TO HEAL OUR ESTRANGEMENT FROM THE EARTH
Opening our heart to the forest, to connect with Spirit and life-force.
Dwelling, Learning to Love a Forest is the second book in a series on Dwelling. In this book, Bill explores the experience of loving a forest through observation, stillness and connection. Ultimately, forming relationship with the forest near his wife's ancestral home in Vermont, Bill comes to understand that he is "we", that all is Spirit, as is the forest and as he understands himself through this relationship.
In this book, Bill provides poems, imagery, meditative exercises, as experiences of connection to nature. It is this Dwelling that can connect all of us to the world, to light our path and encourage to explore inward connections to the earth and to ourselves.
Bill's perspective as an ecological architect, invites you to engage with the forest around you. Whether those forests exist around you or are places that travel with you, Dwelling, Learning to Love a Forest will provide ways to reflect and grow life-force, for solace and healing.
Listen to Bill reading from Learning to Love a Forest
Dwelling, Learning to Love a Forest is available for purchase here.
Praise for LEARNING TO LOVE A FOREST
The poems in this book are rooted in a forest place, reaching and branching toward you. Like trees, the poems shade the mind and protect the spirit. They walk you through the filtered light of understanding, where you may gradually see more as you venture deeper. Reading, your intuitive wandering will be spangled with glimpses of forest light to restore you from exile back to your forest home.
KIM STAFFORD
former Oregon Poet Laureate and author of Singer Come from Afar
Learning to Love a Forest exquisitely captures how the forest can teach, comfort, inspire and heal us if we open ourselves to a relationship rooted in Oneness. In these unprecedented times as our estrangement from the earth threatens all life, this relationship is needed to save us and the forest itself. Bill’s writing inspires life-loving consciousness and gifts us with a powerful teaching for protecting nature, a gateway to personal action, and a beam of light on nature’s will to live.
Fran Teplitz
Executive Co-Director, Green America
Every day for two years Bill Hutchins entered the “young wildness” of a Vermont forest. Ambling through rain, sun, ice, and snow, he gazed into the life of the woods, where all yearns toward life and “every step has never been taken.” In Learning to Love a Forest Hutchins shares a portal to connection, quietude and love. If you’ve never loved a forest this book may show you how. If you have but have strayed, Hutchins will take your hand and show you the way back.
Krista Schlyer
environmental advocate, photographer / filmmaker
Learning to Love a Forest is a book for these times. It shows us how one individual stopped waging war within and found love in the peace of his own backyard. Bill Hutchins happens to live next to a forest in Vermont but that wasn't always the case. Through this former city dweller's personal story, poems inspired by his "dates" with nature, and exercises he offers in his presentations, he teaches us to find the magnificent grove of trees in each of us.
Brandel France de Bravo
writer, compassion meditation instructor, public health advocate
Bill Hutchins' delightful book, "Learning to Love a Forest", brings the spirit of Thoreau's Walden Pond into the 21st century. Like Thoreau, Bill gives himself fully to the experience of being fully awake, fully alive, and fully at home in a remote New England forest, recording his inner experiences in clean, fresh poetry, photos, and prose.
John Bayerl
Poet & architect
Bill Hutchins
Bill is a poet and an architect, who tells stories through space, form and words.
Bill has developed DWELLING through his architectural work by working with clients in the making of their homes and through personal experiences.
In 2019, Bill and Beth moved to the Refuge, her ancestral home in Vermont. Bill felt called by the forest to learn how to love the forest. He continues to learn!
A Poetic Exploration of Home and Learning to Love a Forest are a result of his explorations through spiritual texts, meditation, poetry, being in nature, dance and play.
To get in touch with Bill for information on workshops, talking engagements or general questions, please write to bill@exploringdwelling.com.
Get your copy here
Dwelling, Learning to Love a Forest
Together Bill and I have walked the woods he created his poetry for. After our walks I have seen him write. A gift to the forest and his readers, the loving silence of his being tenderly giving birth to the words that carry the spirit of this outdoor dwelling called forest. Light a candle as you read and find yourself intimately connected, Seeing what you would not normally perceive with your subdued senses if you were ambling on your own. Enter into an understanding with the forest, as you would with a lover.