Soon to Be Published
Rewilding: Meditations on Time, Place, Language and the Hugely Mysterious Wild
With a Foreword by Huston Smith
By Ann Jauregui, Author of Epiphanies: Where Science and Miracles Meet
About the Book
In an overheated and turbulent world, Rewilding is a selection of meditative essays that have been collecting slowly over a period of time. They are meant to be read slowly, with pauses.
Ann Jauregui, award-winning author of Epiphanies: Where Science and Miracles Meet, is using something new here, a form she calls micro-essays. With writing that has been described as “poetry masquerading as prose,” these small essays are conversational and intimate, as she invites her reader to slow things down for a closer look.
Because Jauregui is a gleeful polymath, her invitations open onto an expansive world. Here is a cowboy belt that changes the life of a young boy in a Japanese internment camp, a collaboration of quantum physics and Native American linguistics, meditating lamas in the MRI machine, an ant parade that raises questions about what time is and isn’t, the push to tell our stories. Here is a sly little poem about the author’s psychotherapy client who settles in for their session together and says, “Something happened this week that I’m pretty sure happened.” Down here on earth, the poem goes, “it’s easy to miss these things.”
This quality of attention pervades Rewilding. The author, with the assist of an extensive Foreword by the late Huston Smith, offers explorations into a world peopled by ourselves. She is asking us, in Smith’s words, “to get up the guts to renounce the skepticism of our time and love this world as it deserves to be loved.”
Early praise for Rewilding
Rewilding: Mediations on Time, Place, Language and the Hugely Mysterious Universe
Wisdom traditions advocate a return to our original nature, recapturing the innocence and magical perception that we once knew. Rewilding returns us to the intimacy of the natural world including our humanity, a recognition essential for the preservation of our world. It reminds us that we cannot be separated from one another, in spite of the pressures of modernity to divide us. This is high octane stuff. It is poetry masquerading as prose, gloriously written by someone who knows.
– Larry Dossey, M.D., One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters
This fascinating collection composes a lovely commentary on the great issues and wonders of our times. Often Jauregui’s reflections are beautiful, touching, gentle and compassionate. And they are appropriately alarming, but never shrill when dealing with our species’ proximity to Armageddon. Always thoughtful and thought provoking, touching our souls with hope.
– John Nichols, On Top of Spoon Mountain
In this captivating book of essays, Ann Jauregui finds the sublime in the ordinary and the magic in the everyday. The journey she takes you on is visually stunning and then laugh-out-loud. Delightful!
– Kristine Panik, M.D., Psychiatrist, University of California
These essays are jewels to be savored – evocative of the deep interconnection between mind and world – wild stuff indeed.
– David E. Presti, Professor, University of California, Mind Beyond Brain
Jauregui’s prose is delicate and precise, her imagery lovely, her references spot-on. The connections she makes are intellectually, philosophically and aesthetically fun. The images and stories she relates not only bring us to the appropriate conclusion, but the appropriate conclusion seems to arise out of the images and stories without being forced. That’s how essays should work. Her sense of place, her humor, her erudition, and her main themes are needed now.
– Cara Chamberlain, The Divine Botany
Jauregui has the feel of the times. The quakes and shifts of consciousness. Opening to the big big world. To what we don’t know. She has that sense of expansion, seeing beyond the usual boundaries, and a sense of the holy and sacred in our moment-to-moment experience. An awareness of awareness. Plus she is very funny and very real. Frankly anything that helps my nervous system unclutch, that reminds me that this world is going too fast and I’m not crazy for feeling it like a body blow, is a gift.
– Caroline Pincus, Book Midwife
Jauregui grounds herself in the physical world and lives equally comfortably in the metaphysical. I don’t know anyone else who is writing this way. Uplifting and profound.
– Rio Olesky, A Manual for the Modern Mystic
She is a diva as she watches nature!
– Bonnie Bramble, Remembering Dick Olney