Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World

by John Leax

Book Overview

The earth is the Lord's, writes Leax; it is not ours to use as we please. But because we are fallen and are in the process of being restored, our attempts to live responsibly are inevitably incomplete, half-understood, and sometimes simply wrong.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801011973
• ISBN13: 9780801011979
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: Baker Books
• Length: 141 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.8" x 8.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Somewhere Under the Rainbow

"Out Walking" is a quiet book, a book to be savored, a book that offers, if the reader is amenable to entering into the spirit of it, a renewing solitude that makes us more fit for entering grace-fully into community. It is a book about seeing, attending, thanking. I read this book on a spectacular late-spring day in a clearing on my own five-acre woodlot in Western New York, not far from where John Leax lives and writes about his five-acre parcel of paradise. I had meant only to read for a few minutes before allowing myself to drift into much-needed slumber. Instead, I found myself giving both afternoon and evening to Mr. Leax, allowing his observations about the natural world and his own soul's participation in it to guide me more deeply into awe and wonder. John Leax is a poet, which means that he sees beyond the appearances of things to the truth of things. To be sure, he does see the appearances of things in nature, and notes them well, but then goes on to make connections to our human nature. Thus "Out Walking" reads both as nature writing and wisdom literature. One of the poems that Leax has included in his volume is entitled "The Larger Flow." Tracing the stream of water gurgling from one of the little springs on his woodlot to the Atlantic Ocean, he suggests that our own lives, like the waters flowing to the sea, are being gathered, with all other lives, into the larger flow of God's unbounded love. What a healing, hopeful image for a world still too fractured by the dividing walls of hostility and enmity!Slumber delayed by the poignance, passion, and poetry of "Out Walking," at day's end I now "can lay me down to sleep" more grateful, more human, more whole than at day's beginning. I cannot ask for more than that.