Annie Dillard's Meditative Qualities

I found "Teaching a Stone to Talk" really enjoyable to read. The chapter on the Galapagos Islands was especially evocative. Her writing reads as a sort of guided meditation. I was imagining myself as one of the palo santo trees, one of many, swaying in the breeze with her- and it was extremely relaxing... to lose sense of my individuality, stress of all that I have to get done and enter into her very sensory based world for a short while. I found in the excerpt we read from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" she used perspective to bring us into a similarly physical and embodied experience of the world--- moving from wider, philosophical reflections on the world to, in a sense, zooming in on the small frog as she hunches over to see it more clearly and describes her attention to it through the great detail with which she describes its dissolve. I suppose my positive response to her work relates to some comments in class about needing different books at different times in our lives. Being in grad school, I really appreciated having a book that was calming, relaxing, refreshing, and brought me back into my body and an awareness of the world around me. Her perceptions were sharp, honed, while still allowing for the world to be full of mystery.... She reads as curious and interested in not just figuring out what life on this planet MEANS, but getting a sense of it, a FEEL for it. I really appreciated this- in contrast to some of the more jaded and (arguably) aloof characters we've been reading (or at least one's who acknowledge that they are outsiders to a particular place). Of course, Dillard is at once really dark and focuses in on nature in all of its morbidness as well--- but, all in all, her work seems life-affirming. Life is interesting and worth paying attention to even in its darker moments.