The Attentive Heart: Conversations with Trees by Stephanie Kaza, ill. by Davis Te Selle The Attentive Heart is a rather intimate description by the author of her personal relationship with the earth and the quandaries she faces as an environmentalist in this age of consumption. The passages are sensual, contemplative and emotionally expressive; Kaza is not shy about her passion for trees, both collective and individual, or about the depths of her response to their presence. Davis Te Selle's hand-printed lithographs are a lovely counterpart to her prose, gracing each chapter with intricate images that offer a nearly tactile impression of the trees. Twenty-seven encounters with trees are divided into five sections, flowing from admiration and observation to questioning the human use of and impact upon trees, and finally to taking action on behalf of trees and the land. Kaza shares painful stories of the dismemberment of old friends, glorious stories of almost romantic meetings with favorites, and stories about meeting trees on the edges of time, space and infinity. She wonders how to approach the bristlecones, whose lifetimes are measured in thousands of years, climbs within the arms of a great blue oak, confronts night fears in an Oregon forest, and observes the approach of winter reflected in the colors and shapes of a ginkgo tree. She watches as an elm is sliced down in her mother's yard, cuts through a fallen tree, stacks a cord, and muses on living in a house of wood. As the stories weave through time and place, Kaza explores the difficult territory of loving something that you also use and perhaps even abuse. In the time before European invasion, a great forest stretched from the Alaska panhandle to the Golden Gate; the now rolling golden hills would then have been a sea of rippling green defined by the canopy. Most of the trees that Kaza celebrates here are the living members and descendants of those once vast western coast forests. Current dwellers of the mid-California region will revel in the many impressions of Marin, Sierra, Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz forests; The Attentive Heart is a love song to the tree life, past and present, of California.

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