Wild Comfort

The Solace of Nature

Publisher’s Description

In a time of sorrow, Kathleen Dean Moore turned to the comfort of the wild, making a series of excursions into ancient forests, wild rivers, remote deserts, and rainswept islands to learn what nature could teach her about loss and healing. This book is a stunning collection of carefully observed accounts of this time—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 hope and courage, healing and gratitude that come from connection to the natural world.

WINNER OF THE OREGON BOOK AWARD

Selection

I don’t know what sorrow is, if it’s something or nothing, a kind of filling up or an emptying out. What I think I do know now is that sorrow is part of the Earth’s great cycles, flowing into the night like cool air sinking down a river course. To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the Earth, the surge from living to dying, from coming into being to ceasing to exist. Maybe this is why the Earth has the power over time to wash sorrow into a deeper pool, cold and shadowed. And maybe this is why, even though sorrow never disappears, it can make a deeper connection to the currents of life and so connect, somehow, to sources of wonder and solace.

Reviews

“Kathleen Dean Moore is a writer whose senses, heart, generosity, and intellect open in every direction. This book, filled with knowledge of the natural and human worlds, is a superb naturalist’s handbook. It is also a praise book: an illuminated manuscript whose life overspills its own borders. In its grounded wisdoms, humility, curiosity, and in the kaleidoscope beauty of its descriptions, Wild Comfort reminds how to see, how to sing; how to welcome, with equal gravity and grace, whatever asks entrance into our lives. It is destined to become a classic.”
—Jane Hirshfield

Discussion and Activity Guide

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