The Ashokan Way

Landscape’s Path into Consciousness

Gail Straub’s quiet masterpiece, The Ashokan Way, builds on Thoreau’s discoveries in every possible way. Her accounts of her daily rambles through her own Catskill Mountain by-ways move effortlessly back and forth between exterior and interior landscapes.

— From the Foreword by Stephen Cope

About the Book
Excerpts

The natural world has the power to awaken, restore, and transform us, and nowhere are these capacities more evident than in the thirty-six luminous essays that make up The Ashokan Way. Written in the form of journal entries that take place over the course of a year, the essays explore both the outer landscapes of the awe-inspiring Ashokan Reservoir, a vast open space surrounded by the ancient bluestone peaks of the Catskill Mountain Watershed, and the equally awe-inspiring inner landscapes of our own most personal terrains.

Each of the book’s evocative entries describes a walk along the ever-changing reservoir, illuminating the natural world as a portal to self-understanding, restoration, and meaning. Some walks take us deep inside to trek the hills and valleys of our aspirations and sorrows, our joys and confusions. Others offer a profound antidote to an interior landscape that has become crowded with distraction and overstimulation. Still others seem to seem usher us into the realm of the mystical.

As surely as we would perish without the water and air that the earth provides, we are at risk of perishing without the spiritual sustenance that the natural world provides through its ability to stir and astonish us. In a world that is ever faster, noisier, and busier, The Ashokan Way is a balm, an inspiration, and an invitation to discover greater intimacy with inner and outer landscapes alike.

Audio Read by the Author: Introduction and Chapter one

Autumn Equinox Essay

Praise

Walk with Gail Straub in her beloved mountains. Let her take you through the change of seasons, let her show you the altering light and shadow, the dark. You will see all that is visible and all that is not--the mystery that can only be sensed, the kind of beauty that can stun the viewer, or move her to tears. Gail Straub, a part of nature herself, has learned how to lose the static and friction of modern-day life, finding a way to live at peace and in balance with nature, accepting the opposites of life and death as part of the Ashokan Way. This is a beautiful and profound book.

Abigail Thomas

Bestselling author of A Three Dog Life

In this beautiful, elegant, and important book, Gail Straub takes us on a year of walks in the landscape she calls home. But she's really describing a walk we all can take no matter where we live--the walk that bridges all the landscapes of our being: our connection to place, to each other, to our inner sense of self and outer sense of responsibility to the earth and its peoples. Quoting the ancient I Ching, she writes about "coming to rest in motion." She should know: a world traveler and social activist, Gail brings the steady calm she finds in the mountains to her work at peacemaking in a troubled world.

Elizabeth Lesser

NY Times bestselling author of Broken Open

This writing is a masterful act of devotion, pure and simple. In remarkable ways Gail Straub communicates how the seasons of the heart and the seasons of landscape reflect and embrace one another. Reading her book is to enter a spell where past and present, seen and unseen, birthing and dying, dissolve into a mutually enhancing and luminous presence. Revealing how opening to an intimacy with place deepens all intimacies—with self, friends, lovers, parents, youth, and age—literally providing the reflective ground for reclaiming our humanity in the fullest sense possible. A pioneering contribution toward rendering an ecology of soul.

Joseph Jastrab

Author of Sacred Manhood, Sacred Earth

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The Ashokan Way: Landscape’s Path into Consciousness

$16

Cover
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Paperback/Kindle
166