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"You can read [Sightlines] as a practical guide for healing one's unhappiness, as a powerful explanation of why people need the natural world for wholeness, and as a diagnosis for why so much of our society seems to be settling into a brooding funk. It is an extraordinarily generous gift to us all . . . With Sightlines, Osborne joins the first rank of American nature writers. But he also offers real hope to people preoccupied with the meaninglessness of existence. This book brims over with meaning, with a wise and gentle understanding of who we are and how we've gotten lost." —Bill McKibben, Boston Globe
A powerful personal account of outer exploration and inner discovery.
For twelve years, writer Terry Osborne devoted himself to an intense exploration of the physical environment near his home in the Connecticut River Valley. The more he walked the land, the more deeply he came to know its hills, wetlands, and swamps. But his growing intimacy with the area inspired something unexpected. The valley, formed by colliding and dividing continents, scoured by massive glaciers, and cut by rivers and streams, began to reveal and resonate with Osborne's internal landscape, long shaped from within by an unyielding depressive voice.
Osborne gradually discovers that the present -- both physical and mental -- is built on layers laid down in both the remote and recent past, layers that interpenetrate and circulate continually, transforming fragments into woven wholes. In Sightlines, he lyrically and movingly recounts how his external journey initiated and gave form and substance to a profound and therapeutic personal quest.
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Terry Osborne teaches in the English Department and the Environmental Studies Program at Dartmouth College.
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