Overview
In this elegantly written and illustrated book, Susan Chernak McElroy offers a series of short pieces — meditations and teaching tales — based on animals and the natural world. Each piece can be used as a starting point for meditation practice or read as it is. Arranged around the seasons, the pieces describe nature’s evocative magpies hiding prized baubles in their nests, badgers emerging from their dens, buffalo dancing on picnic tables, elk during mating season, dreaming squirrels, dogs, doves, weasels, horses, bears, and even rivers, rocks, and the wind. With McElroy's poetic language, even these so-called inanimate parts of the wild world of nature are vibrant and alive, offering their gifts to any who stop and pay attention. The book explores emptiness, resistance, new beginnings, attraction, decay, integrity, leave-taking, cleansing, and regeneration. Each of the seasonal sections features a line drawing of an animal during that season, and the pages throughout are adorned with intricate decorative borders and art.