her keen vision makes us look anew at ancestral mountains, turquoise seas, and even motel swimming pools. She introduces us to Navajo “velvet grandmothers” whose attire and aesthetics absorb the vivid palette of their homeland, as well as to Persians who consider turquoise the life-saving equivalent of a bullet-proof vest. Throughout, Meloy invites us to appreciate along with her the endless surprises in all of life and celebrates the seduction to be found in our visual surroundings.

Howard Berkes in conversation with author Ellen Meloy | NPR

DIRT - The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth | William Bryant Logan

"A gleeful, poetic book.... Like the best natural histories, Dirt is a kind of prayer."—"Los Angeles Times Book Review" "You are about to read a lot about dirt, which no one knows very much about." So begins the cult classic that brings mystery and magic to "that stuff that won't come off your collar." John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Saint Phocas, Darwin, and Virgil parade through this thought-provoking work, taking their place next to the dung beetle, the compost heap, dowsing, historical farming, and the microscopic biota that till the soil. With fresh eyes and heartfelt reverence, William Bryant Logan variously observes, "There is glamour to the study of rock"; "The most mysterious place on Earth is right beneath our feet"; and "Dirt is the gift of each to all." Whether Logan is traversing the far reaches of the cosmos or plowing through our planet's crust, his delightful, elegant, and surprisingly soulful meditations greatly enrich our concept of "dirt," that substance from which we all arise and to which we all must return.

Author of Air; Sprout Lands & Earth
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THE RED BOOK  | Carl Jung 

"The old expression 'When falling, dive!' might best express the sentiments of Carl Jung as he decided to turn a near psychotic breakdown he was experiencing in late 1913 into an opportunity for self-analysis and self-therapy.  The result of this momentous decision is The Red Book, Jung’s record of his 'confrontation with the unconscious,' which he had bound in a custom-made red leather folio that measured approximately 12 X 15.5 inches and weighed nearly ten pounds.  Like a massive, medieval folio reminiscent of the Book of Kells, The Red Book included over 400 pages of beautifully handwritten, calligraphic text and 53 startlingly brilliant full-page paintings." Mathew V. Spano, Ph.D

EVERY DAY IS A GOOD DAY  |  The Visual Art of John Cage

One of the twentieth century's most influential and iconoclastic protagonists, John Cage (1912-1992) may be described not so much as a composer, artist and author, as a thinker who applied his ideas equivalently to sound, visual art and writing. As with his music, the use of chance operations--in particular via the Chinese Book of Changes, or I Ching--was central to Cage's approach to visual art, determining technique, the placement of forms and even tonal values. Every Day is a Good Day provides the first broad assessment of Cage's art, and is fully illustrated with plates of his drawings, watercolors and prints, including series such as Where R=Ryoanji (1983-92).

THE LINEN WAY  |  Melissa Green

"Here I am, standing on the tallest roof-top, bellowing into the largest megaphone I can find, to rave about The Linen Way by Melissa Green. What adjectives will do the job? I'll try: luminescent, brave, beautiful. I've never read such a powerful testament to poetry. It's as essential here as oxygen, as love. . . 

. . .  When I finished reading this, I felt I had been given a gift, as if Melissa Green had pressed some small thing into the palm of my hand for my fingers to curl around in recognition. I've read it twice, and each time I've felt a little changed by it. I'll read it again. It will change me further." Carolyn McCurdie
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REINVENTING BACH  |  Paul Elie
 
“. . . This is a book about the music of Bach and the ways it has been reinvented in our time.” Fascinating and engagingly written, it emphasizes that Bach — whose greatness as a composer, for Mr. Elie, is “total and inviolable” — was also a pioneer of technology: not just a master organist but a master organ builder and repairer; a theoretician who investigated the possibilities of a tuning system that changed the way music sounds and is still in use; a composer who embraced the art of transcription and would not have minded at all, and maybe anticipated, that his pieces would one day be reconceived for Moog synthesizers and small ensembles of swinging, scatting singers. . . " Paul Etie

DIGGING FOR SPAIN  |  Penelope Todd

'There are two places for every one: The place we imagine and the one waiting for us when we get there.'

Here is a portrait of the growth of a writer, of the challenges of faith, and the route one woman takes to reach a better accommodation with herself, and her family. It's heartfelt and lyrical narrative - as the author questions her closest relationships, and some of the stifling patterns she has fallen into. Yet it will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever tried to juggle relationships, the craving for solitude, and the urge to write or to devote oneself to a career which demands total focus.

​A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST  |  Rebecca Solnit

"Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. . . " Rebecca Solnit

MAN AND HIS SYMBOLS  |  Carl Jung

"Jung's arguments (and those of his colleages) spiral upward over his subject like a bird circling a tree. At first, near the ground, it sees only a confusion of leaves and branches. Gradually, as it cirles higher and higher the recurring aspects of the tree form a wholeness and relate to their surroundings. Some readers may find this 'spiralling' method of argument obscure or confusing for a few pages-but not, I think, for long. It is characteristic of Jung's method, and very soon the reader will find it carrying him with it on a persuasive and profoundly absorbing journey." John Freeman (from the Introduction)

Free download of the ebook/pdf

WHERE THE HEART BEATS - John Cage, Zen Buddhism & The Inner Life of Artist  | Kay Larson


     Our intention is . . . to wake up to the very life
         we’re living, which is so excellent once one
    gets one’s mind and desires out of its way
         and lets it act of its own accord. — John Cage
​

MAP FOR THE HEART - Ida Valley Essays | Jillian Sullivan

​To live in Central Otago, New Zealand, is to come to terms with the dominance of nature. Writer Jillian Sullivan set out to walk the hills and mountains of the Ida Valley where she lives, and follow the Manuherekia River from the mountains to its confluence with the Clutha/Mata-au. Her aim was to not only explore the land and river for themselves, but the ways in which we grow in intimacy with where we live; how our histories, and those of the people who went before us, our experiences of loss and love, our awakening to what is around us, bring us closer to community - closer to a meaningful life.​

UNTIL THE END - Notes from a small life | Mike Riddell 

"My life is like so much smoke drifting on the horizon. It shifts in the breeze, dissipates, and is gone. Was it caused by any glowing embers that once burned? I might well think so, but I might equally be misled by the terror of insignificance. I don’t pretend that my existence has altered the flow of human history, or even rippled the surface of events. It’s as small as any other life that hasn’t been boosted by fame or notoriety. But our small lives still have some meaning, even if only to those who love us. We owe it to them to whisper our words. Small lives have value. Our small ambitions, regrets, dishonesties, accomplishments, disappointments, friendships, jealousies, commitments – none of them are empty of meaning." Memoir of New Zealand author, filmmaker, playwright, and social activist Mike Riddell. Born in humble surroundings, Riddell recounts his adventures including becoming a minister of religion, a university lecturer, a social activist, and a full-time writer.

​Holy Bucket
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THE BOOK OF QUESTIONS  |  Pablo Neruda 

When Neruda died in 1973, The Book of Questions was one of eight unpublished poetry manuscripts that lay on his desk. In it, Neruda achieves a deeper vulnerability and vision than in his earlier work-and this unique book is a testament to everything that made Neruda an artist.

"Neruda's questions evoke pictures that make sense on a visual level before the reader can grasp them on a literal one. The effect is mildly dazzling [and] O'Daly's translations achieve a tone that is both meditative and spontaneous." --Publishers Weekly

ART FORMS FROM THE OCEAN  | Ernst Haeckel 

At the nexus of art and science, this dazzling new edition of Ernst Haeckel's first work reintroduces the genius of an enigmatic scientist and passionate observer of the natural world.

THE POETICS OF SPACE - The classic look at how we experience intimate spaces | Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space ( La Poétique de l'Espace, 1958) is a phenomenological interrogation into the meaning of spaces which preoccupy poetry, intimate spaces such as a house, a drawer, a night dresser and spaces of wide expansion such as vistas and woods. In the opening chapter of The Poetics of Space Bachelard places special emphasis on the interior domestic space and its component: the various rooms and the different types of furniture in it. Bachelard attempts to trace the reception of the poetic image in the subjective consciousness, a reception which demands, so Bachelard holds, great openness and a focus on the present experience while eliminate transient time. (The Cultural Studies Reader)

“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.” Gaston Bachelard

CULTIVATING PEACE  | James O'Dea

In providing theoretical and practical guidance for facilitators of deep dialogue between perpetrator and victim, O’Dea strikes deep chords of optimism even as he teaches us how to face “the heart of darkness.”
His poetic, soulful voice calls readers to new ways to think about peace-building in our personal and professional lives.

Ideal for peace activists, mediators, negotiators, psychologists, educators, business leaders, and clergy, this handbook presents a unique set of tools and perspectives for fostering peace in the coming century.

THE CONSCIOUS ACTIVIST - Where Activism meets Mysticism | James O'Dea


Award-winning author James O'Dea has created a handbook for those interested in Sacred Activism, a fusing spiritual knowledge with radical action. O'Dea outlines the polarities between the inner path of spiritual growth and the outer path of social activism, concluding that the two must co-exist in equal weighting so that the human race can become a compassionate force for good.

ART OBJECTS  | Jeanette Winterson 

". . . I was answering questions for myself, but more, I wanted to communicate the passionate excitement I have for art of all kinds. I really believe in the redemptive, persuasive, healing power of art. We all need it. Most of us don’t get close to it – either because we think art’s not for us, or because the media circus is off-putting. I wanted to cut though the doubts and the objections. . . " Jeanette Winterson

By now a modern classic, THE GIFT by Lewis Hyde is a brilliantly orchestrated defence of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities. Widely available again after twenty-five years, this book is even more necessary today than when it first appeared. An illuminating and transformative book, and completely original in its view of the world, The Gift is cherished by artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It is in itself a gift to all who discover the classic wisdom found in its pages.

"Few books are such life-changers as The Gift: epiphany, in sculpted prose."
—Jonathan Lethem

THE SPELL of THE SENSUOUS  |  David Abram 

In prose at once poetic and precise, David Abram demonstrates that our most cherished human attributes - from the gift of language, to the awareness of past and future, to the rational intellect itself - all emerge in interaction with the animate natural world, and remain wholly dependent upon that living world for their coherence. Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this astonishing and intensely ethical.

"This is a landmark book. Scholars will doubtless recognize its brilliance, but they may overlook the most important part of Abram's achievement: he has written the best instruction manual yet for becoming fully human. I walked outside when I was done and the world was a different place." - Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

INVISIBLE CITIES  |  Italo Calvino 

“Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.” Italo Calvino

EINSTEIN'S DREAMS  |  Alan Lightman

“It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.” 
​

EARTH IS OUR BUSINESS: Changing the rules of the Game  |  Polly Higgins 

Earth is our Business is groundbreaking; no other book proposes law that comprehensively changes the rules of the game. Ecocide is a law that will transform our economies, energy supplies and political landscape. The implications of Polly Higgins’ proposal are far-reaching and profound. Like her award-winning first book, Earth is our Business is written for anyone who is engaging in the new and emerging discourse about the future of our planet.
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STRAW FOR THE FIRE | Theodore Roethke

At his death, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke left behind 277 spiral notebooks full of poetry fragments, aphorisms, jokes, memos, journal entries, random phrases, bits of dialog, commentary, and fugitive miscellany. Within these notebooks, Roethke’s mind roved freely, moving from the practical to the transcendental, from the halting to the sublime.
 
Fellow poet and colleague David Wagoner distilled these notebooks—twelve linear feet of bookshelf—into a wise and rollicking collection that shows Roethke to be one of the truly phenomenal creative sources in American poetry.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. 
I learn by going where I have to go...
[TR]

Review

SURVIVAL IS A STYLE: Poems | Christian Wiman

Christian Wiman's first collection of poems in six years. His many readers will recognize the musical and formal variety, the voice that can be tender and funny, credibly mystical and savagely skeptical. But there are many new notes in this collection as well, including a moving elegy to the poet’s father, sharp observations and distillations of modern American life, and rangy poems that merge and juxtapose different modes of speech and thought.

​The cumulative effect is extraordinary.
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SAVAGE GODS | Paul Kingsnorth

After moving with his wife and two children to a smallholding in Ireland, Paul Kingsnorth expects to find contentment. It is the goal he has sought ― to nest, to find home ― after years of rootlessness as an environmental activist and author. Instead he finds that his tools as a writer are failing him, calling into question his foundational beliefs about language and setting him at odds with culture itself.
​
Informed by his experiences with indigenous peoples, the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Annie Dillard, and the day-to-day travails of farming his own land, Savage Gods asks: what does it mean to belong? What sacrifices must be made in order to truly inhabit a life? And can words ever paint the truth of the world ― or are they part of the great lie which is killing it?

DESERT NOTES/RIVER NOTES - Reflections in the Eye of a Raven/The Dance of Herons |  Barry Lopez

Here, for the first time in one volume, are two of Lopez's masterpieces, "River Notes and "Desert Notes. From the thundering power of the river's swift current, to the stillness of clear freshwater pools; to desert springs, birds and wind, and rattlesnakes . . . and the terrible intrusion of man, Lopez allows us to share moments of intense personal experience as man tries to come to terms with the Earth's landscape, and with his own existence.

"To stick your hands into the river it to feel the chords that bind the earth together in one piece." Barry Lopez

ABOUT THIS LIFE | Barry Lopez

​Once, when asked for advice on how to become a writer, Lopez found himself replying: "Read. Here is far-flung travel (the beauty of remote Hokkaido Island, the over-explored Galapagos, enigmatic Bonaire); Here, too, are seven exquisite memory pieces; beautiful, meditative recollections that will stand as classic examples of the personal essay.

WHEN BLOOD & BONES CRY OUT - Journeys through the soundscapes of healing and reconciliation  |  John Paul Lederach & Angela Jill Lederach

"In When Blood and Bones Cry Out, John Paul Lederach, a pioneer of peacebuilding, and his daughter, Angela Jill Lederach, show how communities can recover and reconnect through the power of making music, creating metaphors, and telling their extraordinary stories of suffering and survival. 

. . . Instead of relying on more common linear explanations of healing and reconciliation, the Lederachs demonstrate how healing is circular, dynamic, and continuing, even in the midst of ongoing violence.
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. . . the Lederachs stress the remarkable effects of sound and vibration through tales of Tibetan singing bowls, Van Morrison's transcendent lyrics, the voices of mothers in West Africa, and their own personal journeys." KROC Institute for International Peace Studies
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THE ACCIDENTAL UNIVERSE | The World You Thought You Knew  | Alan Lightman 

"One August afternoon, the two baby ospreys of that season took flight for the first time as I stood on the circular deck of my house watching the nest. All summer long, they had watched me on that deck as I watched them. To them, it must have looked like I was in my nest just as they were in theirs. On this particular afternoon, their maiden flight, they did a loop of my house and then headed straight at me with tremendous speed. My immediate impulse was to run for cover, since they could have ripped me apart with their powerful talons. But something held me to my ground. When they were within twenty feet of me, they suddenly veered upward and away. But before that dazzling and frightening vertical climb, for about half a second we made eye contact. Words cannot convey what was exchanged between us in that instant. It was a look of connectedness, of mutual respect, of recognition that we shared the same land. After they were gone, I found that I was shaking, and in tears. To this day, I do not understand what happened in that half second. But it was one of the most profound moments of my life." Alan Lightman

GOD and CONFLICT  | Philip Hellmich 

God and Conflict opens the way for deep exploration of what is asked of each of us if we are:

• to declare peace with the same intensity as we have for so long declared war;
• to make a decision for peace in our every day lives, and live it;
• and to stand steadily for peace in these turbulent times that are cracking the foundations of the world as we know it. 

​ERADICATING ECOCIDE  | Polly Higgins

In Eradicating Ecocide: laws and governance to prevent the destruction of our planet, international environment lawyer and barrister Polly Higgins sets out to demonstrate how ‘compromise’ laws have caused the problem and why we can destroy the Earth without consequence. The solution offered is to create a law of Ecocide, the 5th Crime Against Peace.  Such a law will hold to account heads of corporate bodies as well as other ‘natural persons’ in positions of superior responsibility.

BECOMING ANIMAL: An Earthly Cosmology  |  DAVID ABRAMS 

As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we’ve ignored the wild intelligence of our bodies, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. Abram’s writing subverts this distance, drawing readers ever closer to their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the human body and the breathing Earth. The shape-shifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in this book. ​

WHAT IS LIFE?  |  Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan

Half a century ago, before the discovery of DNA, the Austrian physicist and philosopher Erwin Schrödinger inspired a generation of scientists by rephrasing the fascinating philosophical question: What is life? Using their expansive understanding of recent science to wonderful effect, acclaimed authors Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan revisit this timeless question in a fast-moving, wide-ranging narrative that combines rigorous science with philosophy, history, and poetry.

THE LITTLE PRINCE  |  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"What is essential is invisible to the eye", says the fox.
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The MORE BEAUTIFUL WORLD OUR HEARTS KNOW is POSSIBLE  |  Charles Eisenstein 

This inspirational and thought-provoking book serves as an empowering antidote to the cynicism, frustration, paralysis, and overwhelm so many of us are feeling, replacing it with a grounding reminder of what’s true: we are all connected, and our small, personal choices bear unsuspected transformational power. By fully embracing and practicing this principle of interconnectedness—called interbeing—we become more effective agents of change and have a stronger positive influence on the world.

"Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?" Charles Eisenstein

SACRED ECONOMICS  |  Charles Eisenstein 

This book is about how the money system will have to change—and is already changing—to embody this transition. A broadly integrated synthesis of theory, policy, and practice, Sacred Economics explores avant-garde concepts of the New Economics, including negative-interest currencies, local currencies, resource-based economics, gift economies, and the restoration of the commons. Author Charles Eisenstein also considers the personal dimensions of this transition, speaking to those concerned with “right livelihood” and how to live according to their ideals in a world seemingly ruled by money. Tapping into a rich lineage of conventional and unconventional economic thought, Sacred Economics presents a vision that is original yet commonsense, radical yet gentle, and increasingly relevant as the crises of our civilization deepen.

INTERLUNAR  |  Margaret Atwood 

I wish to show you the darkness
you are so afraid of.

Trust me. This darkness
is a place you can enter and be
as safe in as you are anywhere;
you can put one foot in front of the other
and believe the sides of your eyes.
Memorize it. You will know it 
again in your own time. . .  

HOW TO BE AN EXPLORER OF THE WORLD  |  Keri Smith 

"At any given moment, no matter where you are, there are hundreds of things around you that are interesting and worth documenting. . ." Keri Smith

"Everyone is an artist." Joseph Beuys

STAYING ALIVE - real poems for unreal times edited by Neil Astley

‘This celebrated collection… seems appropriate to the moment, an international anthology of 500 poems wrestling with the vicissitudes of human existence. It is not some feelgood froth of life-enhancing affirmations. These poems are carved out of daily struggles, embrace darkness as well as light, and have the metal taste of blood in their mouths. But in their vividness and empathy, they serve as reminders that we are not alone.’ - Neil McCormick, The Telegraph, best books to read during lockdown (on Staying Alive)

". . . Assembling a diverse mix of contemporary poets-Mary Oliver, W.H. Auden, Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Rita Dove, and hundreds more-Staying Alive is a unique anthology that illuminates the vital force of our humanity, the passion of our aspirations, the power of our spirituality. From the enigma of death to the sweetness of friendship, these poems speak to life's mysteries and consolations and help us navigate the most trying times in recent memory." Goodreads

MADNESS, RACK AND HONEY  |  Mary Ruefle 

"Over the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include "Poetry and the Moon," "Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World," and "Lectures I Will Never Give." Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential,Madness, Rack, and Honey resists definition, demanding instead an utter—and utterly pleasurable—immersion. Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award." (Goodreads)

COLOUR - Travels Through The Paintbox  |  Victoria Finlay

Part travelogue, part narrative history, 'Colour' unlocks the history of the colours of the rainbow, and reveals how paints came to be invented, discovered, traded and used. This remarkable and beautifully written book remembers a time when red paint was really the colour of blood, when orange was the poison pigment, blue as expensive as gold, and yellow made from the urine of cows force-fed with mangoes. It looks at how green was carried by yaks along the silk road, and how an entire nation was founded on the colour purple.

Exciting, richly informative, and always surprising, 'Colour' lifts the lid on the historical palette and unearths an astonishing wealth of stories about the quest for colours, and our efforts to understand them.

ON LIES, SECRETS and SILENCE - Selected Prose  |  Adrienne Rich 

“An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.” 
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AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD - Poems 1988 - 1991 | Adrienne Rich

In this, her thirteenth book of verse, the author of "The Dream of a Common Language" and "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" writes of war, oppression, the future, death, mystery, love and the magic of poetry.
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Jane Hirshfield reads Adrienne Rich's Dedication

THIS BECKONING CEASELESS BEAUTY   |  Heidi Rose Robbins

"Heidi's poems are a sturdy and capacious container - an invitation through innocence into eros; a place of whispers and exclamations, of fire and breath, grit and courageous exploration; of heart and listening, expansion and balm. We meet her and we meet ourselves. Turning ourselves and the world around, we remember, lament, marvel and see anew." Claire Beynon  ​

THE MYSTIC HEART - Discovering a universal spirituality in the world's religions | Wayne Teasdale

"Every one of us is a mystic. We may or may not realize it, we may not even like it. But whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or not, mystical experience is always there, inviting us on a journey of ultimate discovery. We have been given the gift of life in this perplexing world to become who we ultimately are: creatures of boundless love, caring compassion, and wisdom. Existence is a summons to the eternal journey of the sage - the sage we all are, if only we could see."

Link to video series with Ken Wilbur

POSITIVE HARMLESSNESS IN PRACTICE - Enough for Us All  |  Dorothy Riddle

"Recognizing the need to develop attitudes that foster this cooperation and defuse the violence that threatens us all, Riddle offers her second volume, Positive Harmlessness in Practice, a thoughtful, wise, and mind-opening exploration of ways to help make harmlessness experiential in a culture in which habits of harm are so pervasive that they are felt to be 'normal.'” Kristine Morris ​

DISPELLING WETIKO  |  Paul Levy

Drawing on insights from Jungian psychology, shamanism, alchemy, spiritual wisdom traditions, and personal experience, author Paul Levy shows us that hidden within the venom of wetiko* is a revelation as well as its own antidote, which once recognized can help us wake up and bring sanity back to our society. How wetiko manifests─will it destroy our species, or will it catalyze a deeper process of global awakening?─depends upon recognizing what it is revealing to us about ourselves.

*wetiko (Native American term) - a 'mind-virus' that covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against not only their own best interests but against the wellbeing of the Collective.

THE INTERIOR CASTLE - St. Theresa of Avila  |  Mirabai Starr

Celebrated for more than four centuries as a master of mystical writing, St. Teresa of Avila is one of the most beloved religious figures in history. An irreverent fiery nun, St. Teresa talked back to everyone including God. She held unconventional progressive views on prayer and worship and spent most of her career under the scrutiny of the Inquisition. Her tendency toward sudden fits and visions only increased the Church's suspicions and she was even labelled insane by a few of her contemporaries. Like her confidant and protege, fellow reformer St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa was persecuted throughout her life simply for believing that every person is capable of a direct relationship with God.

SIDDHARTHA | Herman Hesse 

Though set in a place and time far removed from the Germany of 1922, the year of the book’s debut, the novel is infused with the sensibilities of Hermann Hesse’s time, synthesizing disparate philosophies–Eastern religions, Jungian archetypes, Western individualism–into a unique vision of life as expressed through one man’s search for meaning.

It is the story of the quest of Siddhartha, a wealthy Indian Brahmin who casts off a life of privilege and comfort to seek spiritual fulfillment and wisdom. On his journey, Siddhartha encounters wandering ascetics, Buddhist monks, and successful merchants, as well as a courtesan named Kamala and a simple ferryman who has attained enlightenment. Traveling among these people and experiencing life’s vital passages–love, work, friendship, and fatherhood–Siddhartha discovers that true knowledge is guided from within.

Full-length reading of Siddharta

HERMANN HESSE - Pilgrim of Crisis  |  A biography by Ralph Freedman

"This biography is the story of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist/poet Hermann Hesse who became the guide of many readers.  As the historian George Mosse put it in 1978:  “Hesse’s life was exemplary for those intellectuals who stood in the cross-fire of all parties, eternal exiles who yet longed for a home.”  Hesse captured especially the imagination of young readers first in Germany through both World Wars as a poet of nature, then, during the 1960s and 1970s, the years of the counter-culture, in the United States by his choice of Eastern mysticism in Siddhartha and a heightened sensibility stirred by the drug-related visions in works like Der Steppenwolf."  Ralph Freedman

WAKING UP  |  Sam Harris 

"In Waking Up, I do my best show that a certain form of spirituality is integral to understanding the nature of our minds.

There is no discrete self or ego living like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself—can be altered or entirely extinguished. Although such experiences of “self-transcendence” are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are. . ." Sam Harris

ANAM CARA - Spiritual Wisdom from a Celtic World | John O'Donohue

In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is anam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara is the word for friend. So anam cara in the Celtic world was the “soul friend.” In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam cara. It originally referred to someone to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life. With the anam cara you could share your inner-most self, your mind and your heart. This friendship was an act of recognition and belonging. When you had an anam cara, your friendship cut across all convention, morality, and category. You were joined in an ancient and eternal way with the “friend of your soul.” The Celtic understanding did not set limitations of space or time on the soul. There is no cage for the soul. The soul is a divine light that flows into you and into your Other. This art of belonging awakened and fostered a deep and special companionship.  [John O'Donohue]

Read more on Maria Popova's Marginalian