When a man has labored many years to clear away the false underbrush that obscures his internal landscape, labored to come to terms with the garden that lay underneath all along, the garden that will forever bear the beauty and the scars of all the choices he has ever made; when a man repeatedly has been brought to his knees in surrender to his mortality, his strength, his love, his relationships, his flaws and his gifts, his dignity, his regret, his happiness, his power to create and to destroy, and perhaps most terrifying of all, his own spiritual beauty, what does he do next?

What does a man do after he has sweated and dreamed and wept and loved and prayed and repented and laughed and lost and raged and fought and blindly stumbled his way to the heart of his inner garden? Like any devout pilgrim, he is transformed by the grace bestowed at the shrine. He rests there a little while, and then he begins his slow pilgrimage back into the world, bringing to life what he received/discovered.

The poems of this book speak authentically and eloquently to such a pilgrimage. They are the voice of a man who is at peace with his internal garden just as it is; a man who has learned to be deliberate, respectful and gentle with what he creates and with what he destroys; a man who is willing to bear the awesome burden of being a man alive, embracing the mortal divinity of mature masculine life, deep as the roots of trees.

 - Lloyd Meeker