I didn’t set out to write a Feng Shui book. I set out to answer a question that had been following me for years. In a time of profound disconnection from the natural world, each other, and our own inner lives, how do we find a way back to balance and belonging?

I had spent decades as a wildlife biologist, in beautiful places such as Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain National Park, and at Superfund sites in Colorado where the land had been profoundly wounded and was slowly, improbably, finding its way back. I had watched grizzlies move through landscapes with a kind of attentive intelligence I found humbling. I had led students in restoring a 14-acre wetland from the ground up, and felt something shift in them, and in me, in the process. I had seen, over and over again, that when people and living systems are given the conditions they need, they heal and thrive.

When I studied Feng Shui, I loved what was true in it — the sensitivity to place, the attention to flow, the understanding that where and how we live shapes who we become. But I was also uneasy with the versions of it that reduced a profound ecological wisdom to a simple checklist of cures and corrections. What both traditions shared, at their best, was listening and arriving at the same insight: life wants to flow and flourish. Our task is to stop blocking it.

That’s the book I wanted to write. Not a manual, but an invitation. Not a system, but a way of listening. One grounded in four decades of field work, a deep love of birds and all of the more-than-human beings, Form School and Western Feng Shui and the conviction that the living world is not a backdrop to our lives — it is our lives.

Wind, Water, and Wing is for everyone who has ever wanted a way to reconnect with place that is grounding, hopeful, and healing.