Some things arrive without asking permission.

What does a mouse trembling in your hands beside a pair of nail clippers,

a dog who has climbed into the dryer to wait out a thunderstorm, and a hurricane

that took the house and the neighborhood have to do with ecology?

Everything, it turns out.

That is what an ecologist notices when he turns

his scientific lens inward, through fifty years of meditation.

For forty years, Robert F. Doren worked as a wetland ecologist,

studying how living systems function. He did not expect that the same

habits of attention in the natural world would one day turn inward, or that a lifetime of quiet

meditation would gradually reveal a pattern he had been living inside all

along.

The Ecology of Awareness is a memoir in field notes: patient, observant, and

unafraid to say that love and attention may be the same thing.