Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing, Paperback

Pangolins and polar bears, olms, lemurs, and leopards. We share this beautiful blue-green globe with creatures magnificent, delicate, intricate--and now vanishing at a faster rate than at any other time in Earth's history. Spend Lent with twenty-five of these wild ones. Vivid descriptions of their lives will fill readers with wonder--and grief at what they suffer on a planet shaped by human choices. Their stories thaw our stiff hearts and wake us to greater compassion--which is what Lent, meaning "springtime," has always been for. These stories also wake in us a wild hope that from all this death and ruin, something new could rise. The promise of Lent is that something new will rise. In fact, as these stories also attest, our hope, though wild, is not impossible and is already loose in the world.

"Wild Hope is the only book whose table of contents alone gave me chills. Here's the deal: the living world, life on planet Earth, is sacred. Author Gayle Boss yearns to show us that we live in a miracle. And she succeeds in showing us that we are not alone on this holy planet. This is a beautifully elegant, deeply excellent book, pursued by grace on every page, in every stunning illustration." --Carl Safina, ecologist, NYT bestselling author of Beyond Words and Becoming Wild; MacArthur Fellow and founder of The Safina Center

Gayle Boss writes in Michigan, where she was born and raised. Her life-long love of animals and her immersion in spiritual texts and practices have melded in poems and essays that explore how relationships with animals specifically, and an attentive presence in the natural world generally, restore us to our deepest selves. The mother of two grown sons, she lives in Grand Rapids with her husband.