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The Wild Within |  | Author: Paul Rezendes
Publisher: Tarcher
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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as of 11/23/2009 03:22 MST details
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Seller: betterworldbooks_
Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 1594424
Format: Illustrated
Media: Hardcover
Edition: illustrated edition
Pages: 216
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1
ISBN: 0874779316
Dewey Decimal Number: 508
EAN: 9780874779318
ASIN: 0874779316
Publication Date: December 28, 1998
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
The story of Paul Rezendes's spiritual journey began when he was leader of a motorcycle gang (i.e., a Devil's Disciple). His dangerous life of narcotics and guns eventually caught up with him and he and his wife found themselves in trouble with the law. His legal hassles gave him the perfect excuse to back out of the gang; thus he reneged on his lifelong commitment. (Apparently, motorcycle gangs are a lot like the Mafia; he muses, "You better have a damn good reason to leave.") From then on Rezendes began a furtive spiritual quest that led him into the woods, following the paw and hoof prints of wild animals. Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Rezendes teaches the art of animal tracking and stalking, all the while making the link to the clean, observant Zen mind. "Stalking meditation demands that we pay full attention to every footfall, every breath, every sound we make, each nuance of landscape, wind, humidity," he writes. "Stalking gives us the opportunity to move away from the tiny perspective of thought and self into all-encompassing awareness." Rezendes, a renowned teacher of seminars and workshops, uses personal tracking stories to emphasize the importance of focused observation. But more importantly, his storytelling challenges readers to be spiritually accountable in the wild as well as everyday life.--Gail Hudson
Product Description
As Jon Krakauer writes of "the dark side of the wilderness experience," Paul Rezendes writes of the spiritual side. Rezendes is one of this country's most skilled outdoorsmen: a master wildlife tracker with an uncanny ability to communicate the profound lessons he has learned from the wild about territoriality, awareness, fear, the inseparability of life and death, and the true nature of the self. Through hard personal experience, Rezendes discovered how tracking can be a powerful tool for understanding our deep connections with nature and with one another. The leader of two notorious motorcycle gangs in the early 1960s, he faced a ten-year prison sentence for drugs and illegal weapons charges. His sentence was revoked, and Rezendes transformed his life path from gang leader to Zen master, founding an ashram in southeastern Massachusetts and honing the tracking skills with which he was raised. In The Wild Within, Rezendes punctuates a gripping narrative of his wilderness adventures with simple exercises that show readers how to turn off their conscious minds and use their deeper intelligence to enter a state of oneness with the environment and to deal more effectively with daily life. In the words of Dianne Dumanoski of the Boston Globe, "Paul Rezendes's [work] is about tracking, but also much more; it shows how to find your way home to the great web of life."
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 17
 In touch with nature June 17, 2009
Charles S. Fisher (Woodacre, CA USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is one of the best books I know of which conveys a sense of connecting silently and alertly to the wild. Once many years ago I went tracking with Paul Rezendez in the New England landscape which we both deeply inhabited. Although I lived ten or so miles from him, he didn't know me. It was a late fall morning along the Quabbin wilderness in central Massachusetts. What he and no one else knew was that just minutes before we took off I was relieving myself in the woods when digging a hole with my heel over which I squatted, I unearthed a yellow jacket nest. I was doing my business for about 20 seconds when all of a sudden I realized something was very wrong. Having no idea what was going on I leaped away in pain but not before a dozen or so of those beautiful social wasps struck home on my tender, but not the most tender, parts. I was so glad that while tracking for the next hours we moved silently at a very very slow pace. Despite my agony, it was wonderful afternoon. The crowning part was Paul calling up a young coyote whose last reply was only a few feet from us when he realized Paul was not another coyote.
As portrayed in "The Wild Within," Paul has led an unusual life from motorcycle gang leader to patient naturalist. Having followed a number of spiritual paths and deeply influenced by J. Krishnamurti Paul has distilled from these experiences a sense of what it means to be human, particularly how to both take that humanity into nature and learn from nature more about it. While I am quite familiar with Krishnamurti's teachings, I found the passages about Paul's experience's in the wild very moving. He hears, he sees, he connects with the wild in a way which I regard as profound. Bobcats, coyotes, loons, deer, foxes, beaver, life and death are all experienced in a world that precedes what our minds make of it. Paul uses their comings and goings to bring us to understand how our minds and selves can become impediments to truly experiencing life. From the book it is clear that the author wants us to take his practices into our lives. There are lots of people for whom spiritual stuff is alienating. To them I would say forget that part of the book and just read his passages about nature. They are exquisite and you will learn much about how humans fit into the world of the wild from which we emerged with civilization. And that is a lot to learn. You can do his exercises later if you want but his lessons from nature will stand you well in this life. I heartily recommend this book.
Charlie Fisher emeritus professor and author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World
The Wild Within November 13, 2007
Jeffery L. Jenkins
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Hard to say how much I enjoyed the book. You can see this influence in Mark Elbrochs new book and is a nice look into a tracking pioneers life. I believe he is retired form teaching tracking and like most of these older trackers, tracking has been more than prints on dirt or sign. I enjoyed it very much and I will read the copy I have more than once. Hopefully one day he will start the seminars again.
Remembering An Ancient Art September 20, 2007
Huby7 (Springbrook, Wi United States)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
There are many reasons why this book keeps getting better for me each time I read it.
I'm going to explain one of them here. Most of us have forgotten that human cultures once entered into relationship with the nonhuman community not as exploiters but as equals. And because of this the people of these cultures could read the tracks and signs of nonhumans better than most of us can read a book. And because of this they understood themselves and the nonhuman community much more intimately than most of us do in our alienated state.
Through his very lucid way of storytelling, Paul makes it very clear that no matter who we are, and what path we have chosen to take up until this point in our lives, we can still reconnect with ourselves and the rest of life on this planet.
Someone who walks the talk. October 16, 2006
C. DeGetmon (Earth)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I give Paul's book my highest recommendation. If you've ever read a book by Tom Brown you will find a home in these pages of wildness - both inner and outer. A wilderness philosophy/ecopsychology of place takes you deep within your own process of healing and awareness with wilderness. Wilderness can heal whatever illness the modern world has inflicted. Paul is an astonishing guide into this realm of spirit and psyche. Enjoy it; but most of all if it calls to your heart, take the next step into the world of wild nature. In this place, "Spirit" speaks to those capable of listening. You may never be the same again.
 What a Hypocrite! November 17, 2005
Jeff (Fair Haven, VT)
2 out of 11 found this review helpful
After reading Paul Rezendes's "The Wild Within" for my nonfiction class, I am convinced Mr. Rezendes is a hypocrite. After leaving the "Devil's Disciples" motorcycle gang, Rezendes embarked on a journey to "find himself." He tried on many sets of beliefs, including Ashram and Roman Catholocism. Rezendes was extremely critical of both sects, Ashram because he thought it was hypocritical and Roman Catholocism because he did not receive an annulment from the Pope on his wife's marriage. Both of these sets of circumsatnces are layered with irony. The tone of Rezendes's book suggests that after leaving Ashram he did not drop the holier-than-thou attitude he picked up during that phase of his life: He continues to put his beliefs on a pedastal, trying to "show his readers the way." If his past life is any indication, within five years he will have demolished his current set of beliefs and published another book debunking them, telling readers about how he alone knows the new secrets and interworkings of the universe. I find it amusing that he rejected Roman Catholicism for lack of his WIFE being granted an annulment, considering how many times he himself had been married and all the people he had abused throughout his life.
The book reads like the journal of a very pompous evangelist who thinks he has discovered the meaning of life. Being unaffected by any religious bias whatsoever, I know one thing. I don't know the meaning of life... But Rezendes doesn't either.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 17
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