Walking Nature Home: A Life's Journey (Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture) [Hardcover]

Susan J. Tweit (Author)

Book Description

Series: Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture | Publication Date: March 1, 2009

Without a map, navigate by the stars. Susan Tweit began learning this lesson as a young woman diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that was predicted to take her life in two to five years. Offered no clear direction for getting well through conventional medicine, Tweit turned to the natural world that was both her solace and her field of study as a plant ecologist. Drawing intuitive connections between the natural processes and cycles she observed and the functions of her body, Tweit not only learned healthier ways of living but also discovered a great truth--love can heal. In this beautifully written, moving memoir, she describes how love of the natural world, of her husband and family, and of life itself literally transformed and saved her own life.

In tracing the arc of her life from young womanhood to middle age, Tweit tells stories about what silence and sagebrush, bird bones and sheep dogs, comets, death, and one crazy Englishman have to teach us about living. She celebrates making healthy choices, the inner voices she learned to hear on days alone in the wilderness, the joys of growing and eating an organic kitchen garden, and the surprising redemption in restoring a once-blighted neighborhood creek. Linking her life lessons to the stories she learned in childhood about the constellations, Tweit shows how qualities such as courage, compassion, and inspiration draw us together and bind us into the community of the land and of all living things.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Walking Nature Home by Susan J. Tweit offers the reader a constellation of healing stories. Replete with Tweit's powerful articulations of the human heart and overlaid with the stories of the natural world in all its wonder, this book joins the ranks of the great testimonies of our time." Denise Chavez, author of A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food, and Culture

About the Author

SUSAN J. TWEIT is an award-winning author whose passionate articulation of humans' relationship with the "community of the land"--nature and the landscapes we love--has earned her accolades that include a Silver Eddie, the Oscar of magazine awards, for "The Last Refuge" in National Parks magazine, and a spot on the Denver Post's "Colorado Voices" panel--twice. Her eleven books include Colorado Less Traveled, a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards, and The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes, hailed as "a joy to read" by High Country News. Tweit writes a weekly column, "Nature of Life," for her local paper, the Mountain Mail. She also records and produces this material for broadcast on KHEN-FM, her local community radio, and as podcasts on her Web site, susanjtweit.com.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 191 pages
• Publisher: University of Texas Press (March 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0292719175
• ISBN-13: 978-0292719170
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #583,604 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

My training is in field ecology, the study of the natural communities that make Earth a living planet. I once spent weeks in wild places studying grizzly bear habitat, wildfire patterns and sagebrush communities. I turned to writing when I realized I loved telling the stories behind the data more than collecting those data.

I'm the author of twelve books that explore the interrelationships that form what Aldo Leopold called the "community of the land." My work has appeared in magazines and newspapers from Audubon and Popular Mechanics to High Country News and the Los Angeles Times - and has been heard on the Martha Stewart Living Radio Network.

I've taught workshops at colleges, universities, and writing festivals from University of California-Riverside and Miami University of Ohio to Wofford College in South Carolina, as well as at home and online. Audiences as diverse as the International Xeriscape Conference, Collegiate Peaks Forum, Monte Vista Crane Festival, and the Walking Words Writing Festival have called my talks "inspiring" and "insightful." I coach individual writers, review manuscripts for university presses, and contribute to "The Perch," the blog of Audubon magazine, and Story Circle Network's "HerStories" as well as my own blog. My current teaching and speaking schedule is on my web site (susanjtweit.com).

I'm a Quaker, a step-mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a mentor & mentee, and a friend. I belong to an informal network of writers and artists who speak for the land, and to Story Circle Network, Women Writing the West, ASLE, and Colorado Author's League.

I'm a passionate gardener: I grow my own vegetables, fruits and herbs, and also enjoy the challenge of native plant restoration and "wildscape" design. My designs have been featured in the Rocky Mountain News, Zone 4, and on garden blogs. Take a look at the slide shows on my web site (susanjtweit.com).

I live with my husband, sculptor Richard Cabe, in a house heated by the sun--the sun generates our electricity, too!--on a reclaimed industrial parcel in a high-desert valley tucked in the shadow of the tallest stretch of the Rocky Mountains.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Constellations of Meaning, April 9, 2009

By 

Story Circle Book Reviews - See all my reviews

This review is from: Walking Nature Home: A Life's Journey (Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture) (Hardcover)

"The deepest memoir is filled with metaphor."
--Maureen Murdock, Unreliable Truth

Walking Nature Home: A Life's Journey is one of those rare memoirs that is much more than a life's story (as if that were not enough). It is a memoir that not only tells us about a lifetime's worth of experiences, but shows us how experience is shaped by knowledge, how knowledge is experienced through nature, and how nature can guide a human being to a fuller, healthier understanding of her place in the world.

The constellations are the most important guiding metaphor of this elegantly-crafted book. Throughout her life, Susan Tweit has oriented herself by the stars, using them to remind herself where she is in space and time: "I and all the other lives on Earth are connected to the stars." So it is natural for her to use the constellations as chapter markers in her life's journey, from Orion the courageous (her "stellar talisman") to Virgo (the "unowned" one, own woman, belonging to none), to the familiar Dipper ("you can chart your course by it"). Each of these stellar constellations creates a constellation of meanings and significance in Tweit's life, marking, defining, charting, guiding.

And she needed their guidance, for at twenty-three, married to her college sweetheart and already embarked on an exciting career as a plant ecologist, Tweit learned that she was suffering from an autoimmune disease that (the doctor told her) would claim her life within five years. Learning to live with that diagnosis, learning to treat her illness as the subject of research demanded more of her than she thought she could give. But she borrowed strength from Orion, a sense of self from Virgo, and the help of the other constellations. And as she learned more about her illness, she understood that it was not the end of life, but the first step toward becoming herself.

The title of Tweit's memoir, Walking Nature Home, offers another important metaphor for her life. Throughout the book, walking is not only a powerful image for purposeful forward movement ("Orion striding across the black heavens"), but for her own growing confidence and personal independence: walking away from her first marriage, for instance; or making an arduous week-long, hundred-mile trek, with a dog for companionship, through the Wyoming mountains. "Walking the days alone," she says, "forced me to pay attention. If I kept my awareness tuned within, I might yet hear what I needed to understand my health and, more importantly, my life." And years later, walking with her new stepdaughter Molly allowed them to develop a caring, trusting relationship:

"Walking gave us a territory of our own, a place we could start fresh, away from the disputes that regularly rocked our household. Rambling with no agenda forced Molly and me to leave our baggage at home. Walking provided time together, and it got us outside to learn the landscape where we lived."

As the book comes full circle, we find Tweit watching Orion again, strengthened by the love of a man who shares her understanding of the wholeness of nature, in the home they are building themselves on a "half-block of decaying industrial property" in a small Colorado mountain town, where together they have restored a ravaged creek to health. Health, restoration--another constellation of metaphors here.

But that's enough. You really must read the book.

by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Courageous Journey, August 20, 2009

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E. B. (Kansas) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Walking Nature Home: A Life's Journey (Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture) (Hardcover)

Susan Tweit is grounded to time and place on this earth by the heavens. Having always loved the stars, in this memoir of faith and courage in the face of a severe illness, an autoimmune disease that some twenty years ago was supposed to kill her in five, she heads each chapter with a short story about the constellations. She also finds courage and faith and grounding in the act of walking and once took a hike of one hundred miles through a Wyoming wilderness with only a dog for a companion. When you understand how ill she was/is and what a feat it could be for a healthy individual, then you know the courage, the fierceness of will she possessed to endure. She took that "walk" not because she wanted to prove she could, although that might be a side motivation, but to learn to listen, to be aware and in the silence and the sounds of nature, learn more about herself and how to manage her illness.
I love that when she and her husband (who by the way is a darling man) moved to Colorado, they bought an old abandoned industrial property and began to restore it to health, starting with the creek. This is a beautiful story, a well-written story of tenacity and the power of the human spirit. A must read for those who are fighting an illness and for those of us, so far, in good health. It's a book that is now in my personal library and one I will recommend to my book club. Eunice Boeve, author

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this book, May 25, 2009

By 

Laura Pritchett - See all my reviews

This review is from: Walking Nature Home: A Life's Journey (Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture) (Hardcover)

This is a gorgeous book -- about illness, stars, courage, honesty, and healing. It's the best memoir I've read recently -- and I hope it ends up in the hands of many.