Chris Dombrowski is the author of The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water . He is also...
The Barn at the End of The World
Deciding that her life was insufficiently grounded in real-world experience, Mary Rose O’Reilley, a Quaker reared as a Catholic, embarked on a year of tending sheep. In this often hilarious book, O’Reilley describes her time in the barn as well as an extended visit to a Buddhist monastery in France. She seeks, in both barn and monastery, a spirituality based not in “climbing out of the body” but rather in existing fully in the world.
For O’Reilley, a smallish woman, that means learning how to “flip” very large sheep, inoculate them, and help them lamb (among other, earthier things). It means absorbing the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh and the practice of Mahayana Buddhism, which emphasizes social engagement, while also allowing herself to crave pastries, resent her roommate, and wish for more food.
“At the beginning of this year,” she writes, “I had no idea why I felt led to light out into the unfamiliar territory of sheep farming and Buddhist practice.” By the end of this “memorable spiritual autobiography” (Washington Post), she has found a well of deep peace and a way to live consciously in the world.
Keywords:
animal, body, Buddhism, catholic, Christian, faith, farming, farms, france, friends, funny, humorous, husbandry, journey, lambs, literary, livestock, Mahayana, meditation, memoirs, mindfulness, monastery, monastic, Quakerism, real world, rural, sheep, society, spiritual, spirituality, Tibetan, tradition, work, zen
ISBN:
9781571312549 Publish Date:
07/01/2000
Pages:
344
Size:
6 × 8.88 × 1 in
Weight:
17.5 oz
Like this book? Sign up for occasional updates
Praise and Prizes
“A memorable spiritual autobiography . . . The Barn at the End of the World is in three parts quilted by 99 brief essays ranging from barn ecology to the religion of natural process. Worthy ideas—many expressed with elegance, many comedic—are on every page.”
Washington Post
“Houses plenty of treasures . . . Mary Rose O’Reilley has created a memoir that is as delightfully unconventional as her approach to religion.”
Dallas Morning News
“The life and death reality of raising sheep provides a reality to Mary Rose O’Reilley’s spirituality that most people do not have.”
Temple Grandin
author of Animals in Translation
“The Barn at the End of the World is about the subtlest, most sane-making book on contemporary spirituality that I’ve read in years. It is also the funniest. This book has the makings of a classic.”
Joanna Macy
author of Active Hope
“Mary Rose O’Reilley’s rich, allusive prose draws on Catholicism, Quakerism, Buddhism, monastic tradition, Shakespeare and the Bible. Her short vignettes are luminous with faith matters, yet full of the earthy details of animal husbandry, resulting in a style that’s a cross between Kathleen Norris and James Herriot.”
Publishers Weekly
You Might Enjoy
Based on this book, we recommend you try…
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,...
“Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.” So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar.
A vibrant collection of personal and lyric essays in conversation with archival objects of Black history and memory.
Studded with poems and songs, this correspondence is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and joy.
An astonishing, vital book about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood from the author of Rising, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.