Mary Reynolds Thompson is a facilitator of poetry and journal therapy and life coach dedicated to bringing forth the Wild Soul Story. At the beginning of this rousing paperback, she maintains that there are five major landscapes in our lives, each with special qualities to give us. They are deserts, forests, ocean and rivers, mountains, and grasslands.
With literary flair, Thompson probes these natural wonders as having both an outward and inward dimension.
For example, the desert intrigues us with its mysteries and its manifold meanings. Thompson looks at deserts and silence, thirst, simplicity, clarity, emptiness, and impermanence. She claims that this place occupies a significant, though infrequently visited, place in us. We can experience the desert in "the cracks and creases of our skin, in the thirst on our tongues, in the dry fear that catches at our throats, in the loneliness that grips us amid a busy street or bustling day, in the dust rising to meet us at the end of the road."
Mary Reynolds Thompson provides us with a chance to truly attend to the bounties of these five landscapes. Her book is packed with insights, spiritual practices, and journal exercises, including exploring the uniqueness of trees, learning to stand still like them, sensing the depth of the ocean and then plumbing your depths, setting your feet on grass and savoring the sensations, making use of ancient stones, and letting mountains speak to the power that is within us to shape our world into what we really value.
