This poetic collection of mini-essays, one for each day of the year, is my spiritual go-to guide. Since today is Thanksgiving, here's a small segment of the essay "The Kinship of Gratitude."

"But the simplest and deepest way to make who we are at one with the world is through the kinship of gratitude. Nothing brings the worlds of spirit and earth together more quickly.

"To be grateful means giving thanks for more than just the things we want, but also for the things that surmount our pride and stubbornness. Sometimes the things I've wanted and worked for, if I actually received them, would have crushed me.

Sometimes just giving thanks for the mystery of it all brings everything and everyone closer, the way suction pulls streams of water together. So take a chance and openly give thanks, even if you're not sure what for, and feel the plenitude of all that is living brush up against your heart.

Although I have not read this fully (there's a piece for every day of the year), I love what I've read so far. Each day has a short poem, guidance for the day and finally an exercise you can do during the day. Each section is short and sweet, therefore easy to slot into already busy lives.

With daily devotional type books, not every day’s offering resonates, but these did much more often than not, especially when I took the time to center myself in solitude and silence and not just rush through. Even then, these don’t need to take long.

Certain bits of wisdom have stayed with me, such as, “Stop being a glass. Become a lake,” (January 15) referring to having a larger sense of self/life so that pain is less concentrated like salt in a lake.

A really excellent book for daily readings. The author looks at and thinks about all aspects of life very deeply. I will read it again!

Great daily reading over the past year. Thought provoking daily passages encouraging the reader to slow down and enjoy all aspects of our lives including the good and bad.

This was a miss for me and is headed to the little library. While I absolutely love the format, a daily spiritual devotion with calendar dates, the musings of Marc Nepo did not resonate with me at all.

Take for example June 12. “To count by touching” where it states we need to count by touching, not by adding and subtracting. When we count with our eyes, we stall the heart.

WTF!???!!! What are we counting? Why can’t we use math? I truly do not get how this is spiritual. “To count with Hands brings us deeper than all counting…” What drivel!

If this resonates with you, congratulations I highly recommend this beautiful and nicely packaged book. If this makes zero sense to you, leave it like I did, in the little library.

This book was okay but it could have been better. No doubt, there were many wonderful lessons contained within its pages, and on certain days it is EXACTLY what you need to hear. While there are many wonderful stories, quotes, meditations, etc. to enjoy within this book I thought that it would have been even MORE improved if the author had not included soooooo many personal stories. I wanted this book to be a little more objective in its advice and parables; I did not need yet another story about how Mark Nepo survived cancer and learned to forgive his horrible family. The daily stories that I found most rewarding and have pondered on the most were the ones that were told entirely in the third person and did not reference Mark at all.

Nepo offers a very palatable entry into mindfulness. With a page or two a day corresponding to each day of the year, every entry offers a short quotation, a few paragraphs discussing it and then suggestions of topics to meditate on. I have used this to meditate, almost daily, for this year and really appreciate the format which draws me into meditation, even though my mind rarely stays with the topic. Thinking about some essential truth even for a few minutes a day is very grounding.

Some of the opening quotations:

"Only when I stop collecting evidence
do the stones begin to speak."

" We are rare, not perfect."

"Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt-marvelous error!-
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures."
Antonio Machado

I’ve read this book several times. Each time, I discover new things to contemplate. And return to my favorite sections when I need a pick-me-up. As we’ve come through this COVID-19 pandemic and the isolation of social distancing, re-reading the wise words of this book has given me comfort and a different perspective of the isolation of social distancing. It’s been a time of reflection inward and hopefully a time of personal growth too.

The book is formatted into a daily meditation guide whose purpose is to awaken you, using quotes, and many spiritual precepts as the jumping off points. Day-books have been the rage in the last decade, and frankly, most are a bit like FaceBook, allowing you to feel like you are having a brief respite when in fact, like the thousand friends you've collected, real friends need to be cultivated and spent time with, listening and understanding and celebrating. I postulate that while they may be nice as part of a calendar, if you want to have any kind of spiritual awakening, you need to pick a spiritual path and stay with it like you would a good friend, and get to know its depths.

While I was so-so on some of the quotes and his commentary about them, I had a great deal of trouble with several of the religious precepts I perused. If you are going to use religious quotes and precepts, then know them. OR, tell your readers you are a dabbler and going loosey-goosey on everyone, throwing your shallow interpretation on the wall to see if it sticks. OR, say you like this quote, saw it as graffiti on a bathroom wall, what it means to you, and that you've not spent much time on it. OR, don't interpret a quote at all and just write what you want to say. A quote doesn't validate you, but to a reader, it might make them think you know what you are talking about.

I was gifted with the book. It is poorly written. While it is true, everyone has the right to take a word and reinterpret it anyway one likes, language and culture are based on the dialogue between the differences and similarities of thought. And it may be true that I know more than your average bear about a lot of religious ideas, going deeply into four of them. Still, Nepo has taken many precepts, religious quotes, and has not bothered to really understand them. He has given a platitude version of a quote for the ages. While this may have helped someone, somewhere, I have a problem with what the man robs a reader of the opportunity for, and that he holds himself out as a meditation instructor who is guiding you to a deeper and more awakened life, when it is really a Hallmark day-book. I postulate he wastes your time for 15 minutes over 365 days (roughly 90 hours) when in that same time you might get to some sort of awakening by picking up a Buddhist, Jewish, Shamanic, Catholic -- insert your faith here -- book and going deeply into the pages, thinking about what they mean with a really good highlighter! (Oooh, there's a good quote for my own daily book!)

Granted I didn't read the whole book -- I read from the back (this is a weird thing I do unless it is a book of fiction) and was unimpressed. Then this morning, I went to page one, Jan 1, and decided to give this a chance. I read, "Precious Human Birth. Of all things that exist, we breath and wake and turn it into song." He began to incorrectly describe what that precept is all about (and in any scholarly -- not spiritual -- Buddhist 101 book they'd give it to you accurately) then took off on his own digression. He even threw in a chop-wood-carry-water reference -- just to let you know he knew a bit about Zen/Taoism/Eastern thought!

Okay, it is a good thing to contemplate what he said -- to marvel at how great it is to be human and give thanks to be able to reflect and be conscious (and he implies other forms of life do not do this) -- BUT BUT BUT, this is not the precept. There is so much more to it. The precept of "Precious Human Birth" is not just about being grateful for the gift of a human body, it is also to contemplate that you have a gift in that you have heard good teachings, truths that you can use toward consciousness, compassion, openheartedness. It is a contemplation you do at the beginning of every Buddhist prayer -- in any branch of Buddhism -- so understand that it is core to a mind-set toward all the practices and meditation, from the most difficult or elaborate to the simple act of zazen. You contemplate four thoughts:

1) having this precious moment free of tyranny or fear, perhaps;
2) of the fact that you can die at any time;
3) of karma, (what you do -- thinking too, if we are honest -- whether virtuous or nat, traps you into cause and effect;
4) and of the suffering of others.

The last one eventually leads many on to the Bodhisattva vow, to not rest until all are released from suffering (Reader's Digest explanation.) These are four preliminaries are words, and in the beginning of my path I thought them a bit mundane and boring. Then I wondered, "Why do they all yak on and on about these obvious things?" Wondering why teachers I respected yakked on about them, and trusting them a bit to guide me, led to contemplation. I committed to my practice and went deeply with them, discovering in the gratitude beyond the wonder of blue sky, into the synchronicity of my precious life and its more painful moments as well. And to look for the consciousness in all things.

When Nepo reduces this to more than the statement of "contemplate your Precious Human Birth," and begins to reduce it to you meditating on how you are different than the rock and the bench, he takes your practice away from you. He leads you into a sense of false security that you are pretty hot stuff, and your life is pretty damn good. Then during the day you may wonder why that feeling doesn't last.

Real practice, any real practice (although I think there are better practices and worst practices if you want to awaken), will not just make you feel good for a few minutes, or make you think you have 4,678 friends. It will make you feel the discomfort you have, and offer a way to seriously cope and grow through the discomfort, just as an awake person may enjoy their FaceBook friends but also know that most are not "real" friends but acquaintances or less, and in that number there are a few good friends who must be tended, spoken to, cried for, cared about, shared with, and celebrated.

Many reasons to read this book as this is another spiritual journey towards enlightenment that experience by many human among all and the shared stories of what works till they reached the meaning of healing. As those who search what is healing is this can be the answers and as there is a guidance given in every of the stages. Explorative approach will always have more stories to tell.

I have finally spent exactly one year with this book – a meditational guide on spirituality, gentleness, and love for daily life. It brought peace to my evenings when I read the day's passage, and I am already excited to read it again for the next year. A great gift for anyone who is looking to open their heart.