My Heart Belongs to Nature
My Heart Belongs to Nature
A Memoir in Photographs and Prose
John Nichols fell in love with nature as a child when his father and grandfather, both naturalists, taught him the names of the flowers and trees, the herons and butterflies they encountered on walks in rural Long Island, New York. When Nichols moved to New Mexico as a young man, his passion for the natural world grew. He began photographing the land and critters observable just outside his kitchen window…and far beyond. In My Heart Belongs to Nature, Nichols records his forty-five-year connection to the Taos valley and its mountains, where he still lives. His engaging prose and striking photographs offer a tribute to his infinity in this grain of sand, replete with memories of wives, children, bighorn sheep and rattlesnakes, and high-altitude snowshoe excursions—all of it a paean to the biology that sustains us.
New Mexico’s favorite iconoclast turns pensive in this ode to his beloved Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Río Grande.…Nichols’s lyrical introductory text hands off the book to his own photographs and brief descriptions that his fiction fans will devour with delight.
Such soulfulness! John Nichols has traveled up and down the highest peaks in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, across the wide plateau that cradles the Río Grande Gorge, and deep into the riverine where he has mastered boulder-dancing and fly-fishing. His photographs portray nature’s artistry, and his prose restores the reader’s mind to Nature’s flow.
This is the book all who love nature would write if only we were John Nichols and had his photographic eye. It’s a photographic scrapbook from a lifetime of observing, experiencing, and loving nature, in all its forms, alone or with children and beloved friends.
John Nichols has published four other photo/essay books as well as four additional works of nonfiction and thirteen novels, including the classic The Milagro Beanfield War. Most recently, the University of New Mexico Press has published his novels The Annual Big Arsenic Fishing Contest! (2016) and On Top of Spoon Mountain (2013). Also available from UNM Press are Nichols’s Dancing on the Stones, Conjugal Bliss, An Elegy for September, and American Blood.
