When we seek the opportunity to grow personally,  we have the choice to accomplish this in so many different ways.  I personally have found when you commune with nature, it gives one the opportunity to clear their mind and move into a heightened sense of awareness about the world around them.

In my interview with Irene O’Garden about her new book entitled “Risking the Rapids-How My Wilderness Adventure Healed My Childhood“, Irene takes us on a journey down the rapids of the Flathead River of Montana with her family to heal from the emotional from the death her brother John.  This trip turns into more than just a float trip which is what Irene and her entire family though it would be. The circumstance that they found themselves, in including the capsizing of the rafts through unexpected very rough waters, is what transformed Irene’s life forever.

Irene’s family was not perfect, she grew up in somewhat of a dysfunctional home with her father being an alcoholic and her mother not being present emotionally for the children.

As Irene writes so eloquently in her book “A family is a landscape of its own, as granted as the earth and trees: a wild ecology of feelings, unique in balance, particular of circulation. Each element’s essential in landscape: none moved, removed without a subtle or drastic change. No force shines from the landscape–all times and change carried off by elemental forces which transform the hardest of substances to soft. Patterns marked in rock, in soil, in surface give a landscape it identity. Emotion is the weather of the family, patterning the faces, the voices and the hearts”.

If you are seeking to understand the dynamics of your family, and to get in touch with your emotions, I would recommend that you listen to this interview with Irene O’Garden.  If you want to learn more about her book Risking the Rapids, please click here to be directed to her website.

I hope you enjoy this heartfelt interview with author Irene O’Garden.