Stories from Beneath the Trees: Encounters with Nature, Wonder, and the Sacred in the Ordinary

Beneath the trees, the ordinary things.For twenty years, Jess Sellers carried her guitar into hospitals, hospices, and memory care facilities, offering music to the vulnerable and the quietly enduring. What she found in those rooms was wonder a man who had died as a boy and returned speaking of trees that talked, a woman whose dearest companion was a pine outside her window, a child who slept in the arms of a magnolia he called Maggie.Stories from Beneath the Trees gathers two decades of such encounters luminous moments when the scales fell and the world revealed itself as more alive and mysterious than we knew. Drawing from her childhood on a Southern pecan farm, where four hundred trees were tended and named like kin, Sellers writes with the patience of someone who has learned that grace cannot be grasped, only received. For readers of Margaret Renkl, Mary Oliver, and Helen Macdonald.