What the Heart Wants: Stories of Hope and Belonging

By Dianne Grob

WHAT THE HEART WANTS is the story of one woman's passion for the natural world, told with a lyrical and emotional depth that evokes one's deepest connections to heart and soul-indeed to life itself. "DIANNE GROB has an extraordinary capacity to bring the reader into a lovely, rapt silence-and to simultaneously awaken and satisfy our yearning for the living reality of our world. I cannot think of anyone who has written of the path through hopelessness to hope for the world with greater clarity and honest, evocative wisdom. I love to think of all the people who will have their hearts opened by this book and whom it will help to find their way home. It is beautiful. It is needed. It deserves to be a classic." -JOANNA MACY Author of World as Lover; World as Self and Coming Back to Life

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 059541558X
• ISBN13: 9780595415588
• Release Date: December 2006
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 84 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Slow, deep, luxurious breathing

Reading Dianne's prose is like walking along a quiet stream, ankle deep in wet grasses on a soft early morning. As I read her stories, I feel my lungs restored to deep full breaths, my heart to opening, and my spirit to courage. Dianne explores psychic and emotional terrain that we need more words for. This work is important and permission giving.

Love Is the Door

This thin volume bears several readings, its message being profound but subtle. Ms. Grob approaches the world with her senses wide open. In these delicious encounters with the earth's landscapes and creatures--including its human creatures--she arrives at love. She uses it like a sixth sense, a qualitatively different way of knowing the natural riches around her. Right there in that particular form of knowing, hope is born. The author's discriptions of meeting her surroundings with love awakens her reader to his or her own emotional connection to the fragile beauty of the planet.

Read this book

There is so much good to say about this book: it is moving without being sentimental; it brings the world alive, in a way I could absorb via the author's keen eye and generous heart. The stories are charged with the grandeur of the ordinary. But above all else, the writing is clear: fresh, clean, and alive, like water flowing over smooth stones. Trip Quillman

A gift to yourself. A gift to others.

This small book is not to be read quickly. It is a slow, meditative, intimate conversation with the body and the body of the Earth. Dianne Grob's tender stories made me laugh aloud and moved me to tears. Bets of all, she showed me how to live the teachings of deep ecology--how to feel hope for the natural world while facing the truth of our environmental problems. This is a beautiful gift for yourself, for anyone you love.