Yesterday my copies of Mindfulness in Texas Nature arrived. It’s now available through the publisher, Amazon, as well as bookstores. If you can join me tomorrow at Interabang bookstore in Dallas, I will be there at 6pm for discussion and book signing.

Meghan and I have looked forward to this day for a long time. It was the very end of 2019 when I got the go-ahead to write this book, with Meghan on board to be the photographer, and we got started just before the pandemic arrived in 2020. But we began with Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge and kept on traveling as much as we could. Each of those trips was magical as I look back on them. We visited Big Bend, Caddo Lake, LBJ National Grasslands, The Big Thicket, and multiple other places. 

Meanwhile, I wrote about mindfulness in nature and how a person might go about practicing it. I discussed the documented benefits of time spent in nature along with the benefits of mindfulness and the related practice of Shinrin-Yoku or “forest bathing.” The lower blood pressure and stress hormones, the boosted immune functioning, the decreases in anxiety and ruminative thinking, and other good things that happen. 

Mostly the book consists of narratives of all those trips, the adventures and quiet moments without gadgets or agendas, just being there among all the grasses, woodlands, and wildlife in those wonderful places. What I wrote brings those days back, and Meghan’s photos make them even more vivid. 

Our trips were done and the manuscript completed by late 2021, and now the book is here. I think readers will feel some of what we felt in those trips and get ideas about “ways to be fully present … freed from the distractions and restlessness that can let the sights, sounds, smells, and other sensations slip past us before we really notice” (Introduction, p. 1).

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Mindfulness in Texas Nature, 2024, Texas A&M University Press