"Walking Nature Home by Susan J. Tweit offers the reader a constellation of healing stories. Replete with Tweit's powerful articulations of the human heart and overlaid with the stories of the natural world in all its wonder, this book joins the ranks of the great testimonies of our time."

—Denise Chávez, author of A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food, and Culture

"Susan Tweit has written a glorious love story—to her Rocky Mountain sage meadows, to her husband Richard, and finally, painfully, to her own unreliable body. I read this book long into the night, lifted by the beauty of the story, braced by its hard-muscled prose, strengthened by its wisdom. What is human thriving, and how can we embrace it? What is human love, suspended between the stars and the salty earth?"

—Kathleen Dean Moore, author of The Pine Island Paradox

"If you've ever searched the night sky for the bright shape of Orion, or tenderly lifted the mangled body of a rabbit from the road, or had to move from a place you loved, or trekked alone across a mountain range, or fallen in love, you will be at home within the pages of this book. In this intimate memoir, Tweit merges science with heart and spirit, writing about what it is to be human with the precision of a scientist, yet with the simple eloquence of a poet. In the face of a life-threatening illness, she writes about the healing power of love and nature. We watch as she and her husband resurrect a 'half-block of decaying industrial property,' rejoicing when it blooms with bright red Indian paintbrush and the blossoms of snap peas. But most of all, we rejoice at a life fertile with care and ripe with love."

—Page Lambert, author of In Search of Kinship,

"Susan Tweit's memoir carefully walks the thin arete pathway of beauty, poetry, pathos, and personal triumph, slicing the metaphorical synapse between horizon and mesa, while behind the narrative voice a half moon rises, thin and silver as the severed wing of a lost and abandoned fallen angel's ghost. Her language invokes the interior landscape of the subconscious, the dark night of the soul, and the miracle of quiet, a trick she has mastered to remind us of its presence, as when a shooting star shishes between anvil and stirrup in the mind's ear and the residue of its memory crackles."

—David Lee, author of So Quietly the Earth and winner of the Western States Book Award

"Walking Nature Home is the engrossing, lyrical story of one woman's spirited engagement with the natural world and how it, quite literally, leads her home. But it's also a profound testament to the power of wild places to heal and make us whole. An inspired and inspiring work."Mark Harris, author of Grave Matters

Without a map, navigate by the stars. Susan Tweit began learning this lesson as a young woman diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that was predicted to take her life in two to five years. Offered no clear direction for getting well through conventional medicine, Tweit turned to the natural world that was both her solace and her field of study as a plant ecologist. Drawing intuitive connections between the natural processes and cycles she observed and the functions of her body, Tweit not only learned healthier ways of living but also discovered a great truth—love can heal. In this beautifully written, moving memoir, she describes how love of the natural world, of her husband and family, and of life itself literally transformed and saved her own life.

In tracing the arc of her life from young womanhood to middle age, Tweit tells stories about what silence and sagebrush, bird bones and sheep dogs, comets, death, and one crazy Englishman have to teach us about living. She celebrates making healthy choices, the inner voices she learned to hear on days alone in the wilderness, the joys of growing and eating an organic kitchen garden, and the surprising redemption in restoring a once-blighted neighborhood creek. Linking her life lessons to the stories she learned in childhood about the constellations, Tweit shows how qualities such as courage, compassion, and inspiration draw us together and bind us into the community of the land and of all living things.