Love Letters from Mother Nature
ONE WOMAN'S RADICAL DETOUR INTO THE NATURAL WORLD

By 1992, Shelley Neller had had enough of living and working in big cities. She took the leap, left her pressured city career in public relations and moved to Byron Bay, Australia's most easterly ecotopia.

Love Letters from Mother Nature, A Meditative Journey is a wise and witty distillation of the introspection, the reading and the meditation on her back-to-nature experience. Neller spent time in the natural world, watched her garden grow, read widely and developed a fresh interpretation of life, guided by an openness to the landscape, the light, the weather and the creatures around her.

Her precise and beautifully written accounts of the natural environment, landscape, birds and her own garden convey the mysticism of her experience, without being vague or flaky. Once she realised that the poets were right -- the whole world can be revealed in a grain of sand or in a wildflower, if you give them your proper attention -- Neller found herself the unexpected scribe for Mother Nature, that wisewoman storyteller of the great cycles of life. Mother Nature speaks through Neller in a voice that is warm, inspiring, gently informative, wryly compassionate, and occasionally calling us to task on matters both personal and political, intimate and universal.

Great thinkers and ideas, literature, music and comments on popular culture are all woven with ease into the tapestry of the book. A former newspaper journalist, book editor and co-author of several non-fiction books, Neller says:

I was unprepared for the powerful effect that living so close to nature would have on my life. Nature taught me that there is a creative core, an artiste, a mystic -- a Muse -- in each of us. They are neither dead nor irretrievably lost to us, just a bit comatose from all our cultural conditioning. Making contact with the living world around us provides a way to wake up those creative and joyous aspects of ourselves that are yearning to be revived and given expression. Simply hanging around with nature can catalyse creativity, ignite understanding, inject optimism and restore balance.

Shelley Neller's frank and lucid account of her journey shows that there is more to the world than meets the eye, that the universe is a benign place offering intuition to each of us and that we all need to cultivate more gratitude and hope.

Love Letters from Mother Nature, with its promise of renewal and celebration of life on Earth, will cheer and encourage those looking to chart a new life course, to re-connect with nature, to revive their sense of optimism and awe, to be more creative or simply to be.

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• There is more to the phenomenal world than meets the eye. Nature, with her many hidden dimensions, has the power to heal, guide and uplift us. All we need to do to tap into her powerhouse is to slow down, spend time with her, relax and tune in.
   
• We are all members of the sacred community of trees, waters, air and soil that make up the big picture of life on earth. And the natural world is one of the great mediums through which the Divine speaks to us. Yet because so many of us live in cities and have limited contact with nature, we may not have experienced either of these potent realities.
   
• Place is an active force, capable of a powerful interaction with us, capable of carving deep meaning in our hearts. Places, just like people have about them an energy, an electricity, a certain vibration, just as each individual does. These subtle energies, these invisible realms make up a far greater reality than the limited physical one we recognise through our senses. Shelley Neller believes Byron Bay has an energy of transition, movement, of illumination and change. She says that constant radical upheavals and readjustments are part and parcel of life for residents in that locale.
   
• Being with nature can help us to cultivate repose and receptivity. Western society places great value on constant activity, but there is much to be learned and gained from simply being, a state which so many of us find difficult to relax into. Through beingness, we develop true receptivity, a healthy supple state enabling us to apprehend quickly and to stay open to new ideas, suggestions, unexpected assistance.
   
• Gardening can be a mystical experience, providing an oceanic feeling of union with all of nature. There are unseen and benign dimensions around the soil and behind the faces of the flowers. Gardening is an active participation in the deepest mysteries of the universe. Through gardening we become co-creators with nature.
   
• Aggressive ecological activism has an important role to play, pitted as it is against the behemoth of the industrial economy; and some people find this an energising call. However, contemplation, meditation, prayer and affirmative focus, each carry as much, if not more power to manifest positive change in our physical environment. Few of us have experienced non-action as a potent way to create our reality.
   
• How the natural world fares in future will depend on how we think about it. Form follows thought. We get what we focus on. We create our own reality according to our ideas and expectations. If enough people continue to emphasise humanity's rape of the planet or if they focus on possible future disasters, then we will be on the fast track to manifesting them.
   
• We need to acknowledge the damage we do to the planet, and we need to recycle, repair, replant and reduce consumption. But equally importantly, we need to keep expressing our praise, gratitude and hope for the Earth, for her profusion and abundance, her infinite diversity, her beauty and strength, for the stupendous mystery of existence we share with this glorious garden planet.