Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale about That Which Can Never Die » (1st ed)

Clarissa Pinkola EstÉs, Ph.D. is an award-winning poet, diplomate senior jungian psychoanalyst, and a cantadora (keeper of the old stories) in the Hispanic tradition. She has been in private practice for twenty-five years and is former executive director of the C. G. Jung Center for Research and Education in the United States. The author of The Gift of Story and an eleven-volume series of bestselling audio works published by Sounds True in Boulder, Colorado, Dr. EstÉs heads the C. P EstÉs Guadalupe Foundation, a human rights organization that has as one of its nascent missions the broadcasting of strengthening stories via shortwave radio to trouble spots throughout the world.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., the internationally known poet, psychoanalyst, and author of the seminal classic Women Who Run With The Wolves (99 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, translated into eighteen languages, and a bestseller worldwide), touches our lives anew, rendering in the strong and lyrical voice for which she has become known a powerful series of her signature healing stories.

These elegantly interlocked tales of loss, survival, and fierce rebirth center around Dr. Estes's uncle, a war-ravaged Hungarian peasant farmer and refugee, a faithful gardener, and a storehouse of stories who was one of the "dancing fools, wise old crows, grumpy sages, and 'almost saints' who made up the old people" in Estés's childhood.

Told with graceful simplicity, deep feeling, generous humor, and profound optimism, The Faithful Gardener is, at its captivating core, the story of an open-hearted child who listened well to her old-country elders and who grew up to remember, to bear witness, and, as one of the premier storytellers of our times, to remind readers and listeners of all ages of "that magisterial life force within all things that strengthens us in times of turmoil or transition, that faithful force which can never die."

Library Journal

Renowned Jungian psychologist and poet Estes (Women Who Run with the Wolves, Ballantine, 1992; The Gift of Story, Ballantine, 1994) writes a beautiful allegory in her latest volume. Growing up in a refugee family, Estes learns the art of storytelling in the ancient tradition. In graceful prose, she relates the story of her Hungarian Uncle Zovar, a concentration camp survivor, in his struggle to release himself from the horrors of camp life. A "story within a story" is illustrated through the uncle's narration of the burning death and rebirth of his forest during World War II. Estes includes her own rendition of the Christmas tree story: the tree in the forest cut down, adorned at the house, then burned as firewood in the end. She relates the story of her own urban forest started in her back yard, inspired by her uncle's thoughts on nature. Estes's style is charming, spellbinding, and lyrical. Followers will clamor for more. Highly recommended.-Lisa Wise, EBSCO, Springfield, Va.