Book excerpt: "Deming writes about the importance of nature writing for our peripatetic times. Because our lives are materially less connected to the natural world, they are spiritually less connected. Through the arts - through the story of the captain whose boat honors the Kwakiutl "Wild Woman of the Woods" or the fisherman who sacrificed his catch to save two whales - we fall again "into harmony with place and each other," we write the sacred into the real."--BOOK JACKET.