Announcing the Release of Apprentice To The Wild

I am pleased to announce the launch this week of my new book Apprentice To The Wild, published and now available through Empty Bowl Press. My excitement at the release of this book has many layers. We humans live by stories, and there is joy in the sharing of stories that have most shaped and animated one's life. When I began this book, I imagined it as a letter to my grandchildren, Neve and Ethan, now six and three years old. As I express in the book, I wanted “to paint for them a picture of what I lived for, and how I have attempted to keep alive for them what feels most precious about the world we still share.” 

Apprentice To The Wild chronicles significant encounters with wildness and risk from my life as a commercial fisherman and wilderness guide in Alaska across five decades. At the same time, the book is an exploration of “the wild within”, as it has also animated my life as a Protestant clergyman, Zen practitioner, and mindfulness teacher. That practice of what I call “inner habitat restoration” has also been an animating part of my work as a wilderness guide in Alaska. As I write in the book's Introduction,

As a Zen student, I sought to bring into these adventures an inward-leaning spirit of inquiry, a listening heart that comes to flower in the presence not only of natural beauty but of a spacious and disciplined attention. Whether on the ocean or on the cushion, my goal was to dismantle the false barriers we often erect between human nature and wild nature; in essence, to become an apprentice to the wild.

To be born as a human being is to be thrust into the wild—cell, bone, psyche, and synapse. In a time of profound ecological challenges generated by our human hand, reclaiming a felt connection with the wild forces that gave birth to our species has become an essential part of our emerging survival equipment.

Apprentice To The Wild celebrates the healing powers of nature when it is met with a deeply human presence. When we are fully alive to beauty, truly cognizant of the miracle of consciousness that brings that beauty to life, we are no longer immune to joy, and can root our lives more firmly in the power of presence. This is a catalytic perceptual shift, one that can also unleash wise action as an important fruit of that wider sense of self.

I invite you to join me on this journey through the wilderness of the heart.