Mary Rose O’Reilley is the author of The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd and The Love of Impermanent Things: A Threshold Ecology, as well as a novel, two collections of poems, and three other works of nonfiction. She has served as an American Council of Learned Societies contemplative studies fellow and consultant with the Society for Contemplative Mind in Society in its exploration of meditative disciplines in education. She works as a spiritual director, trained in the Christian (Shalem Institute) and Buddhist (Plum Village) traditions. An emerita professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, O’Reilley is currently active as a musician, potter, and homesteader on a rural island in Puget Sound.
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Books by Mary Rose O'Reilley
At midlife, the author writes, we are called to an “archaeology of memory”—turning over a potsherd here, a fragment there—to assemble something whole out of the messiness of experience. She encourages all of us to contemplate our own deep story, in which the facts of personal history ground a narrative of consciousness and perception.
Deciding that her life was insufficiently grounded in real-world experience, the author, a Quaker reared as a Catholic, embarked on a year of tending sheep. In this often hilarious book, she describes her time in the barn as well as an extended visit to a Buddhist monastery in France.
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