I loved it. How he reflects his personal history with or by diving into the history of places and people and culture, and above all how he reflects his past against the woods. Woods come alive under his pen, or rather under his fingers on a keyboard. He lets us peek into some of the countless stories the woods have seen. I love how he tells his story of abuse in the all-too-often-silent rhythm of depression and of sabotaging one's relationships and all those things that abuse sends in waves through the lives of survivors.
The publisher's blurb promised a book about someone brought up as a strict Methodist who discovered spirituality in woodland. As you could roughly apply that description to myself, this was a 'must read' book for me. The form of the book is at the same time both its strength and its weakness. It is very personal, revealing a lot of intimate details about the author's inner struggle to come to terms with his own nature in the context of a religious upbringing which provided a morality which he could not adhere to and his experience of nature which, at least some of the time, did not provide the spiritual experience that his religious background had taught him to expect. The author's sexuality, and his struggles with it, is placed centrally in a dominant position in the book. On the one hand his honesty and transparency about his experiences gives a …
The publisher's blurb promised a book about someone brought up as a strict Methodist who discovered spirituality in woodland. As you could roughly apply that description to myself, this was a 'must read' book for me. The form of the book is at the same time both its strength and its weakness. It is very personal, revealing a lot of intimate details about the author's inner struggle to come to terms with his own nature in the context of a religious upbringing which provided a morality which he could not adhere to and his experience of nature which, at least some of the time, did not provide the spiritual experience that his religious background had taught him to expect. The author's sexuality, and his struggles with it, is placed centrally in a dominant position in the book. On the one hand his honesty and transparency about his experiences gives a startling insight into his life, but on the other hand, the emphasis on what he was doing at that moment rather than a deeper reflection as to what those experiences said about his issues on a more psychological level left me wondering a bit about the layers underneath. The intense subjectivity of the writing is all very well, but I was thinking a lot of the time whilst reading it that an objective observer might have had very different things to say about his mental state. And what has he left out? Nevertheless, this was certainly a book worth reading and you don't have to have such struggle with your identity as the author to benefit from it.
