Customer Reviews

Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have to confess up front: I was afraid to read this book. Not because I don't know and love Moore's thinking and writing; I do. Her essay, "Testimony of the Marsh," from her book Holdfast is one of my favorites ever. I teach it in my creative writing workshops as an example of how to use lyrical nature writing to reveal truths at the heart of life. So I picked up Wild Comfort in delighted anticipation, until I read this in her introduction:

I had set out to write a different book. I had begun to write about happiness... But events overtook me. I guess that's how I'll say it. That autumn, events overtook me, death after death, and my life became an experiment in sadness.

I couldn't read more. I closed the book. For the past eight months, since my husband began seeing birds and was eventually diagnosed with brain cancer, my life has been an experiment in sustaining courage and balance. I didn't want to read about grief, sadness or any of their relatives. I wanted that book on what makes a person happy.

A few days later, I picked up Wild Comfort again. And reading on, I drank it in like a healing draught, like the smell of rain bringing life to my drought-stricken desert valley. This slender collection of essays moves as powerfully and inevitably as a tide, inching in, rising ever-so-slowly under me, until I am buoyed by the strength and truth that flow through Moore's words. It is like the sun shining through a gap in the clouds, spotlighting the exact place that makes us stop and stare, overcome with awe at how beautiful life is. Wild Comfort may be rooted in grief, in loss, in darkness, but Moore's words carry us inexorably toward light and hope.

I could quote an insightful passage from every essay, but here's the paragraph from the beginning of the book that hooked me:

Late on the night when I finished this book, I felt my way to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Clouds obscured the moon. I could hear the shifting of the dark sea but could only imagine the surge and ebb of its rim on the sand. Then the clouds slid out from under the moon. The advancing edge of waves gathered moonlight and pushed it toward land. The line of light wavered there, shaking in the wind, then slid out to sea. And so it was, up and down the beach, a rim of light riding in on the swash and slipping back into the night. I was happy then, standing in the surge with lines of moonlight catching on my rubber boots. This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.

Amen.

by Susan J. Tweit
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature reflects moments and experiences in the author's life in the wild through lucid, poetic descriptions that comfortably sway between the most minute details and broad universal truths. Her attentiveness to the facts of the moment at hand is keen, while her thoughts in understanding them may be scientific, ethical, or purely exhilarating...and sometimes all of these. Her appreciation and gratitude for the wild are genuine and contagious. She is a full participant...physical, emotional, and in her own way, spiritual...in the experiences she describes, never a bystander to them or an objective academic, although her credentials in philosophy invariably enrich her perceptions.

Moore turns to nature to nimbly and wisely yet subtly face with grace the loss of family members and friends, making choices, dealing with the complexities of modern life, and having patience, among other things. She offers lessons for us in how a heron eats, in a possum in a plum tree, in turning stones, and in a broken sun, reflecting that "[t]here is a wild comfort in the cycles and the intersecting circles, the rotations and revolutions, the growing and ebbing of this beautiful and strangely trustworthy world."

The impact of this book has been to revitalize (once again, for it is a neverending process) my own senses and mind in savoring how human life is inevitably interlaced with the wild, and that embracing and exploring that fact can only bring us closer to understanding what is true and real in both this instant and the timeless universe.

I enjoyed this book, but I never quite finished it. It lost its zing somewhere along the way. I had been hoping to find more of the magic of what nature actually DID to give solace. Perhaps realizing that I didn't need to finish the book at all but rather go outside and take a hike was exactly what the author was getting at?

As I navigate the impending death of my beloved mother-in-law from pancreatic cancer and dealing with my own considerable (though temporary) challenges, this lovely book is helping me to realize that it's all part of being human. Sometimes I need a gentle reminder.
Much like Diane Ackerman, Ms Moore writes in a poetically beautiful way that lifts my heart. I am once again really seeing and appreciating all of the gifts that nature so freely shares. Even in my suburban backyard!

As someone whose contact to nature is seeing a squirrel, oh, a couple of times a month, I can confirm that Wild Comfort opens the urban reader up to a new and wonderful world. Moore is an absolutely exquisite observer of not just creatures and plants but the sky and seas, too. (And she's not squeamish; the opening essay on snakes attests to that.) I respected the author's physicality--kayaking, a nightime hike as a heavy fog rolls in, snow-shoeing in the forest. And, as the title suggests, how she connects events of the (non-human) natural world to cycles and events of her life is most touching and wise. Yes, sometimes there's a touch of piety, and maybe the book didn't need quite so many lists of unheard of (to me) animals and plants--hip-snaps and green wittles (OK, I made those two up). Ah, and lichen apparently is a large part of the world outside of cities. Seriously, though, these were very touching essays and I'm very inclined toward going back and reading her other books.

A pleasant, sometimes elegant series of pieces on the natural world and our relation to it.

The serenity of nature has a healing power that can't be matched. "Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature" is nature memoir from Kathleen Dean Moore, as she reflects on her time looking to nature for comfort after losing many people close to her. From walking among the salmon, desert cuisine, and more, she states that all aspects of nature have something to teach. "Wild Comfort" is a must for anyone who wants to see what nature has to offer as a healer.

The book arrived in a timely manner- but it was missing pages- not damaged, just missing pages. Returned it, no replacement!

I have only myself to blame for buying this book. It is not a "nature" book, as so many personal philosophy/lecturing books seem to be categorized under. If you like being bombarded with lofty liberal ideals, what is wrong with the world, what is wrong with you as a human being being and a member of the human race, you will enjoy this helping of self-flagellation. Any references to "nature" are merely entryways into her philosophical beliefs. Early on she describes her pain of having to burn a huge pile of poisonouse, noxious rubbish and human garbage on a deserted Alaskan coast (where she owns a cabin), because, What else could we do with it? After all, there is no sanitary amd responsible garbage service up here!

Well, practice what you preach and do the responsible thing...don't live in an area where you have to trash it in order to get by. Typical liberal hypocrisy.

I quit reading after the first 26 pages. It will be going to the used book store.