The Wisdom of Wilderness: Experiencing the Healing Power of Nature
The Wisdom of Wilderness: Experiencing the Healing Power of Nature Books
Product Description
Tap into the Awe-Inspiring Power of Nature
Buy Cheap The Wisdom of Wilderness: Experiencing the Healing Power of Nature Online
Related posts:
I really loved this book. It’s well written, entertaining, and the author seems to really be on target with the power of nature and how we all should respect and connect to the wilderness. I flew through this book and that doesn’t happen too often with me! Wonderful reading if you want to be connected to nature and know the power in such a relationship, not only for psychological reasons but for spiritual reasons as well.
Rating: 5 / 5
I found this book to be a tender account of the author’s quest to spend time in nature and the spiritual healing that he experienced there. There’s not a lot of deep theology here. But, there are very well written accounts of the author’s time in the wilderness and the peace that he experienced. It’s very readable.
Rating: 4 / 5
I like this guy and wish with all my heart I may possibly have met him. I connected immediately with this books thought and read it all the way through. I like the wilderness and identified with everything Gerald May had to say in this small gem.
Rating: 5 / 5
There is much to like about Gerald (Jerry) May’s The Wisdom of Wilderness. I too am greatly interested in notions of wilderness and wildness and appreciate May’s reflections on our species’ “estrangement” from larger, wild nature, and the fact that our western Euro-American culture all too often tries to tame, exploit, or manage “the natural world” even as we dread or ignore or deny the wildness within. I also appreciate that he risks writing about the invisibles or intangibles he exposed in the latter stages of his life, even as answering “the call” of wilderness; and the fact that some aspect of larger nature might really be perceived as welcoming. I too have sometimes had the experience of being drawn by nature out of myself and into something larger. It’s often said that wilderness – or, more generally, wild nature – is indifferent to the fate of humans. Yet at times in my life I have sensed something else. I don’t know if it has been nature itself or something even “larger” than nature, some creative force or energy. But I have felt accepted by what we call the natural world. Other thoughts also resonate: the notion that we humans and other parts of nature are perfect in our imperfection; the value, even necessity, of solitude; the importance of being “vitally bestow”; the ability of wild nature to heal; the possibility that “all creation participates in creation”; and like’s presence at the focal top of it all.
May describes his own calling and welcoming by different names. And though his description of “The Power of the Slowing” or “the Presence” or “the Wisdom of the Wild” is not quite like my own, I can sense the truth in his experience. At the same time, some of his accounts seem nearly too superficial, too pat, too simplistic; and occasionally, a small too “woo woo.” Perhaps that has to do with the difficulty of describing intangibles and larger “Presences” or transcendent experiences. In any case, I sought after MORE. I also sometimes had distress following his “leaps” in reasoning and found that he sometimes seems to contradict himself. For instance, he discusses the importance of accepting nature as it is, but then also writes that nature is “willing to become an imaginary enemy” so that humans might learn one lesson or another. That sort of thought seems to place humans back at the focal top of things. And in certain chapters, I wish May had dived deeper. For instance Chapter 6, “Violence at Smith’s Inlet.” Even as certain parts seemed overly dramatic, I reckon May missed an opportunity to explore his own complex relationship with the violence caught up in sport fishing. Though his own partaking in fishing resulted in extensive killing and wounding, he simply says, “It everlastingly bothered me, but I kept doing it.” (Until, we learn in a later chapter, he simply stopped.) As an aside, I found his discussion of angling “one-upmanship” to be asinine and irrelevant in this sort of book. I do greatly appreciate his argument that we need to look harder at – and accept – the “shadow” of humanity’s violence. I just wish he’d gone deeper in this chapter. I also wish he followed through in his discussion of the human proclivity for naming; by the end of the chapter I wondered, what is his top?
One other comment: May – like many people in our culture – seems to equate wilderness and wildness. But as I note in my own book, Living with Wildness: An Alaskan Odyssey, wildness and wilderness are not at all the same, a top that Gary Snyder, Jack Turner, Paul Shepard, Wendell Berry, Roderick Nash, and many other American writers, historians, and philosophers have emphatically made, sometimes at fantastic part. Wilderness is a place; and sometimes, an thought. Wildness, on the other hand, is a state of being. Wildness is bestow the world over, including within us. As Jerry May himself puts it toward the end of his book, what he is really considering here is “the Wisdom of the Wild.” It’s a wisdom meriting our attention and openness.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book was written with the last ounce of strength Jerry May had as he was dying of cancer. It is full of joy, humor, gentleness and beauty, and it is vintage Jerry. A gorgeous book for those who like nature, beauty and the outdoors, and seek the divine in natural settings.
Rating: 5 / 5