The Spirit of the Place: Indiana Hill Country - Hardcover

A delightful book of photographs ably supported by text, The Spirit of the Place is a celebration of the subtle rather than the spectacular. Although Indiana cannot lay claim to sensational snowcapped mountains such as the Rockies or vast geological formations such as the Grand Canyon, her gently rolling hills stained with autumn colors and her creekbeds sculpted by winter ice possess a quieter, no less profound beauty.

Photographer Darryl Jones not only finds this beauty, but he translates it with breathtaking immediacy: a field of black-eyed Susans against a cloudless blue sky; morning light playing against a complicated pattern of rows of cut hay; sunset reflected in the ripples of a pond--this is the understated beauty of southern Indiana's hill country. Accompanying these sublime images is James Alexander Thom's lyrical prose, which tells the story of the places and the people who settled them. The Spirit of the Place is contemplative, harmonious, and profound.

In Walden Pond Henry Thoreau found a setting which inspired his famous musings on the nature of existence and the foibles of his society. Photographer Jones and writer Thom take similar inspiration from the hill country in Southern Indiana where they live and work and in consort provide a beautiful and insightful meditation on the meaning of place, the values of rootedness and community, and their different but similar paths toward personal harmony and spiritual understanding. Jones sees beyond the surface of nature to the basic elements - earth, air, water, and rock. His photographs are ""contemplative studies on the metaphysics of nature, the invisible made visible, God's mind revealed"", the pre-existing harmony which exists in nature if only we can see it. Thom's text, taking its inspiration from Jones's images, traces the cycle of his life from birth in rural Gosport, to journalism in the big cities of the world, and then back home again, where he found both his voice as a writer and his spiritual rootedness.