Customer Reviews

Perfection of the Morning: A Woman's Awakening in Nature

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Sharon Butala has written a deeply personal book with universal application. She tells of her journey from a fulfilling but hectic urban life to one of isolation and introspection. She joins her new husband on a cattle ranch in southwest Saskatchewan and leaves behind her university teaching, her graduate studies, her support network of feminist friends, and her teenaged son. In her long, lonely hours of interaction with "Nature," she encounters the mysteries and messages of the natural world and experiences the gradual healing of her own wounds. As I read Butala's book I found myself stopping to write about my own pains, my own healing, and my own mysterious encounters with Nature. It was a journey we took together, and I am stronger for the experience.

Some books are good because they tell a good story; some are good because they are funny; some present new and intriguing ideas; some are simply well written. Sharon Butala's Perfection of the Morning is good because it is uncompromisingly honest, and that alone gives it tremendous impact. She writes about her transformation from an urban, academic feminist when she marries a rancher, moves to rural Saskatchewan, and finds herself living among rural women in the midst of nature. It would have been easy for her to have either romanticized the rural life, or to have poked fun at the men and women in whose world she had come to live. She writes about what can best be described as spiritual experiences in nature, and she could have exaggerated them and couched them in "feminist" or "New Age" terms. Instead, she writes about her perceptions and reactions simply and clearly, without fanfare.

She writes of her life on a ranch in the middle of virgin prairie grassland, her frustrations and her achievements, and her insights into her relations with her new neighbors, both human and non-human, domesticated and wild, animate and inanimate. The book is wonderful because she is careful to be truthful and clear about the changes she went through, not glossing over either her difficulties or her breakthroughs of understanding. She describes the lives of rural people who spend most of their time out of doors, and in particular, the lives of ranchers who spend many hours of every day in all kinds of weather with their animals on the prairie. She talks about how living in the midst of nature affects the way people think and feel, their awareness of the world around them and their relation to it. The book describes cultural differences which are so profound that it is difficult to explain them to those of us who have grown up in suburban and urban environments. And yet she succeeds in this gem of a book to make us crave the opportunity to experience the awareness she describes. It is a pity that so few of us will be able to do so.

The author claims that having left behind her urban comforts to live in rural Saskatchewan eventually put her closely in touch with nature. Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed with her version of 'in touch with nature'. I expected to read the words of someone who respects animals and wilderness. Instead I read about her views on mice as pests, how she and her husband made their living fattening cows before the slaughter, and her twisted comments about hunters having a greater capacity for pain and suffering than the animals they cruelly kill. Exploiting animals has clearly become an inherent part of her livelihood on the farm. She thinks nothing of attending rodeos where animals are wantonly abused, and she has no trouble inflicting pain on cows through branding without anesthetics. She describes environmentalists as mostly "urban" people who are only capable of fighting the corporate world and governments by attempting to put Nature in their own terms. (Huh?) She fails to realize that if us crazy "urban" environmentalist all moved out into the wilderness, there would be no wilderness left! (I for one am proud to live in the city, leaving wild areas free for the animals to roam.) The author also totally fails to acknowledge that an animal-based diet (which she and her husband directly rely on for their livelihood) is behind much of the mass-destruction of wilderness observed in the last century. I suppose I wouldn't have been so shocked reading this book had it not been advertised as "an apprenticeship in nature". I'd sooner see it called "a treatise in exploiting nature".