There's a long tradition in Celtic religious language of finding a way to turn even the smallest and most ordinary activities into meditation or prayer. We find it charming when we read the results in the context of mowing hay or bringing in the cows, but it's hard to imagine it in the context of today's daily round. Gunilla Norris has managed to do it -- for such things as paying bills and doing the laundry and setting the alarm -- and it's a marvel. The book is indispensable, and it is an extra bonus that it's beautifully designed and produced and so well-made that you'll be able to pass it on to your children and grandchildren. It has my highest recommendations.

The pictures and the accompanying text are inspiring and absolutely perfect together so that the overall effect of this book is impossible to describe in words. Get it, read it again and again for the rest of your life, and you'll see what I mean.

I have read all of Gunilla Norris' books, and found them deeply contemplative. I highly recommend all of them, to be read with a morning cup of tea and muffin.

My main reason for writing this review is that I eagerly ordered this title and discovered it is a REPRINT of an old book. I was disappointed that the Amazon blurb didn't include it's older date of publication, 1993. So, if you have not read this book, you are in for a treat. If you have, this is not a new work. Just a re-issue.

My mother died unexpectedly in August 1995. She fell alseep and never woke up. For weeks after her death I could find no solace. My beloved garden lost all meaning to me. Several months later, in early November, I was browsing through the garden section of a bookstore I visited once or twice a year. A small hardcover book, wedged between large volumes of gardening advice and gorgeous picture books, caught my eye, and I took it down from the shelf. Its title, Journeying In Place: Reflections from a Country Garden, seemed rather long for a book of less than one hundred pages. I opened it and began reading. It is All Saints'Day, a year after the author, Gunilla Norris, found her mother dead. Sadness gripped me as I read the words that I could not utter, the words that would help me begin my journey back from grief: "The killing frost has happened both in my garden and in my life. I have lost my mother."

Gardeners understand and accept life's cycles better than most, I believe--the seasons, birth, death. Norris's "little" book focuses on her garden and the life in and around it through one year. In it she describes the spiritual,the "saints," that inhabit her two-acre plot of Connecticut farmland. From spring peepers to a feral cat, from dahlias to day lilies, from compost to harvest, she guides the reader through four seasons, discovering the "holy" in the everyday, and in doing so, finds meaning and peace. As the geese once again fly south, heralding the coming winter, Norris is uplifted. "I think of my mother and somehow I feel her presence inside me...No love is ever lost in this universe. No matter what season, what year, what place, love will always be turned into new soil."

This book found me during my darkest season, and Norris's words helped heal my broken spirit.