Dark Cloud Country, START HERE
This provides the framework for how to utilize this section to read my latest book, Dark Cloud Country!
This is the introduction page of my newest book, Dark Cloud Country: The Four Relationships of Regeneration. You can buy the book here. Or, you can read it on Denuding the Illusion.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Caution: Fiddling Façades & Drunken Composers READ
Introduction: Of Brides & Clouds READ
RELATIONSHIP 1: CHAOS READ
The Dancing Dawn-Darkness READ
Stardust and Drunken Daydreams READ
Death, Oh Harvest READ
There is Nothing as Sure as Nothing at All READ
Ivy-Veiled Boughs READ
RELATIONSHIP 2: BOUNDS READ
A Theory of Change READ
Love-Carved Lovers Live READ
Let us Walk Together READ
Patience, She is Dancing READ
RELATIONSHIP 3: ART READ
Desert Dancer COMING SOON
Flaxen-Haired Fairyland COMING SOON
The Learned Fool COMING SOON
The Story of Oak COMING SOON
RELATIONSHIP 4: SINGULARITY COMING SOON
Grain of the Gods COMING SOON
Awaken, Slumbering Heroes COMING SOON
A Liturgy of Lost Lilies COMING SOON
PRAISE FOR DARK CLOUD COUNTRY
“An impassioned celebration of life in all its complex wonderment.”
—James Canton, Author of The Oak Papers and Grounded
"If you relish poetic writing, if you are in awe of existence ever in the process of creating, and if you delight in beauty, mystery, and wonder, you will dance with Daniel through the four relationships of regeneration—chaos, bounds, art, and singularity—as Dark Cloud Country delights your mind and dazzles your spirit."
—Fred Provenza, Professor emeritus, behavioral ecology, Utah State University; author of Nourishment
“Dark Cloud Country is a short book that reads like a long one. Carefully we must walk through Griffith’s words to find the nourishment our souls require. Dark Cloud Country is written in a language that digs through the innermost being, like a sacred encounter—the kind your keep closed somewhere special in your heart. Griffith’s words are a great call, a nudge, a whisper, and a tap on the shoulder for all of us to remember the essence of regeneration: a beautiful story.”
—Precious Phiri, Co-Founder of Igugu Trust,African Coordinator for Regeneration International, educator and farmer in Hwange Community, Zimbabwe
“Dark Cloud Country captivates us and stirs our souls. I finished the book yearning for more but realizing that I could find more simply by embracing life!”
—Gabe Brown, Author of Dirt to Soil
“An eco-poet and philosopher, Griffith’s ecstatic imaginings and lyrical prose don’t just live on the page, they pulse in the body, calling us back into right relationship with our beautiful and ever-bewitching home planet. Myth and rumination, physics and ritual, soil and soul all converge, here, to give voice to the magnificence of life. Reading Dark Cloud Country is like watching a murmuration of starlings. The mind swerves. Dives. Rises. It travels to surprising places. The heart too.”
—Mary Reynolds Thompson, Author of Reclaiming the Wild Soul and A Wild Soul Woman
“We could say that wilding—poet-essayist Daniel Griffith's more mundane professional occupation—is a mystical way to interact with the land: not to see earth as separate, yielding produce only when forced through labour, but earth as a creative whole, an unfathomable totality which requires that everyone and everything (including the gardener) makes themselves edible in order to partake in the bounty of growth and fruit. With Dark Cloud Country, Griffith has written prose that equals the wild itself—an entangled whole that is ever growing and only yielding fruit if the reader lets go of their illusion of being able to control its aliveness.”
—Andreas Weber, Biologist, philosopher, and author of The Biology of Wonder
and Matter and Desire
“In the beginning, it was Daniel’s voice echoing in my head when I followed the lines. But then, gradually, it became mine. The more I read it out loud, the more it resonated within me and resonated with my voice. The jump between story, poem, and lyrical prose broke my flow and I was startled into a deep awareness. I often had to pause to look out of my window to practice my own observations. The more I read, the less notes I took. The more I just am—sitting with the words ringing in my head. Griffith’s Dark Cloud Country make it clear—it is art we lack, not science; poems, not progress.”
—Leon Bucher, HUB Lead of Landregeneration, Germany
“Daniel Griffith’s Dark Cloud Country isn’t your typical how-to save the planet guide. Instead, it proposes an antidote to the way we live our lives as individuals. Dark Cloud Country is a thought-provoking challenge to the stories we tell ourselves. Open up and let Griffith’s words flow through you. You might be surprised what you find.”
—Anthony Gustin DC, MS, Host of The Natural State Podcast author of Keto Answers
“Daniel Griffith's incantations don't attempt to merely teach, discover, or inspire; instead, he invites us to remember ourselves in an intimate dance with creation. Griffith guides our departure from the noisy shores of theory to a quiet stillness—a place where we perceive an ancient melody rise and begin to dance again. At once familiar and confronting, Dark Cloud Country is a deep well of wisdom whose waters I will no doubt draw from for many years to come.”
—David Leon, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Farmer’s Footprint
“Dark Cloud Country is a magical, artful meditation on what it means to be human in the here-and-now: a salve to the excruciating buzzing of a civilization composting around us. It’s a request to sit still and listen to all that circumambulates us through all timelines. It is a love-letter to lineage, togetherness, and all magic that can be gleaned from rootedness and relationship. It is a song for the death that unites us all.”
–Maren Morgan, Writer/Filmmaker/Podcaster and Co-creator of Death in The Garden
“Like a brilliant mind wandering amidst beautiful chaos, Griffith explores the depths of regeneration through an outcry for observation, of ourselves first and our surroundings second. Dark Cloud Country is a necessary and beautiful wayfinding expedition to get lost in our musings toward a definition of what Regeneration actually means—it is an invitation to love, to choose, and to do better. This is a work that starts in Griffith’s words and concludes deep within our hearts.”
—Julie Jackson, Co-Founder of Taurio
“Dark Cloud Country reminds us that landscapes, homelands, and communities are not merely spaces to hold our invaluable quest for awe, beauty, love. They also are vessels for our despair, hardship, loss, grief. With all those emotions embodied, space becomes place and place is protagonist. Daniel’s words, which he encourages us to voice on our own through reading the text, meld with so many before us, creating the relationships necessary for regeneration.”
—Andrea Malmberg, Savory Institute Master Field Professional, Ecological Outcome Master Verifier
“Dark Cloud Country is a beautiful dive into the subject of regeneration from ecological, spiritual, scientific, and philosophical perspectives. In lyrical, meditative prose, Griffith invites readers to expand their understanding of regenerative living and thinking.”
—Stephanie Anderson, Author of One Size Fits None
“Reading Daniel's writing reminds me that our teachers come in all forms. For him, in Dark Cloud Country, it is the oaks, the soil, the sunlight, the numbers, the language, the ancestral stories, and of course community. And for me, Daniel is a teacher, or perhaps a translator. Maybe both. . . . Daniel's writing is vital to changing the way we perceive and thus behave toward each other and the natural world. If we do not stop completely, deconstruct, wonder and wander, as Daniel teaches us, I fear the regenerative movement will become captured by the industrial model, and through reduction to a set of practices, scaled and replicated. And lost. It is on this narrow path between hope and sadness, between chaos and order, that Daniel leads us. The forest, with its life/death/life cycle, and its community is there, he teaches, if only we can learn to see it.”
—Abbey Kingdon-Smith, Savory Institute Global Network Coordinator and Holder at UVE
“Dark Cloud Country, despite its length in pages, was not written for casual consumption. One may easily find that its careful reading is like falling down the stairs. Here you lie, looking up at what seemed a task that required no thought beyond the intended destination. But Griffith flagrantly greased the steps to produce an awakening that only a tumble down the steps can produce: Stop. Think. Be mindful. . . Griffith’s words will neither deter nor defeat but rather invite. For, as the author himself states, ‘Chaos is not disorder, but order beyond form.’”
—Jeffery Sondregger, Conscious Agrarian, Husband, and Father