A John Graves Reader (Southwestern Writers Collection Series) Book

There is something remarkably spiritual about Dillard's thorough observations and painfully accurate descriptions of the natural world in Tinker Creek, her home in Virginia. Each chapter evokes the grotesque transformation that insects, reptiles, fish and animals undergo to adapt to the indifferent natural habitat that fosters, disfigures and finally kills them. The shifting seasons, attuned to the natural cycle, provide sporadic moments of enlightening contemplations about creation and the forces that make the world spin on its axis under the inanimate, unknown universe that allows stars to become the source of warmth and life regardless of an apparently soulless disorder of things.

Dillard's conception of beauty is based on emptying the mind and abandoning the constant recognition of the self to surrender to one's surroundings, making the natural world the protagonist and not the background of our erratic, uncertain and insignificant lives. A type of beauty that shines in the mangled creatures she so carefully devotes her attention to.
She unlocks meaning from the water bug sucking the life out of a frog, or from the praying mantis laying eggs after mutilating the male, or from monarch butterflies that hatch and carry the smell of previous seasons with them before they migrate to the south. The more careless and the more unaware nature is, the more bountiful its outlandish fecundity and growth becomes, and corruption, decay and death are taken as intrinsic stages of this ongoing process of merely being.

Words pour out of Dillard's poetic drive, flooding pages with impossible detail and countless scientific facts that she matches up with the spiritual ache that urges her to go out every morning, and some nights, in search of answers.
The problem of this particular reader was that she was incapable of joining Dillard in the vacuum of her mental space, in the place where she dropped all questions to become a still mirror, to become what she saw. I, on the other hand, remained an outcast, a voyeur of her spiritual communion with the world, unable to partake in its grace and gnarled glory.