There are moments in our lives where a door of awareness opens, if only for a brief second. These are the moments that are simply impossible to express, but moments that have captured us for all time.

Join a New England forester on a fifty-year quest for something larger than all of us. Here are a series of essays, stories and poems emerging from the natural world, but always connected to a life that has had its common share of illumination and darkness, hope and despair, love and loss, ambition and failure, resistance and acceptance, anger and peace. Marking timber for harvest becomes a meditation on the unique connection between responsibility to the natural world and awareness of self and others. A shadow in the woods, a voice on the wind opens up the mystery inherent in all the wisdom traditions. The impact of a sudden death on a logging crew lingers for decades, demanding a resolution between hubris and fate. The crushing retreat of the United States from climate science and advocacy manifests in a longing for the precise language of another time when we were closer to the natural cycles of life.