Narrative Wilderness: Being in Time and Place, published by Shanti Arts Publishing in Brunswick, Maine, is a memoir and love story set in the mid-90s, on the Pacific coast, in which the author, an artist and photographer, learns from wild nature and the human surroundings, how to see, to love, and to stand in the face the uncertainties of life.

The book is about seeing and loving in a moment of time characterized by a feeling of grief-in-advance-of-loss and lifted by the healing spirit in nature. In that sense, the book is a spiritual journey, which begins at a similar point that Dante describes as a “dark wood,” that place on the road, in early midlife, when one feels lost.

Guided by the command in Rilke’s famous poem, “You must change your life,” the writer, an artist and photographer, having left a complicated life on the East Coast, discovers a remote coastal village in California, and falls in love with the place and a man and a house. The book opens with circumstances threatening the viability of their idyl and the house is put up for sale.

The urgent questions revolve around how to hold on, what to let go, and who would they be if they abandoned what they’d built together. Gradually, by paying attention to the insights that come from living intimately with the land and animals, from the quiet witnessing of the people of the place, who were all working out their own creative fates, the writer opens to the insights that power her forward.

Through the quiet and lovely teachings of the place, she learns how to love and accept everything on her plate, the difficult and the great, and to love her life and the given moment, as it is.