A Walking Friendship: The First 500 Miles

Years of walks in an upstate New York wildlife management area inspired two writer-photographers to create this volume of poems, essays, and nature images. Alternately meditative and humorous, spiritual, and earthy, seasonal and timeless, this book by Diane Kavanaugh-Black and Carole Fults illustrates the growing friendship between two people and between themselves and the natural world.

The woods and paths at Partridge Run Wilderness Management Area in Berne, New York, are a container for their friendship, and a place to wrestle with internal struggles.

Yes, this book is about walking in the woods but is not a primer on hiking or plant identification, not a physical wellness manual or gut-wrenching memoir. Instead, in a shared meditation the authors take on various questions of our modern fragmented lives: How to slow the hell down. How to be curious. How to watch when there seems nothing to see.

In the end, walking in the woods gives all of us lessons on how to live wherever we are, how nature is in us and supports us while we suffer and rejoice.

Join Carole and Diane as they encounter nature and report back on the lush colors, funny conversations, a little high drama, internal consternation, and revelations. You will not be disappointed.