BlueInk Review:

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The Spirit of the Tree and Other Backyard Tales: Connecting to Creation

Nancy Nason Guss

AuthorHouse, 105 pages, (paperback) $19.99, 9781546203728 

(Reviewed: May 2018)

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What is the example we are setting for our children? Are we helping them find ways to be at peace or creating a better world for them? Nancy Nason Guss, a retired educator, answers those questions by providing her own recipe for peace and contentment: Start each day outdoors with a meditational reading and the willingness to feel the spiritual energy that connects us all.

 

To help readers share that simple pleasure of “just being,” she provides six read-aloud stories that are heavy on allegory, each blending the love of nature with a valuable life lesson, and suggested talking points for parents interested in exploring the themes with their children. All showcase God’s miracles and blessings, using situations in which humans interact with trees, birds, a river, and even a shriveled cactus.

 

Characters of all species get to speak their own minds. The cypress enjoys inhaling the carbon dioxide exhaled by a child, for example, and the birds have a long discussion about their obvious differences before agreeing that all creatures should live in harmony.

 

Guss writes in the third person about situations that perhaps come from her own childhood, creating intimate and evocative prose. Many of the tales are tenderly told, such as the brothers who learn from a misshapen tree to weather life’s storms by sinking their roots deep and letting God’s light shine on them.

 

God-centered adults seeking clean, inspirational bedtime reading,or pieces to read aloud to their children, will find that The Spirit of the Tree has much to offer.

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#spiritofthetree. #connectingtocreation. #backyardtales. #nancynasonguss. 

Reader Review:

 

"The Book of Creation is attested in Biblical Scripture from the book of Genesis to the book of Revelations. Nancy Guss has captured the essence of this in her book that echoes the great hymn "All Creatures of Our God and King" in one of the verse:
Dear mother Earth you day by day unfold, unfold your blessings on our way; alleluia, alleluia! All flowers and fruits that is you grow, let the his glory also show; O praise him, O praise him, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!"
-Fr. Benjamin Twinamaani, Rector
Grace Episcopal Church, Tampa, FL