100 books like The Wisdom of Wilderness

The late Edward Abbey might be a controversial figure, but you can’t write about desert literature without mentioning this iconic book.

In this book, Abbey captures his experience as a winter caretaker of Arches National Park (before it was a national park and before the road in was paved). In 18 chapters that read like short stories, he chronicles long days on horseback, jaw-dropping tales of flash floods, journeys up remote canyons, and more adventures that do an uncanny job of conveying the spirit of the desert and what it was like to explore it mid-century.

Abbey’s writing is blunt, colorful, and engaging, and this book is a romp of a read. 

A Buddhist activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning beat generation poet, Snyder celebrates “wildness” as a moral principle. It gives value to the living world and invites us to the wild places within, the inner wilderness that carries us beyond the comforting assurances of the mind. He cautions against looking for metaphorical and spiritual meanings “beyond and through” the natural world. This risks our not “seeing what is before our very eyes: plain thusness” … which in itself is more than enough to astound!

First and foremost we are sensual critters. At birth, our brains still have significant development to accomplish and focuses initially on the Sensory Control area since it’s vital for growth that we fully realize the messages and signals that the physical world is constantly sending. Here’s a poetic and philosophical exploration of how we emerged from and continue to be part of the physical sensual world. It makes sense it’s last. I’ve been reading it for two years without finishing; after a couple of pages of Abram’s beautiful wisdom about how, for instance, the first spoken languages were composed of natural sounds I need to put the book down and ruminate for a few days on the creative implications of my speaking and the sounds I make. 

A depth psychologist and wilderness guide, Plotkin is director of the Animas Valley Institute in Durango, CO. Building on the work of Joseph Campbell and others, he proposes various exercises, rituals, and disciplines to use in nature wandering as a soulful practice. These include dream-work and drumming, vision quests, and cross-species dialogue. His later book, Nature and the Human Soul (2007), offers a nature-based pattern for understanding stages of human development.

I’m not sure I could love this book anymore–I often speak about the importance of accepting and working through negative emotions and that there are no inherently “bad” feelings, but this book expresses the importance of the difficult seasons we experience in life in an utterly breathtaking and encompassing way.

This is more of a memoir than a scientific book that wraps you in a warm embrace of personal narrative, like talking to a dear friend after a heartbreak. With the inclusion of historical and anthropological examples of “wintering,” this book beautifully takes a stance against toxic positivity and why it’s ok not to be ok. 

Mindfulness is often seen as a philosophy and practice that originated solely in eastern religious traditions. Indeed, in my conservative Christian upbringing I was taught that it was wrong to meditate, and that meditation could open one up to demon possession (!). But as Martin Laird’s excellent guide shows, there is a rich history of mindful meditation within Christian monasticism. Laird offers a piercingly clear description of the experience of nondual awareness. His writing reveals not only what the experience is like, but the specifics of how to enter in. 

This is one of the first books I read about Ignatian meditation and contemplation, and my copy is well worn; in fact, I used it as a primary source for my own book on imaginative prayer. (Ignatian meditation is a way of prayerfully reflecting on the meaning of Scripture, while Ignatian contemplation is a way of entering the world of a Scripture passage through the imagination.) Gallagher closely follows the methods and terminology used by St. Ignatius in his Spiritual Exercises, but he “translates” that material for modern readers in a clear, simple way. I found it especially helpful that Gallagher includes lots of first-hand accounts from the experiences of ordinary people; these offer practical models for what each step looks like, and make the whole book more interesting, too.

As a child in Guyana, Rose was steeped in African, Caribbean, and Latin American healing traditions. Trained in Eastern and Western herbal medicine, she is a master herbalist and owner of Sacred Vibes Apothecary. Her first book brims with insights that guide her work to unite “plants, ancestral practices, and community.” Rose affirms that spiritual herbalism is based on “a relational vision of health, with the understanding that we cannot heal alone in a vacuum.” I love how her use of stories, recipes, and daily practices makes healing with herbs accessible and enjoyable. With chapters organized by major body systems, Rose builds the reader’s knowledge of how physical systems work, insight into the sources of imbalance, and confidence to embark on a path of transformative well-being. 

Happiness is a Choice is a faith-based, definitive work that defines and helps people deal with the troubling elements of depression. Drawing from their professional training and counseling experience Minirth & Meier provide a thorough analysis of the factors that contribute to depression and offer solutions to cure it.

This book will deal with the vital connection between spiritual life and psychological health and establish basic steps that can be taken to recover from depression and maintain a happy, healthy, and fulfilling existence.

An absolutely gorgeous autobiography that never for a moment bogs down in the details, but soars above the timeline of Yalom's life by concerning itself chiefly with glimmers of insight, events that have lived on in his unconscious and formed him into the healer he became. Like all of Yalom's best work, I found myself reading it slowly, savoring every word. The honesty, if you open yourself to it, and accept that he really is telling you the honest to god truth, smacks you in the face like few authors I've ever encountered. I kept thinking, if I do enough psychotherapy for long enough, I might be able to pull off this degree of self-knowledge.