Many writers, like the late Mary Oliver, encourage us to go outdoors. It is a place of enlightenment, they say, a place of ordinary things holding wondrous insights. Natural Wonder records the power of nature that shape and deepen the author's sensibilities even as it expand his vocabulary to help name something that before seemed unnameable. Natural Wonder also finds its way along cycles of life and death that defy fatalism and carry, if only in small sparks, the flicker of hope.