Walking Nature Home: A Life's Journey
4.5/5
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About this ebook
“Offers the reader a constellation of healing stories . . . Powerful articulations of the human heart . . . Overlaid with the stories of the natural world” (Denise Chávez, author of A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food, and Culture).
Without a map, navigate by the stars. Susan Tweit began learning this lesson as a young woman diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that was predicted to take her life in two to five years. Offered no clear direction for getting well through conventional medicine, Tweit turned to the natural world that was both her solace and her field of study as a plant ecologist. Drawing intuitive connections between the natural processes and cycles she observed and the functions of her body, Tweit not only learned healthier ways of living but also discovered a great truth—love can heal. In this beautifully written, moving memoir, she describes how love of the natural world, of her husband and family, and of life itself literally transformed and saved her own life.
In tracing the arc of her life from young womanhood to middle age, Tweit tells stories about what silence and sagebrush, bird bones and sheep dogs, comets, death, and one crazy Englishman have to teach us about living. She celebrates making healthy choices, the inner voices she learned to hear on days alone in the wilderness, the joys of growing and eating an organic kitchen garden, and the surprising redemption in restoring a once-blighted neighborhood creek. Linking her life lessons to the stories she learned in childhood about the constellations, Tweit shows how qualities such as courage, compassion, and inspiration draw us together and bind us into the community of the land and of all living things.
Susan J. Tweit
Susan J. Tweit is a plant biologist who began her career working in the wilderness studying wildfires, grizzly bear habitat and sagebrush ecosystems. She turned to writing when she realized she loved telling the stories in the data. She is an award-winning author of twelve books, including a previous memoir, Walking Nature Home, and has been published in magazines and newspapers including Audubon, Popular Mechanics, the Denver Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Her essays and commentaries have been collected in numerous anthologies, and heard on regional public radio. She is cofounder of the Border Book Festival and Audubon Rockies’ Be A Habitat Hero Project, and an active member of Women Writing the West and Story Circle Network. Visit her online at www.susanjtweit.com.Tweit writes from the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a farm at the foot of high peaks near Paonia, Colorado, where deer and coyotes saunter through her garden and stars stud a dark night sky.
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Reviews for Walking Nature Home
10 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Okay, this is one of my favorite books, and even when I'm broke I buy copies to give to people. It's a beautifully envisioned and written account of finding, and trusting, ourselves and our places in this world. I could wax poetic, or I could give you the bare-bones outline, but there is no way to summarize this book that does it justice. Just make space in your life for the gift, some time soon, of reading it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a memoir of recovery of physical wellness within an immense appreciation of the natural world, written in a manner that makes one just want to never stop reading. The author was given two years to live, with an uncertain diagnosis of a nonspecific autoimmune disease at the age of twenty-three. Over two decades later, by learning her body's needs and shaping her life to the world of nature, she writes a tale of following gentle and strong convictions lived within lessons of the crucial interrelationships of the species that defines the community of the land she so respects. A beautifully and engrossing testament to a species in its proper element reclaiming life.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Susan Tweit's memoir of diagnosis in her early twenties with undifferentiated connective tissue disease with a grim prognosis. Through her life as a natural scientists, she uses observation of her body's responses and reaction as well as her relationship with the natural environment to construct a life that helps keep her disease in check.