“Kestrel Reads” Book Discussion – Rooted: Life at the Crossroads

Looking for your next good read? Join us for **Kestrel** **Reads**, a quarterly discussion group to help you delve deeper into books about nature, environmental issues, and people’s relationship to the land.

For our spring nonfiction selection, we’ll read and discuss ***Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit*** *(2021).* As we now know, science confirms what poets, artists, mystics, and earth-based cultures across the world have proclaimed over millennia: life on this planet is radically interconnected. Award-winning writer **Lyanda Lynn Haupt** invites readers in this time of planetary crisis to explore how we might not only live *upon* our imperiled, beloved earth, but live *with* it in both simple and profound ways. She invokes rootedness as a way of being in concert with the wilderness—and wildness—that sustains humans and all of life.

Lyanda Lynn Haupt is a naturalist, ecophilosopher, and author of *Mozart’s Starling*, *The Urban Bestiary*, *Crow Planet*, *Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent*, and *Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds*. She’s a winner of the Washington State Book Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award.

“*With her deep intuition and expansive attention as our guides, Lyanda Haupt’s gorgeous words create a path to the place where science and spirit meet. It’s a barefoot path that wanders through solitudes and into community with frogs, moose, orca, and our own wildness.*” – Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of *Braiding Sweetgrass*

Read or listen to *Rooted*, then meet up to discuss it at the Kestrel headquarters in Amherst. The discussion will be moderated by Kestrel member **Cheri LeBlond**.

Like so many of the arts, the written word has the power to inform but also to reach the heart. Book clubs expand on this experience by providing a common, respectful, creative space to listen and be heard, as well as to amiably disagree. Book lovers who share and explore ideas with each other become better readers, writers, and collaborators. Unpacking a good book deepens and enriches the story or content, giving you insights you’ll carry into the next read, creative endeavor, or conversation.

***We encourage both new and past participants to join us!***