In the Moment

Inhabiting a landscape, walking a landscape, writing a place and time. Linda Cracknell is a writer of place and nature who believes in being alert, observing, and writing from the particulars of each experience. Engaging bodily with her writing, she is someone for whom getting mud on her boots, sleeping high up in the hills, or being slapped by salt water can all be part of her process. She follows Susan Sontag's advice to "Love words, agonize over sentences and pay attention to the world." In this varied collection of essays, Linda backpacks on a small island that is connected to the mainland at low tide, musing on the nineteenth-century Scottish writer whose character was shipwrecked there. She hikes the wooded mountain trail close to her home in winter snow-a place she is intimately familiar with in all weathers and seasons-and she retraces the steps of a multiday hike made almost seven decades after her parents trod the route together. She explores her inspirations, in nature and from other artists and their work. Reading this collection will open your eyes to the world around you and how you can observe, take note, and later commit those notes and memories to written pieces that will evoke the place and time.

Understanding, loving and protecting butterflies-in all their enchantments.Butterflies have enchanted and intrigued us for centuries. From the eighteenth-century 'aurelians', through the Victorian 'golden age' of collecting to the twentieth-century focus on conservation, humans have chased glimpses of these beautiful but elusive creatures. Winding through literature, art, music, and dreams, The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment uncovers why butterflies continue to inhabit such a profound place in our imagination. Today, the art of butterfly-watching can be a mindfulness practice for many; a Romantic escape from our industrialized existences. A first of its kind in combining the history of human interest in butterflies with a guide to practical observation, this pocket guide encourages us to nurture our curiosity and head out into our local environment, focusing on edgeland habitats that are home to many species. It is perhaps because butterflies are so fragile and fleeting that we are so beguiled by them. But now, as numbers dwindle, they have never been more difficult to spot. The Butterfly paves the way toward uncovering the history of our fascination with butterflies and learning how to spot and identify them.

From the author of The Zen of Climbing and The Craft of Bouldering, a manifesto for a new approach to connecting meaningfully with the wildness around and within us. In recent years, we have woken up to the crucial role that nature plays in our well-being. As we live increasingly urbanized lives, we seek out wilderness and green space in times of hardship and turmoil, or simply during our leisure time. In the process of exploring and understanding more about the benefits of being in nature, many of us have taken up swimming, forest bathing, cycling, hiking and running in the open air. But when we spend this time in the wild are we really connected to it? Francis Sanzaro argues that we often obscure opportunities for real connection through our attachment to screens, our anxieties about our "everyday" lives, or simply through our egos. When we observe nature, we rarely do so without subconsciously filtering out the parts that don't fit into the perfect snapshot we crave. To foster a genuine connection with the natural world, and to better protect it, we must embrace its contradictions as well as the surface beauty. Through deeper engagement with our environment, we can discover the wild within ourselves, too.

From the author of The Zen of Climbing, this enlightening and essential book is an inspired collection of concise essays and reflections on the art of bouldering. More than a sport, bouldering is a craft that demands equal fine-tuning of the mind and body. It calls for total commitment and attentiveness. Climber, writer, and philosopher Francis Sanzaro brings the discipline into conversation with other sports and arts including architecture, dance, skateboarding, painting, parkour, martial arts, and gymnastics. Sanzaro shows how the pursuit of bouldering is akin to developing a philosophy-something that can be nurtured and strengthened like a muscle, benefiting both body and soul. He explores all aspects of the craft and gives boulderers a voice of their own.

What do Zen masters, sixteenth-century Samurai, and the world's elite climbers have in common? They have perfected the of awareness, of being in the moment, of trusting the process. Climbing is a sport of perception, and our successes and failures are matters of mind as much as body. Written by philosopher, essayist, and lifelong climber Francis Sanzaro, “The Zen of Climbing” explores the fundamentals of successful climbing, delving into sports psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and Taoism. Awareness, he argues, is the alchemy of climbing, allowing us to merge mental and physical attributes in one embodied whole. This compact volume puts the climber's mind at the forefront of practice.