Explore the world of urban nature in this journal-style memoir of a year in Boulder, Colorado, a city known for its striking setting at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Much more than a starry-eyed paean to nature's wonders, Pieces of Light is a 'journey of the heart,' where Tweit's year is spent reaffirming her bonds, healing her spirit, and settling her young family into a powerfully alluring landscape - until they must move away for work in a distant...

Diagonosed with an autoimmune disease that was predicted to take her life in 2-5 years and offered no clear direction for getting well through conventional medicine, Susan Tweit turned to the natural world that was both her solace and her field of study as a plant ecologist. She shows how qualities such as courage, compassion, and inspiration draw people together and bind us into the community of the land and of all living things.

"Colorado's San Luis Valley is not a place for the timid. Sizzling hot in summer, frigid cold in winter, this huge landscape is humbling in its openness, a place defined by the rhythms of nature - and by the thrust and parry of male courting female in the ritual dance of sandhill cranes. These majestic birds arrive by the thousands twice a year to feed, rest, and socialize in the valley's wetlands - invisible except from the air - and their cries...