A Passion for This Earth: Exploring a New Partnership of Man, Woman & Nature

by Valerie Andrews

Book Overview

Weaving personal experience of the land with an exposition of the importance of the natural world and our place within it, the author uses tribal lore, mythic stories and Jungian insights, to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0062500686
• ISBN13: 9780062500687
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: HarperOne
• Length: 246 Pages
• Weight: 1.34 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Passion for This Book

For fifteen years, "A Passion for this Earth," by Valerie Andrews, has been high on the list of books I have recommended to my creative writing and mythology students. Ms. Andrews writes in the passionate tradition of Rachel Carson, Thomas Berry, and Annie Dillard. I find her book to be a resounding call for a "new story, a new mythology" that reconciles women and men with the earth. To my lights, Ms. Andrews' prose is stunningly beautiful, and her conviction about the role of passionate storytelling, in an era marked by irony and cynicism, is a balm for the soul. -- Phil Cousineau, author of "The Art of Pilgrimage"

A Passion for This Earth: Exploring a New Partnership of Man, Woman, and Nature

Andrews received glowing reviews from the Jungian community for this book. Marion Woodman called it a courageous work, best selling author Jean Shinoda Bolen said this is a powerful and poignant meditation on our need for a sense of place in a time when most people experience some form of uprootedness. As a pastor, I know how much people are in need of reorientation, and how our modern mobility often leaves people cut adrift, without a sense of community, without a deep connection to a certain place. In my own work, I am greatly concerned with the balance of masculine and feminine- and a divine model for creation that draws equally on the gifts of both ways of being in the world. This book has much to say about the way and individual can draw on each. Robert Johnson, another best-selling Jungian analysis says, "I have a consuming hunger for a new mythology that will be loyal to the past but rises above the one-sided patriarchy that has occupied humanity for several millenia. Valerie Andrews writes with the grace and insight on this subject that only a woman could provide. It is good to hear a reconciling female voice." The best part of this book is the author's even handedness when describing relations between men and women, and our common goal: to serve the life force and reconcile ourselves with our own internal opposites. The essays are really about our own inner work as much as they are about the broader canvas of nature, and the workings of the living world. I've also found the films the author cites useful in my own educational work.