Into the Green Heart
A memoir about connecting with Nature
This is the website for my exciting new book, Into the Green Heart: A Woman’s Initiatory Journey in Nature.
In writing this book, Into the Green Heart, my memoir, I want to change the world. Or at least how we see our world.
I want change how we think about the often dry and dispassionate notions of environmental sustainability and ecology. And I want to bring heart back into the way we think and feel about Nature.
I take my title from a passage by Susan Griffin in her book, Woman and Nature: the Roaring inside Her. My book tells my story — the story of a professional woman at midlife, a consultant urban planner, — who abandons city life for self-imposed exile in rough conditions in an unfamiliar bush setting.
While what we might call a mid-life crisis will be familiar to many readers, I doubt that my particular way of coping with it is.
Beginning with the ‘wake-up call’ of the my close encounter with a brown snake in Arnhem Land, my book describes – via letters, journal entries and short stories – my year in the tropical bush. I tell my story of what became a journey of the self towards the Self, or the ecological Self.
In 1991, I was deeply concerned about global ecological issues, my profession and my growing exhaustion, I figured out that nothing short of a dramatic change would save me (and the Earth). So I set out from Adelaide for ‘Deep Creek’ in the Northern Territory, thousands of miles away.
I could never have predicted the archetypal journey I soon found myself experiencing.
Later I was to learn that it contained all the recognisable stages — and transitions — of an initiatory journey: Separation, Threshold and Return. But at the time, deep in the singing forest – I could hardly make any sense of it at all.
I had the fortitude to survive, beenfit from and learn from my journey — just!
I am preparing my book for publication now.
In this blog, I will share extracts from my book, my insights and some of the images that have touched me along the way.
Please contact me.
With gratitude.
Wendy Sarkissian
Contact details:
PO Box 20117 Nimbin NSW 2480 Australia
Telephone:+ 61 402 966 284
Email: wendy@sarkissian.com.au