The Attentive Heart: Conversations with Trees - Hardcover

Kaza, Stephanie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0449907791 ISBN 13: 9780449907795

Publisher: Fawcett, 1993

Synopsis

The author shares her impressions of trees and their place in the environment

About this title

Reviews

Readers who feel a kinship with trees will be captivated by these "conversations." Now a professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont, Kaza bases most of these meditative essays on experiences she had in California. With a Buddhist reverence for living things, she follows the Zen practice of shikantaza --just sitting--to find serenity and inspiration among trees. She observes the change of seasons with a stately gingko, re-visits a commune to renew her acquaintance with a tan oak and madrone, dreams as she leans against a massive blue oak. On Arbor Day, Kaza joins a group planting redwood seedlings; she makes a pilgrimage to Methuselah Grove to see bristlecone pines and to Yosemite for whitebark pines. Other encounters include red firs, alders and sycamores. This is a beautifully written, imaginative appreciation of trees. Illustrations. First serial to New Age Journal; QPB alternate.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Twenty-seven lyrical, beautifully illustrated essays about communing with trees. Kaza (Environmental Studies/University of Vermont) tries to marry deep ecology with the ``Mountains and Rivers Sutra'' of the ninth-century Japanese Zen master Eihei Dogen. Like the sutra, the book progresses in five sections, beginning with the ``simple desire to meet trees and make contact'' to the desire to ``uncover more complete histories of individual trees,'' as well as to ``experience a certain vulnerability in raising difficult questions'' about life and death among trees and humans; then going, third, through an entering into the sufferings of trees and on, fourth, to a response in ways that ``are heartfelt and genuine'' and that ``aim for greater capacity in approaching the very demanding situation of trees today''; and, lastly, taking up a search for ways ``to restore spiritual as well as biological relationships with trees....'' Kaza is deeply serious as she strives for the heartfelt in trees growing up the Coast Ranges of central California, and in Washington, Oregon, and the Sierra Nevada. She fights TV and nature movies that offer ``delusional substitutes for rich, sensory contact with the actual rhythms and textures of the natural world'' (an argument very similar to Bill McKibben's in The Age of Missing Information, 1992). Hers are one- sided conversations: The redwoods, alders, maples, and oaks don't answer back. But we get many wonderful moments down in the drinking roots of sycamores; up in the spring ecstasy of pollinating maples; sitting in the still wisdom of caves; and watching a nervous Kaza, with a diamond mind and chain saw, cutting firewood that she praises. Too talky at times, but readers who stay will be rich winners. Could achieve a cult following. (Twenty-seven lithographs by Davis Teselle) (First serial to New Age Journal) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This book records a series of the author's intensely personal, sometimes spiritual, relationships with individual trees. Her approach is based on her experience as a practitioner of Zen meditation techniques. Kaza's training as a naturalist, however, gives her essays a more realistic bent; she recognizes the many uses of wood as a raw material--for paper, furniture, fuel, lumber, etc.--and does not dismiss the human uses of trees as an evil. Her descriptions of the trees and the life around them and in them are accurate and lyrical, although the writing is almost too poetic and intense in spots. This is not a book to be read straight through; it should be dipped into at reflective moments, like a book of poems. Notes in the back constitute a bibliography of sorts. Recommended for environmental collections.
- Eleanor Maass, Maass As socs., New Milford, Pa.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fawcett
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0449907791
• ISBN 13: 9780449907795
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 258