Wood Lake Nature Center Book Club: Listening Point

Join other adults to discuss some wonderful environmental and outdoor recreation-based books. Refreshments will be provided. All books available at local libraries or may be available for loan through the nature center.  Note:  This event takes place at the Richfield Community Center due to construction at Wood Lake.  $5/session; free for members.

This month:  “Listening Point,” by Sigurd Olson. Poetic meditations about Olson’s cabin and his life there, now available in paperback for the first time. Many people have a special place where they go to experience nature. Perhaps it is a cabin, or a campsite, or a favorite hiking trail. For Sigurd Olson it was a bare glaciated spit of rock in the magnificent Quetico-Superior country of northern Minnesota. He called it his Listening Point, and it is at the center of his book of the same name.

Listening Point is Olson’s second book, with over 40,000 copies sold in hardcover. Strikingly illustrated with drawings by Francis Lee Jaques, this book tells the story of Olson’s Listening Point, from his first night sleeping there under the stars to the eventual building of a cabin. “From this one place I would explore the entire north and all life, including my own,” he writes. “For me it would be a listening-post from which I might even hear the music of the spheres.”

Through deeply personal stories, Olson brings life in the woods alive. He traces the history of a fallen leaf, explains the power of a canoe paddle cutting through the water, and the magic of listening to the rain pour on his tent flaps.