The Love of Impermanent Things: A Threshold Ecology

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 320 pages
• Published by: Milkweed Editions June 28, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1571313125
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1571313126
• Book Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 14.4 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
At the outset of this quiet, quirky book, O'Reilley (The Barn at the End of the World) declares that she has written neither a memoir nor a collection of essays: rather, she has collected ephemera. In vignettes that recall Barbara Holland's work, O'Reilley discusses the meaning of vocation—her job as a college English professor, she says, would not begin to capture her passion for pottery or her call to the ministry of spiritual direction. Her mother, recently dead, casts a long shadow; some of O'Reilley's strongest prose is about grief. She also pays good attention to nature and animals: dogs, goldfinches, elk and deer meander through her reflections. And this is a deeply spiritual book. O'Reilley equivocates about her belief in God, but she wakes up every morning praying and practices walking meditation. She lambastes the kind of Christians who have tamed and domesticated Jesus. The genre of occasional prose invites annoying, if forgivable, repetition—too many uses of the same Sufi phrase "The soul flies in circles," for instance. A Catholic turned Quaker, O'Reilley rebels against tidy religious language. "I want every spiritual word to be new, minted that second. Or else I want silence." Her language is not grandly new every second, but it certainly is lovely. (May 25)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Review
"Read this book and you will see shards of your own life come into focus through O’Reilley’s observations and confessions." -- Spirituality and Health

"[The Love of Impermanent Things] . . . is profound and poetic enough to get you nodding your head and whispering ‘amen.’" -- Body and Soul --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: The Love of Impermanent Things: A Threshold Ecology (World As Home, The) (Hardcover) and I am only about 100 pages into it. I heard the author interviewed on NPR and decided impulsively to buy the book. It is incredibly written -- funny, wise, deep, reflecting. I am reading it slowly, savoring the stories, and trying to embrace the wisdom of "living the life that I am". I have a copy for my spiritual director...and plan to buy another for one of my dearest friends. For all of us who seek the One that embraces us in Love and Beauty, I recommend this book. Prepare to laugh...at the stories...at yourself...and then settle into the deepest regions of the heart to contemplate what God calls you to be.