Books like These Wilds Beyond Our Fences — picked by fans

This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”

Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.

Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.

She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.

What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?

First of all, how could anyone not love a book with an author’s name like that?

This book was on display mere inches from me while I was signing books at an exceptionally enchanting indie bookstore called Sudden Fiction in Castle Rock, Colorado. I couldn’t wait for the signing to be over so I could get a copy for myself. And it did not disappoint, the contents being as beguiling as the cover. 

Sheldrake describes not only the incredible and seemingly irrepressible capacity fungi have for survival and thrival (yep, I made that word up), but also encourages us to practice the same spells. I may have to become a mycologist in my next iteration – it’s good to remake oneself every few months, I think.

I’m a sucker for animals. So is, pun intended, Sy Montgomery.

One thing I feel, above all, is awe and gratitude for the wondrously diverse beings who share this beautiful planet with us, and this gorgeous book submerged me in these emotions from first page to last.

One day, Sy decided to make friends with Olivia, a giant Pacific octopus, and despite all the barriers to connection one could imagine between two species, damn if they don’t succeed. Why? Because Sy isn’t the only one desiring companionship, friendship, and love, Olivia does, too. Just writing about it makes me tear up.   

What other book can you think of that has a section entitled “The Healing Powers of Depression”?

This was the book that taught me the key to whole body, mind, and spirit transformation was to cease all the habitual “overcoming” language and behavior and go deep into the places the ego fears the most.

In this approach, dark times are initiations that don’t just help us get through but strip us so completely down to the bareness of our own souls.  

This book offers a response to a deep longing to be in the world with childlike curiosity. It encourages our direct perception of life through the energetic heart field. Although it is meant as a knowledgeable guide for listening to and communicating with plants, it elicits a poignant call during a time of profound alienation. Encouraging the letting go of top-down linear thinking, Buhner offers a step-by-step somatic path for decolonizing the soul. I discovered by exchanging the word “psoas” for “plant” the book easily becomes a personal guide for increasing our core awareness as it inspires opening the heart by rooting into a reciprocal relationship with the living Earth. To me, re-wilding my relationship with the deepest aspects of self is vitally personal and imperative if all life is to truly flourish. 

I grew up believing ambition to be a virtue. I assumed it was a positive trait to have, to aspire to. And then, I read this definition by David Whyte, and my whole outlook changed. 

“Ambition left to itself, like a Rupert Murdoch, always becomes tedious, its only object the creation of larger and larger empires of control.” I no longer aspire to be ambitious, because it doesn’t coexist with cooperation, sharing, and communal good. 

I have a fondness for etymology, studying the origin of words. But to do so with 52 words and a poet’s guidance? Chef’s kiss. 

Joanna sadly left this world in 2025, but her work will stay with me forever. 

This was the book that helped me move past my panic attacks about the future of humanity. How should we be when we accept the fact that the world is falling apart? How does one act, prioritize, and engage? How do you do it, without falling apart yourself? 

Not an easy book to read, because it clearly lays out the trouble we’re in as human beings on this planet—no tiptoeing around. And yet, that’s exactly what gave me comfort. I needed to recognize, name, and honor the fears I felt within, instead of continuing to try to bat them away. 

This book meets our moment with truth and clarity. 

Who are we, and why are we here? Any book that grapples with these existential questions calls my name. And especially, books that ask these questions in light of the immense upheaval and change we are currently living in. 

One of the greatest gifts of growing wiser is that we begin to see our life patterns and cycles with greater clarity. Was it fate? Was it destiny? And how do we find meaning through all of it?

Michael Meade is one of our time’s greatest teachers, and in this book, he gives us permission to view our own lives like a story in which times of trial become the very things that shape us into who we are meant to be.

The framework presented in Corporate Lifecycles deals with the same core issue of Stages and Challenges of Organizational Growth as dealt with in my own book, but from a different perspective. The author is a former academic who has developed his own framework of corporate lifecycles and his methodology of organizations working through them. The book presents a different framework of corporate life cycles and emphasizes the managerial styles that are appropriate to reach stage of the corporate lifecycle. The author has seen and worked with a large number of companies that have employed his methods. He presents his perspective and insights for this role as a participant-observer. 

I loved this memoir because it is a story of incredible resilience.

I was deeply moved by the author’s ability to recount the stark facts of the heartbreaking intergenerational trauma she suffered while showing how her early life experiences of deprivation and abuse helped pave the way for her compassionate work with patients and populations. I nodded in recognition and sometimes laughed out loud at her account of her Catholic school education, which I could relate to my own experience.

I was awestruck by her grit and determination to rise above her difficult circumstances without any kind of model and little or no encouragement. I was inspired by her ability to find love and a fulfilling career after such a rocky start, and I’m sure her patients appreciate the depth of her compassion.