The Book of Nature | pull up a chair

March 24, 2023

out in the wilds (another name for birthing a book to the world)

the very definition of oxymoron: girl recording into phone in the midst of sheer wonder

field notes from out on the front (the book-birthing front). . .

well, it’s friday, friday morning to be precise, and none of the heart attacks i was certain i would have or was having seem to have felled me. despite my genetically-certified DNA from a fellow who loved a microphone, and the chance to trumpet his wonder and wit into the world, i’m fairly certain mine has gone dormant. i seem to have found a sweet spot in the quiet of a typing room where thoughts meander and flow, wriggle onto the page (or the screen), and i do my best talking from there. or even better: across an old maple table, a formica slab, or even the console of any old car, where talk is heart to heart, face to face, where you can see the gleam or the tears in the eyes. where you gauge every flinch of the jaw or the cheeks or the itty bitty muscles that lift up the eyebrows, punctuation in facial expression––the very best kind.

if you were one of the glorious flock who popped onto the zoom the other night, when we all lined up in our on-screen window panes, you were there for the glorious highlight of the week. of the eighty who pulled up a virtual chair (80?!?!), some 22 of you were signed on as “iPad,” which made it a little hard to know who was quite whom. but i knew that for the first time since this ol’ chair started gathering round the make-believe old kitchen table, we were as one, unblindfolded, and we could finally see who we were. and hear our real live voices. at least some of us. we might need more zooms. especially ones where my heart isn’t pounding like the kettle drum in the marching brigade.

lily-of-the-valley dorset button from amy

twas a week full of flurry. twas a week filled with moments i’ll never forget. (a hand-stitched dorset button i now wear by my heart, marsha from low country blessing us with her front-porch benediction, a river of people i love flowing down the stairs of an ever-enchanted bookstore last night, and the little pings of love notes and reminders to breathe from the blessed old friends who know how trembly i get when dispatched beyond the walls of my hermitage…)

i’ve been thinking hard of late of how the writing of a book is a time-lapse conversation––and conversation, to me, is the holy marrow of life. i spent months and weeks reading and writing, pouring my heart and my soul into each page; quite truly, laying it all on the line. and then, as the book made its way down the book-making assembly line, through the chutes and the gears and the binding machines, it all went silent. but now, as the little book lands with its plops on door stoops hither and yon, the conversation picks up again. and that, my friends, is the very, very best part of writing a book.

it’s when i find out which sentence or thought might catch on your heart or your soul. it’s where the interplay of our minds begins a back and forth, often a dance. where i get to find out what cumulus clouds of wonder or wisdom rise up from your reading, where your thoughts leap off of mine and gather their muscle and take on their own magnificent form. that leaves me jaw-dropped.

last night, at the very first in-person book launch, in the lower room of the enchanted bookstore where four of my five books have been officially birthed (the pandemic got in the way of one of the birthings), a beautiful, beautiful woman (one i’d never before met) came up to me, took me firmly by the shoulders, and told me she’d read the book cover to cover, and had figured out its message: “the Holy Spirit will find you,” is what she said over and over. “that’s the message.”

she had tears in her eyes when she said it. and tears i find are contagious, so i had them in mine too. after all those months of reading and writing, i hadn’t quite landed on precisely those words. but i realized that no matter how you define “Holy Spirit” (and i might define it quite broadly), she’d nailed it. in six words, she summed up what it took me 56,000 words to quite get at.

there are comical moments too, as in many a delivery room. (remind me which parts of labor and delivery made me chuckle…) the photo above, a rare inclusion of any image of me here at the chair, captures me following orders. the marketing gurus at broadleaf books, my lovely twin-cities-based publisher, sent me a note and told me to get out and record video befitting my book. not wanting to be on screen myself, i decided to film at the glorious water’s edge of which i write in the book, the grasses where i nestle like quail in the rush. and i decided i’d insert myself by reading aloud, sight unseen. and my beloved blair, who assigned himself to the role of “editorial assistant” this week, decided he’d do the driving and, when i wasn’t looking, he snapped the somewhat hilarious photo above: crazy lady reading aloud a book on earthly wonder into hidden microphone of little glass slab.

the other half of that marketing assignment instructed me to consider making a “reel,” a concept as foreign to me as reading a novel in russian. i had literally no idea how to do this, so i called one of my brothers, whose mastery of reels is legendary among his circles. he reels with abandon, he reels for any occasion. so i knew i was going to the master. as he talked me through, step-by-arduous-step, i followed along. i sat in a chair, and i read a few lines. and then, i must have hit the wrong button, for the darn thing “posted”––aka somehow landed on instagram where any and all could follow along. egad. it had been my first dry run, but i decided to leave it. because life unfiltered, unedited, un-pre-plotted, is where the spice finds its way in.

here’s what life unfiltered might look like:

and with that overdose of moi, i shall leave you in peace for the day and the week.

but do tell: if you’ve found yourself turning the pages of my conversation in paper and ink, what are some of the thoughts that have wriggled up for you? lines that sprung your own epiphany? stories that made you think of your own? tell me what you’ve read from the Book of Nature (the real one, not my little old book)? and tell me the glories and wonders you’ve found. . .

bless you and thank you for being the circle that holds me. the love here is real, even if all the rest is somewhat virtual.

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February 6, 2023

a most special gathering: let us pull up chairs and launch this book together

it’s monday. i know. and that’s not a day when i usually leap out of the cyber-vapors to plop onto whatever is the glowing screen of your choosing.

but i come with invitation:

please join me in pulling up your very own chair to gather round this virtual old maple table to attend the birthing of my next book, the one titled The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text (Broadleaf Books).

we’ll gather on the evening of Tuesday, March 21––its actual pub date––when we shall send The Book of Nature soaring into the everland. it’s free and it’s just for friends of the chair––wherever you are––and it’ll be at 7 p.m. chicago time, when we’ll gather by zoom. and all you need to do is click this link to register. the zoom link will be magically sent to you. and, since i’ve never ever done this before, beyond that we will all find out together what happens next.

but what i do promise you is that i will be right here. perched on my stool, snug against the kitchen counter. and i can’t imagine a cozier way to begin this latest adventure in book-birthing.

it is a downright thrill to imagine seeing many of your faces for the very first time because after 1,102 meanders here at the chair, it’s about time we look into each other’s eyes, feel the smiles wash up from the depths of our very own soul, and revel in the collective goodness of those who have so buoyed me over the years.

truth is, i can think of no finer way to gather the graces and muster the courage i’ll need to tell the world all that i’ve tucked into these 200-some pages. this is a book that stands on the shoulders of wisdom seekers across the millennia, and across cultures and faiths and geographies. it’s a book that pokes around in the nooks and crannies of all creation, seeking the thrum of the sacred––the holy Divine––in our very midst. it stands in awe of the moon and the night sky. it awaits the dawn, and gathers the dusk. it traipses through the woods, and settles into the murmurous grasses that rise from the mounds not far from the water’s edge.

this book has been called “a field guide to the depths of your holiest places,” and i hope and i pray that as you turn its pages you find yourself inching deeper and deeper, closer and closer, into your own holy encounters with the ineffable wonder and wisdom that stirs in the wind and rustles the meadow.

but this gathering––this rare leap off the page and into the virtual––is how my heart yearns to begin the book’s first breathing.

you can find out more about this newest book on its very own page here at the chair, where you can even find links to buy it from your favorite indie bookstore, or direct from its publisher Broadleaf Books, or, yes, our friends at the behemoth that is amazon.

here’s a peek at the first review that’s crossed the transom. and, yes, i will be forever grateful to that lovely, lovely soul at Booklist, the publication of the American Library Association, who wrote this in the January edition of Booklist:

The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text

By Barbara Mahany

Mar. 2023. 191p. Broadleaf, $27.99 (9781506473512). 200

Writing with a nurse’s foundation, a scientist’s eye, a theologian’s mind, and a poet’s soul, journalist Mahany (Stillness of Winter, 2020) contemplates God’s presence as revealed in nature, His “first sacred text.” Tracing the Judeo-Christian belief that scripture succeeds and augments nature by directing humanity to knowledge of the divine, Mahany looks to nature itself, marveling at its intricacies and blending scientific facts with literary descriptions that all point unquestionably to a grand designer worthy of worship. She incorporates literary writing by a host of essayists and poets (Annie Dillard, Henry David Thoreau, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman) and Christian and Jewish religious writers as well as Islamic, Greek, Chinese, Celtic, and Indigenous traditions. She implores readers to continue reading the book and not to allow the noise of modern life to obscure its message. Supplemental material includes an annotated list of recommended reading and an extensive bibliography. Mahany’s lyrical, thoughtful, most recent work beautifully complements her shelf of awe-inspired books about nature and will appeal to fans of Shauna Niequist and Anne Lamott.
–Karen Clements

till then, i’ll keep finding you here on fridays. and while i dream up ways to sign books for those not nearby, do know that there will be real-live book events in person at bookstores and sacred places in the days and weeks and even the months after the 21st. in fact, an actual in-store book launch is on the calendar for thursday, march 23, at 6 p.m. at that charmed bookstore, bookends & beginnings, in their brand-new space at 1620 Orrington, Evanston.

i hope, hope, hope, you can pull up your very own chair on march 21. though i won’t be able to pass a tin of cookies, nor pour you a spot of tea or bubbly, the conviviality alone will fill my lungs, and set my heart a soaring….

please let me know if you encounter any glitches, and i’ll don my thinking cap. and turn to the wizards at Broadleaf who seem to know how to guide me at every turn.

with love, babs, the chair lady.

p.s. the book in the photo at the top here is the Advanced Reading Copy, or ARC, and it’s the only edition i’ve got, though i hear the final final is due to plop on my stoop any day!

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July 15, 2022

a peek at this little book i’ve been making for the last couple years…

there is a choreography to birthing a book, an unseen one, one that’s becoming familiar to me, a familiarity so far beyond the dreams i cast out my long-ago childhood window, into the leaves of the oaks that arbored and harbored me, onto the heavens far, far beyond.

first, you feel an idea wriggling around deep in your soul, then it rises up to your brain, and the only way to scratch the itch is to begin to breathe possibility into it. what if? you percolate that inkling for a while, front burner to back to front again. and then you begin to read, to see if sinew comes to the bones. and, if you find that the deeper you read, the more curious you become, then you know you’re onto something worth chasing.

i chased the idea that all of creation––the cadenza of birdsong, the golden slant of the setting sun, the comfort of even the chirring cicadas in the waning weeks of summer––held the pulse of the sacred. all of it was of the God i’ve long held close to my heart, the God daring to brush up against us, to draw us into the dance, to unfurl timeless truths in an alphabet of moonbeam and monarch, the veeing of geese or the hard crack of lightning scything the sky.

i’d long known that when i step into the dawn or the woods, plant my bum on a log by the lakeshore or the rickety rock in my own back plot, i’m keen to a sense that an ineffable presence is there, right there, with something to teach, to offer, to whisper. but until i knew of this so-named Book of Nature, an ancient theology rooted in the notion that long before there were words, God spoke through the murmurings, the convulsions, and the unfurlings of the natural world, i hadn’t sensed it so perceptibly. hadn’t realized there were millennia of thinkers who’d been reading that book.

it’s imperative, and more urgent than ever, that as this great holy earth is pummeled and poisoned and burned, we realize that maybe what’s most at stake is a tie to the sacred.

for the better part of eight or nine months, i read everything under the sun––poets and prophets, mystics and saints, believers and non-believers, all of whom had something to say on the subject of all creation, its wonders, its heartbreaks, and lately its cavernous losses. i combed my readings for notes upon notes. then, equipped with voluminous cross-referenced pages, i started to write. within a couple months, i’d written some 200 pages. and then i waited a very long time.

but now, those pages edited and copy edited, typeset and proofed, the cover designed and posted online in most of those places where booksellers peddle these days (it had been on amazon, and now–except for U.K. amazon––it seems gone! but now it’s back––like magic!), i’m at the part of the book-birthing dance where you pull back the cover on the book’s actual cover so the ones to whom you most emphatically write can be the first to officially peek.

so, here’s the cover. (you are, i hope you know, all the ones to whom i most emphatically write, the ones who faithfully wander by and pull up a chair whene’er the spirit so moves you….)

the pages inside, 204 of them, will have to wait to be read till the next vernal equinox, the day the book is “official,” marked with its very own pub date––March 21, 2023––and whirling into the world.

of all the books i’ve written, this is the one that counts as the most intensive. it started from scratch (unlike the others, all collections of essays), and came in layers and layers.

i had a brilliant editor, lauren winner, an american historian, scholar of religion, professor at duke divinity school, episcopal priest, formerly an orthodox jew, an endlessly curious mind, a voracious reader, and a best-selling author on multiple spiritual subjects––Mudhouse Sabbath, her journey from orthodox judaism to anglican priest, Wearing God, the many metaphors for God found in the bible (these are but two of her many published words)––who now teaches the craft and art of spiritual writing at workshops, universities, and seminars from coast to coast. i can and will attest to her brilliance, to the way she evoked from me layers i hadn’t known were there, the way she lifted the prose off the page, insisted i weave in an airiness that might make a critical difference.

there’s a whole team behind the making of the book, though only one of us gets our name on the cover. there’s a meticulous and exceedingly kind copy editor, there’s a cover designer and another designer for the interior pages (this book is a beauty inside). there’s a production editor, and a typesetter and a page proofer. and there’s the editor who believed in the idea in the first place, and nurtured it along. i am forever indebted to each one of them. and there will soon be a team whose job is to do what’s hardest for me: peddle the darn thing, get it onto and off of bookshelves. in bookshops and libraries. and into the hands and the nooks of readers.

there is an essential and indispensable triangle in the world of letters: the writer, the idea, and the reader. it’s a conversation unspoken. a conversation in pages. and without the reader, the writer is whispering into an abyss. and the only sound is the author’s own echo.

so this is the book. and if you ever choose to pluck it off a shelf, you will find my whispered whole truths deep inside.

if writers write to say this is what i believe, this is where i find the beautiful and the sacred, and maybe i can show you just where i’m seeing and sensing, maybe just maybe one little writer can filter onto the world just one little mote of starlight or sunlight or moonlight where before there had only been the murkiest shadow.

The Book of Nature is my one mote of filtering light.

you can find it on Broadleaf Books here.

you can find it on amazon here.

and, very excitingly, you can find it on the indie booksellers’s bookshop.org

here’s how my publisher, Broadleaf Books, is describing the book:

We live inside a nautilus of prayer—if only we open our senses and perceive what is infused all around.

Throughout millennia and across the monotheistic religions, the natural was often revered as a sacred text. By the Middle Ages, this text was given a name, “The Book of Nature,” the first, best entry point for encounter with the divine. The very act of “reading” the world, of focusing our attention on each twinkling star and unfurling blossom, humbles us and draws us into sacred encounter.

As we grapple to make sense of today’s tumultuous world, one where nature is at once a damaged and damaging source of disaster, as well as a place of refuge and retreat, we are called again to examine how generously it awaits our attention and devotion, standing ready to be read by all.

Weaving together the astonishments of science; the profound wisdom and literary gems of thinkers, poets, and observers who have come before us; and her own spiritual practice and gentle observation, Barbara Mahany reintroduces us to The Book of Nature, an experiential framework of the divine. God’s first revelation came to us through an ongoing creation, one that—through stillness and attentiveness to the rumblings of the heavens, the seasonal eruptions of earth, the invisible pull of migration, of tide, and of celestial shiftings—draws us into sacred encounter. We needn’t look farther for the divine.

and that, dear friends, is the news of the week. be careful out there, this latest covid bugger (BA5) seems more determined than ever to muscle its way in. i’m going back into semi-hiding given that i am still dizzy from my first covid round….

what’s stirring you this week?

Little Babs, long before she dreamed of a book cover

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