The Wild Silence: A Memoir
AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Heartfelt and heartening … a full-throated paean to the fundamental importance of nature in all its glory, fury and impermanence." —Wall Street Journal
The incredible follow-up to the international bestseller The Salt Path, a story of finding your way back home.
Nature holds the answers for Raynor and her husband Moth. After walking 630 homeless miles along The Salt Path, living on the windswept and wild English coastline; the cliffs, the sky and the chalky earth now feel like their home. Moth has a terminal diagnosis, but together on the wild coastal path, with their feet firmly rooted outdoors, they discover that anything is possible.
Now, life beyond The Salt Path awaits and they come back to four walls, but the sense of home is illusive and returning to normality is proving difficult - until an incredible gesture by someone who reads their story changes everything. A chance to breathe life back into a beautiful farmhouse nestled deep in the Cornish hills; rewilding the land and returning nature to its hedgerows becomes their saving grace and their new path to follow. The Wild Silence is a story of hope triumphing over despair, of lifelong love prevailing over everything. It is a luminous account of the human spirit's connection to nature, and how vital it is for us all.
“Heartfelt and heartening … a full-throated paean to the fundamental importance of nature in all its glory, fury and impermanence." —Wall Street Journal
The incredible follow-up to the international bestseller The Salt Path, a story of finding your way back home.
Nature holds the answers for Raynor and her husband Moth. After walking 630 homeless miles along The Salt Path, living on the windswept and wild English coastline; the cliffs, the sky and the chalky earth now feel like their home. Moth has a terminal diagnosis, but together on the wild coastal path, with their feet firmly rooted outdoors, they discover that anything is possible.
Now, life beyond The Salt Path awaits and they come back to four walls, but the sense of home is illusive and returning to normality is proving difficult - until an incredible gesture by someone who reads their story changes everything. A chance to breathe life back into a beautiful farmhouse nestled deep in the Cornish hills; rewilding the land and returning nature to its hedgerows becomes their saving grace and their new path to follow. The Wild Silence is a story of hope triumphing over despair, of lifelong love prevailing over everything. It is a luminous account of the human spirit's connection to nature, and how vital it is for us all.
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Community Reviews
I love the way Raynor Winn manages to create authentic, emotional pictures with words that connect with the reader on a very personal level.
I adored the book all the way up until the Icelandic trail. The part felt disintegrated, almost rushed, and somewhat irrelevant in comparison to the rest of the story. This feeling may have been born of curiosity and interest to hear more about progress on the farm rather than what felt - at least to me - like a rushed intermezzo squeezed in towards the end, that mayhap needed a bit more airtime and love, on par or level with the rest.
As it is, the Icelandic trail felt a bit "lost" and therefore rushed towards the end, but never mind.
I love Raynor Winn's way of grabbing my interest, my heart and my imagination so easily and sustainably throughout the book.
Passages like "In the wild grip of nature we had formed a bond that didn't need words", "It was a stillness, a wild silence beyond the emptiness of the pine trees. A silence on the wind, the deadness of something having gone.", "This place between the stone and my fingers, this is the place where our conscience and the earth are inseperable." resonated with me and just made my heart sing.
The words grabbed me and made me cry when I read the next passage. It literally describes what I currently go through with my dad, who was diagnosed with fast deteriorating dementia:
"My throat was tight with tears of loss and fear of loss to come. He had let go of a moment that hung so brightly on my tree of memory that I could find its glow in any dark place. But for him the light had dimmed and gone."
This is so to the point, it describes so well what I am going through and what I am feeling, it is plain surreal! Raynor Winn could have opened my heart and pulled those exact words out of it. And through her decriptions I find comfort. I find hope in her words, that there is time still. That we can make the most of the time we are allowed to share. That we can make the best of it every day and make it count.
I will use " [...] our gift of time and nature" intentionally, because "I [cannot] let him lose what was held within those covers; if those memories began to slip then everything else would come tumbling after. His life, everything he'd done, and us, all the memories of our life, would slip from him, lost in the sludge of vagueness. I had to stop it, to find a way to plug the holes in his thoughts. I couldn't stand quietly by and watch the steady, dripping loss of everything that made him who he was." I guess, I still need to learn to " spread [our] wings and trust the air."
I highly enjoyed Ray's and Moth's next part of their journey in the sequel to The Salt Path, and am grateful for the hope of Wild Silence that it sparked.
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