Earthbound - A Secular Canon

EARTHBOUND is a book of wisdom for people who keep no church and for anyone who has ever wanted the consolation of scripture without the belief that usually comes attached.

Written in plain, numbered verses, it gathers what the great traditions already knew about how to live, the Stoics and the Daoists, the Buddha and Ecclesiastes, Marcus Aurelius and Montaigne, the long human conversation that has been going on for three thousand years, and sets it down with the theology left at the door. What remains is the part that was always true: how to begin, how to work, how to love, how to forgive, how to grow old, and how to say goodbye.

Across seventeen books and more than a hundred short chapters, EARTHBOUND moves through the whole shape of a life: Beginnings, Wonder, The Self, Others, Reconciliation, Work, Justice, Suffering, Loss, Time, Mortality, Wisdom, Songs, Doubt, Hospitality, The Earth, and Farewells.

It asks you to believe nothing. It asks only that you pay attention. The verses are made to be read slowly, a few at a time, and returned to on the days you need them, when a friendship ends, when a body fails, when the year turns, when someone you love has died.

The book closes with THE OCCASIONS: a set of readings written as poems for the great thresholds of an ordinary life, a birth, a joining, a birthday, an anniversary, a leaving, a reconciliation, an illness, a death, a burial, the bedside of the dying, and the turning of the year. A secular liturgy, in plain and beautiful language, to be spoken aloud by anyone at the moment it names.

EARTHBOUND is for the reader who has stopped believing and still wants to live well. For the humanist and the doubter, the recovering literalist, the spiritual-but-not-religious, and anyone building a life of meaning without a heaven to hold it up. It belongs on the shelf beside Marcus Aurelius's MEDITATIONS, the TAO TE CHING, and ECCLESIASTES, taken, as those are best taken, as literature: human voices, speaking across time, about the only life we are sure we have.

Read it at a wedding. Read it at a graveside. Read it on an ordinary Tuesday when the day has been long. Then close the cover and go and live, which is the only place the words were ever pointing.

The world is in front of you, unspent. Look long. Look slow.