Why Buffalo Dance: Animal and Wilderness Meditations Through the Seasons

By Susan Chernak McElroy

Book Overview

In this elegantly written and illustrated book, Susan Chernak McElroy offers a series of short pieces -- meditations and teaching tales -- based on animals and the natural world. Each piece can be used as a starting point for meditation practice or read as it is. Arranged around the seasons, the pieces describe nature's evocative moments: magpies hiding prized baubles in their nests, badgers emerging from their dens, buffalo dancing on picnic tables, elk during mating season, dreaming squirrels, dogs, doves, weasels, horses, bears, and even rivers, rocks, and the wind. With McElroy's poetic language, even these so-called inanimate parts of the wild world of nature are vibrant and alive, offering their gifts to any who stop and pay attention. The book explores emptiness, resistance, new beginnings, attraction, decay, integrity, leave-taking, cleansing, and regeneration. Each of the seasonal sections features a line drawing of an animal during that season, and the pages throughout are adorned with intricate decorative borders and art.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1577315421
• ISBN13: 9781577315421
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: New World Library
• Length: 187 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 7.4"

Customer Reviews

Why Buffalo Dance

This eloquent collection of short stories empowers the reader to experience each chapter on a personal level and grasp the lessons Mother Nature has to teach us! Sharon Posey Travel Agent & Nature Enthusiast Atlanta, GA

Meditations for Healing

This book was suggested to me by someone who saw how much I connect to God, my Creator, through the created. This book touches my soul and has given me simple profound wisdom & encouragement to hold on to as I go through some tough & painful times in my life. The book starts with Winter & moves through each season, using nature's patterns & rhythms to encourage us, show us truth from a more natural perspective, and teach us more about ourselves by understanding each season's gifts and cycles. I started the book last Fall, went through each season, and have now started it again, picking up new insights from what I missed the first time or am now seeing in a different light based on my walk in the last year. This book is like a dear friend that you can turn to for comfort without judgement, wisdom without criticism, and feeling the connection between all living things.

nature

Read this from our library then had to buy 2 to have - one for a gift, one to keep. Like it so much have given both as gifts! Each chapter is a gem, a story of woman in nature with the meaning of the interaction subtly displayed but left up to the reader to interpret for her own life.

one to linger over

Even better than the author's Animals as Guides for the Soul, this is an elegant little book to savor and to come back to. The insights drawn from the author's observations of the nature around her and of her life give meaning to the seasons of the year and the seasons of life. Buy one for youself and one for a friend.

A lovely set of nature appreciations

WHY BUFFALO DANCE: ANIMAL AND WILDERNESS MEDITATIONS THROUGH THE SEASONS offers a lovely set of nature appreciations musing on everything from the lessons of eagles in 'The Right Timing' to a Spring celebration in 'The True Nature of Things'. These aren't the one-line meditations you've come to anticipate in such celebrations of life, but thought-provoking essays linking observations of nature with seasonal inspiration. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch