This book is borne of loss. Of death, certainly, but not only death. There are other forms of change that involve loss as well as joy: the panic that sometimes accompanies aging, the ways that childbirth both signals a beginning and an end, the heartbreak that comes with the end of a relationship, grieving a friend who violates our trust, filling the hole left by a child going to college, and many more. The kinds of loss that are addressed include the loss of love, of certainty and assuredness, of knowing where we are, of identity (who we are), of beauty and youth, of health, of life itself, of privacy, and of roles and of knowing. When someone we love leaves us, we suddenly walk alone into new territory without them. We become strangers in new lands, places where the landscape is unalterably changed, where the center of gravity has somehow faltered and become weak, making us feel as if we might fall off the surface of the earth. Sometimes, that moment of loss defines the rest of our lives, becoming a center to our compass forever. This unique book is a guidebook, an atlas of those experiences of loss and grief, a map for living through and into change and impermanence, to moving on anew. You are the navigator through the three main sections: Embrace what is:walking into your new landscape Honor what was:being grateful for your old landscape Love what will be:living into your future landscape Illustrated throughout with art submitted from around the world, this book is a visual atlas of experience, utilizing map imagery and the richly metaphoric, evocative, and functional language of geography to help you place yourself on your own journey.

Patti Digh is a Southern-born master storyteller whose stories are full of humor, poignancy, surprise, pain, and knowing. She is the author of four previous Skirt! books: the best-selling Life Is a Verb, a Books for a Better Life finalist; Creative Is a Verb; Four-Word Self-Help; and What I Wish for You. “If the Buddha had two kids, a dog named Blue, a Southern accent, and a huge crush on Johnny Depp, his name would be Patti Digh," wrote one reviewer after Digh's grassroots bestseller, Life Is a Verb, was published. She lives with her family in Asheville, NC. Visit her at PattiDigh.com.