Kathleen Dean Moore - Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

This marvelous and sense-luscious collection of essays demonstrates Moores distinctive style which is rich in descriptive passages and deep musings.

Spirituality & Practice

Introspectives looking for nature writing in the vein of Rachel Carson or Annie Dillard will appreciate Wild Comfort, not only for its sensual imagery, but also for its informative and encouraging tone. Moores impeccable attention to detail and vivid descriptions invoking all five senses are constant.

ForeWord Reviews

With attention to the smallest details of the natural world, this very personal book unites our emotional world with the world that surrounds us.

Sierra Clubs blog The Green Life

Wild Comfort is a richly poetic book, tipsy with life, and Moore a wonderful guide to the wilderness and our own wildness. Its a book brimming with wonder, sorrow, happiness, and the intricate designs of nature that can surprise and sustain us all.

Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeepers Wife

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 naturalists 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

What nature gives, it takes away. Kathleen Dean Moore feels the ache of this truth in her bones. And yet in spite of grieving over the death of friends, the extinction of species, and the tattering of Earths web, she finds comfort in natural and human creations, in symphonies and snakes, in science and stars, in the beauty constantly upwelling from the mystery we call life. This book itself is such a consoling creation, a cause for gratitude and joy.

Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Private History of Awe

Moores descriptions are powerfully visceral. Readers will find that the world seems larger, wilder, and yet safer than they had thoughtmore beautiful and more like home.

Book Page

This collection of essays, reveries, and meditations interweaves keen observations of the natural world with descriptions of wilderness travel, conversations, stories and philosophical musings. It is easy to imagine Moore lying next to Plato, intensely focused and observant, pointing out the natural worlds soothing and transformative miracles. She excels at it.

The Oregonian

ABOUT THE BOOK

In an effort to make sense of the deaths in quick succession of several loved ones, Kathleen Dean Moore turned to the comfort of the wild, making a series of solitary excursions into ancient forests, wild rivers, remote deserts, and windswept islands to learn what the environment could teach her in her time of pain. This book is the record of her experiences. Its a stunning collection of carefully observed accounts of her lifetracking otters on the beach, cooking breakfast in the desert, canoeing in a snow squall, wading among migrating salmon in the darkbut it is also a profound meditation on the healing power of nature.

To learn more about the author, visit her website at www.riverwalking.com.

KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE lives in Oregon, at the confluence of two rivers, and, during the summer months, she resides in a little cabin at the edge of a southeast Alaskan inlet. As an essayist, activist, and professor, she brings together natural history, philosophical ideas, and creative expression in a search for loving ways to live on the earth. She has published three books of personal essays about living in the lively places where water meets land: Riverwalking, Holdfast, and The Pine Island Paradox. Her essays can be found in many journals, including Audubon, Discover, Orion, and the New York Times Magazine. Moore is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State, where she teaches courses on environmental thought and ethics. She is also the cofounder and director of Oregon States Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word.

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TRUMPETER BOOKS

An imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

trumpeterbooks.com

2010 by Kathleen Dean Moore

Cover photograph Scanpix Creative/Masterfile

See page at the end of the book for additional copyright information.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moore, Kathleen Dean.

Wild comfort: the solace of nature / Kathleen Dean Moore.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2318-1

ISBN 978-1-59030-771-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Philosophy of nature. 2. NaturePsycholgical aspects. I. Title.

BD851.M66 2010

508dc22

2009034550

For Dora Wood Dean and Ruth Baumann Moore

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

RACHEL CARSON, A Sense of Wonder

Contents

This is a book about the comfort and reassurance of wet, wild places. I have felt their peace, the steady surge and flow of the sea on sand, water slipping over stones. There is meaning in the natural rhythms of dying and living, winter and spring, bones and leaves. Even in times of bewilderment or despair, there is the steadfast ground underfootpine duff, baked clay, stone turned red in the rain. I am trying to understand this, the power of water, air, earth, and time to bring gladness gradually from grief and to restore meaning to lives that seem empty or unmoored. This book moves from gladness to sorrow, as life often does, and climbs through what might be prayer or a kind of stillness, to restored meaning and hope, to peace, maybe even to celebration and the courage to be glad again.

I had set out to write a different book. I had begun to write about happiness. The book I planned was a sort of research project, trying to put my finger on what makes a person happy, examining in exact detail the smell of tomatoes on the vine, the surprise of an old man singing, the rising up of green fields after winter. But events overtook me. I guess thats how Ill say it. That autumn, events overtook me, death after death, and my life became an experiment in sadness. One friend drowned. Another died of Lou Gehrigs disease. My father-in-law faded away like steam from stones.

Then, on September 22, a fuel truck rounded a curve on the coast highway and ran head-on into Franz Dolps car, killing him. He was my friend, my partner in the Spring Creek Project, and a good man, the sort of person who named his golden retriever Sunshine and carried poems in his pack. For many years, he taught economics. Eventually he quit the university, his radical compassion not quite close enough to the required curriculum, and moved into a cabin on cut-over land. There he planted ten thousand treescedar, hemlock, Douglas-fir. His plan was to grow an ancient forest, although he was never sure if it was the forest or himself he was hoping to redeem. We have sifted his ashes into Ten Mile Creek. The fuel truck driver was not injured in the accident, but Sunshine was so grievously hurt that she had to be shot.