Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment is an essay collection that explores the inner and outer natures of remarkable human and nonhuman beings. It is a book about paying attention-with the mind and with the heart. The essays confront the ethical and personal challenges Renata Golden faced in a harsh and isolated environment and examine the power of nature to influence her understanding of the human spirit. The lessons she learned on the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico jolted her out of her customary way of seeing the world-which is the transformative power of a thin place, where the borders between the sublime and the profane melt away.
The essays call attention to the animals that are often shunned-pack rats, rattlesnakes, ants, prairie dogs, and other desert dwellers that some consider better dead than alive. Many of the animals in these essays are at risk of extinction. The essays honor these animals for the role they play in the wild world and for their unique abilities, such as cooperative societies and complex language skills. By recognizing the animals' value, Golden gives readers reasons to be moved to save them, if it's not too late.
"In Mountain Time, Renata Golden writes that mountains create a 'constant hum' connecting the very core of the earth to our own skin. She interweaves stories from her own life with riveting accounts about the Apache and Irish, yucca and Lehmann's love grass, kangaroo rats and leopard frogs who have made a home somewhere and sometime in the complex topography of the southwestern borderland she love
Camille T. Dungy
"In this luminous collection, Renata Golden offers us an un-easy love story: with birds and people, mountains and family, history and place. Elegantly researched and exquisitely crafted, these essays have a depth and range that will delight and, yes, astonish."
Susan Fox Rogers
"Renata Golden's Mountain Time would be at home with Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire-or, best, with Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, for humility and listening and deep awareness of multiple stories and voices. But these gemlike sentences are Golden's own, and they woo me into an affair with a place I've never been. Fierce and beguiling, funny a
