Why Buffalo Dance: Animal and Wilderness Meditations Through the Seasons » (1ST)

In this elegantly written and illustrated book, Susan Chernak McElroy offers a series of short pieces — meditations and teaching tales — based on animals and the natural world. Each piece can be used as a starting point for meditation practice or read as it is. Arranged around the seasons, the pieces describe nature’s evocative moments: magpies hiding prized baubles in their nests, badgers emerging from their dens, buffalo dancing on picnic tables, elk during mating season, dreaming squirrels, dogs, doves, weasels, horses, bears, and even rivers, rocks, and the wind. With McElroy's poetic language, even these so-called inanimate parts of the wild world of nature are vibrant and alive, offering their gifts to any who stop and pay attention. The book explores emptiness, resistance, new beginnings, attraction, decay, integrity, leave-taking, cleansing, and regeneration. Each of the seasonal sections features a line drawing of an animal during that season, and the pages throughout are adorned with intricate decorative borders and art.

Library Journal

McElroy, a writer and a longtime cancer survivor, has written an interesting collection of reflections that draw from her proximity to the Grand Teton Mountains of Wyoming and Idaho. She uses her observations of nature, animals, and wildlife to reflect on certain truths and mysteries of human and nonhuman existence. McElroy writes in prose, but her mini essays do what poetry used to they offer digestible, intelligent responses to life through symbols and imagery. Many readers will enjoy sharing the journey with her. For most collections. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.