A Field Guide to Now: Notes on Mindfulness and Life in the Present Tense [Hardcover]

Christina Rosalie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 4, 2012

For anyone who craves a meaningful life, A Field Guide To Now is an invitation to begin. Through evocative prose and original illustrations, Christina Rosalie inspires readers to find passion and purpose by attending to the moment at hand.

Every self-help book tells us to “be present,” but few succeed in showing us how. With this book, Christina leads readers to discover how the small and seemingly mundane aspects of daily life can—through a shift in focus—become a springboard for the profound. It is an antidote to the perpetual rush we experience daily; and to that feeling that there will never be enough time to begin, to commit to a creative practice, or to become whatever it is we want most to be.

Part adventure guide and part survival guide, A Field Guide To Now is filled with thought starters and creative exercises that will lead you to uncover your own extraordinary life amidst the ordinary moments of every day. It will make you laugh. It will make your heart sing. It will give you a reason to pause. Above all else, this book is call to take action, to live wholly into the present, and to persist in becoming whatever your heart yearns to be. 

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An ode to the pleasures and sweet bondage of motherhood, a gift basket of drawings, musings, definitions and advice from the grassy hillside of a New England farmhouse.  A labor of love, in love’s coat of many colors; an offering to the God of the search for a valuable life.”

– Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted and Cowboys Are My Weakness

“Christina Rosalie’s thoughtful book, A Field Guide to Now, is a personal and conversational guide to faith and timing.”  

– Sabrina Ward Harrison, author of Spilling Open: The Art of Becoming Yourself

“In A Field Guide to Now Christina Rosalie brings life into perfectly crisp focus by distilling it, with letters and paint, down to its most basic and beautiful elements. While falling in love with her world, you’ll remember what you love about your own life, and you’ll finish the book inspired to make the most of every moment.”

– Katherine Malmo, author of Who in This Room: The Realities of Cancer, Fish, and Demolition.

“No one talks about the moments in between,” and yet Christina Rosalie does. Reminiscent of Annie Dillard, Rosalie shows us how the unexpected details of daily life – a weasel destroying the hen house, a praying mantis climbing the pepper mill – allow us to understand that “the present tense is at once much bigger and messier and also smaller and more precise” than we can imagine. Interrupted sleep, fledgling dreams, clambering children, and several cups of coffee later, we learn, as she has, that, “It’s easy to look at what’s achievable in a day and come up short. But it’s just as easy to underestimate what you can accomplish in a year.” Beautifully written and illustrated, A Field Guide to Now is just that, a guide to living in the present – one I plan to carry with me and return to often.

– Laisha Rosnau, poet and author of Lousy Explorers, Notes on Leaving, and The Sudden Weight of Snow

From the Inside Flap

A Field Guide To Now is a reference manual for creating an extraordinary life out of ordinary moments. This collection of illustrated essays and field notes explores the tenuous line between survival and thriving; between wanderlust and making a home; between being and becoming; and about how these things inevitably converge in the scarce, haphazard, simple moments of right now. It is both an invitation to create whatever opportunity your heart yearns for, and proof that it is possible. Reinvent the way you engage with the moment and explore the texture of your present tense.

 

Imagine if you could look for the present moment in a field guide, the way you might look up the name of a tree you see outside your window?

For as long as you can remember, the tree has just been a tree. But when you look it up, it becomes something more—a sassafras maybe, or a tulip maple—and suddenly you can feel the way your attention toward it shifts. You recognize the way its pollen gathers fine and yellow in the weft of your bedroom screen in May, or the way its shade freckles the dying grass at the end of summer. In the act of naming it, in discovering its traits and marks, the tree becomes something more to you.

What if you could do this for all the moments that fill your life? That is what this book is about. Begin. Take note. Be right here.

 

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: skirt!; First edition (September 4, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0762778563
• ISBN-13: 978-0762778560
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,041 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christina Rosalie is the author A Field Guide To Now: Notes On Mindfulness and Life In The Present Tense (SKIRT! September 2012). A creative consultant, writer, and mixed media artist, her award-winning writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Milk & Ink, The Sun, Mothering, and Blue Print Review. She writes about creativity, taking action, mindfulness, motivation, and motherhood at www.christinarosalie.com and on Twitter at @christina_write.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Full of Soul August 13, 2012

By BrianaCreates

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I am a sucker for deep, soulful writing, and this book is it! Christina's detailed and intimate writing style is making it hard for me to put the book down. In the book, she not only shares her engaging artwork, but also puts on paper her thoughts on life, writing, mothering, pregnancy, teaching, and noticing the specifics of each moment. I highly recommend this book. One of my favorite quotes so far is as follows, "Maybe your days are already too long, and your dream time too short. This is okay. This is, in fact, what defining a creative practice is all about, especially during times when things feel dark, or bleak, or terribly out of focus. This work is about taking note of what your moments are made of. What they offer, and what they resist." (p. 11)

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Field Guide to Now: Notes on Midfulness and Life in the Present Tense August 10, 2012

By Sandra

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is heaartwarming, heart-wrenching and inspiring at the same time. It is not only beautifully illustrated by the author, but Rosalie's style of writing mirrors that of a Steinbeck. This book is a piece of art through and through. A MUST READ. You will have the first edition of a book from an author who will go very far in the literary world. Buy it, cry and laugh with it, love it and live it!

Sandy

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Field Guide to Now August 14, 2012

By E South

Format:Hardcover

If you love reading words that will spur you to come alive in your own life, you've found a good reference manual and a fantastic story woven in one place and illustrated with whimsey and heart. An inspiring read for those of us yearning to live our lives with intent. Rosalie writes with an accessable ease and inspirational voice. I can't wait to see what's next from this talented author! A Field Guide to Now: Notes on Mindfulness and Life in the Present Tense

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected.... February 23, 2013

By JC SALM

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

THE author writes from her experiences as a mother to her young children. There was a time when this would have appealed to me, but now, as a grandmother living alone, I have limited access to my grandchildren. We are working on improving relationships, but in the meantime, I have been there and done that (what the author talks about) and I was looking for something more relevant to my life. As for the exercises and questions and yes, even the artwork, I found them lacking and hollow.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Dirt, Despair, and Delight of Life February 2, 2013

By Jill M. Salahub

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is one of the most beautiful, inexplicable things I have ever loved. It's a poem written on a painting and wrapped in a book whose spine is made from bones and feathers, glued together with jam and laundry detergent. I try to define, to capture, to translate "what it is" and I just can't, in the same way you can't hold a live hummingbird still enough to count its feathers.

For months, I was almost finished with this book, only had three pages left. There it stayed on my bedside table, waiting. At first, I didn't understand why I resisted. I thought it was simple forgetting, being too busy, too tired. But I was wrong. I didn't want it to be over. And when finally I was able to open it again, to turn to those last three pages, to finish, as soon as I did I went back to all the pages whose edges I'd folded over, reread and underlined, made notes in the margins, and then, I immediately started reading it again.

Because, this: "It is both an invitation to you to create whatever opportunity your heart yearns for and proof that it is possible. To begin, to be in the mess, to be right here." This book is a memoir, and a poem, and a piece of art. It is one woman's story, but also the reader's story if one chooses to contemplate the provided prompts. It is the story of a mother and wife and artist, of a family and a marriage and a house/home, but also of a being of light wrapped in skin trying to make sense of the confusion of being human. Its descriptions of nature are beautiful and at times brutal. She sees the tenderness and brilliance in the mundane, she notices everything, and invites the reader to do the same.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A book to devour and savor September 26, 2012

By Hilary

Format:Hardcover

This is the kind of book you'll want to have alongside a cup of tea, by the fire; or cup of coffee on a warm summer morning. It's a book you'll want to both devour and savor. It's a book that will inspire you to slow down and notice and simultaneously kick you in the ass.
The illustrations are beautiful and the writing itself is like a painting - full of color and contrast and rhythm. Rosalie pulls you into the complex emotional layers of her life and helps you connect to your own - the result - a transformative, illuminating and extraordinary experience.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and Inspiring September 10, 2012

By Elayna Alexandra

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

A Field Guide to Now is one of those books that your life feels empty when you finish it, because it has filled moments of your days in such incredible ways. An easy read that fits easily into the handful of moments that you have waiting for the doctors or before you drift to sleep, Christina Rosalie, the author, encourages you to be here in your life right NOW. This book accepts and celebrates the messiness of life and inspires you to think about challenging yourself in small new ways. Christina Rosalie, observes life in such a vivid ways her writing can't help but encourage you to be more present in your own life -to notice small things. To realize that there is always uncertainty and life sometimes is uncomfortable but this is part of being alive. A must read in my opinion.