Turning of Days: Lessons from Nature, Season, and Spirit by Hannah Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thomas Henry Huxley wrote, “To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.” An all too true statement about most of us, excepting children whose innate curiosity beckons them to run around to peer into the artworks’ faces. Fortunately for the rest of us, Hannah Anderson and her husband Nathan, illustrator of her new book, Turning of Days: Lessons from Nature, Season, and Spirit stand in the gap between nature and nature’s God pointing us to both. They offer seasonal lessons of what it looks like to turn our faces to the works of goodness, beauty and truth in nature given to us by our Creator and reveal more about Him and ourselves than we are aware.
This collection of essays of her observations of nature and theological connections is ordered around the seasons. You will learn about spring peepers, pruning, and hawks’ migration habits. You will read of God’s providence, memento mori, and kronos, the fulfillment of time. You will see detail illustrations showing the same attentiveness.
In an online conversation with Hannah, she writes that she and Nathan have “shared a particular disposition or awareness of [the] natural world.” I share this disposition due in large part to spending much of my childhood exploring the woodlands, creeks, and streams that bordered my home and to a church that offered me a chance to read and learn much of the Bible. The connections come somewhat naturally when you watch a hawk soaring over an open field and then read in Scripture about “rising up on eagles wings”. Fortunately for us throughout the book she models for us how to learn more about what we see and to read the Bible with those observations in mind. In a final essay she gives suggestions how to place our ourselves, so our attention is directed to observe nature well. We will not learn this disposition if we will not place ourselves as creature among creation willing to submit to its teaching.

I received a copy of the book for an honest review.

View all my reviews