A forest implores us to engage and live and be a part of its hidden wonders, flashes of truth. While sitting or walking and feeling the beauty in a garden or forest brings us solace and some healing, creatively engaging with, loving a forest, deepens and expands our and a forest’s life.
"The poems in this book are rooted in a forest place, reaching and branching toward you. Like trees, the poems shade the mind and protect the spirit. They walk you through the filtered light of understanding, where you may gradually see more as you venture deeper. Reading, your intuitive wandering will be spangled with glimpses of forest light to restore you from exile back to your forest home."
—Kim Stafford, former Oregon Poet Laureate, and author of Singer Come from Afar
"Learning to Love a Forest exquisitely captures how the forest can teach, comfort, inspire and heal us if we open ourselves to a relationship rooted in Oneness. In these unprecedented times as our estrangement from the earth threatens all life, this relationship is needed to save us and the forest itself. Bill’s writing inspires life-loving consciousness and gifts us with a powerful teaching for protecting nature, a gateway to personal action, and a beam of light on nature’s will to live."
—Fran Teplitz, Executive Co-director, Green America
"Every day for two years Bill Hutchins entered the “young wildness” of a Vermont forest. Ambling through rain, sun, ice, and snow, he gazed into the life of the woods, where all yearns toward life and “every step has never been taken.” In Learning to Love a Forest Hutchins shares a portal to connection, quietude and love. If you’ve never loved a forest this book may show you how. If you have but have strayed, Hutchins will take your hand and show you the way back."
—Krista Schlyer, environmental advocate, photographer/filmmaker