Coming Down to Earth

In her first major work since Holy Envy, one of our most luminous spiritual writers offers an intimate vision of the sacred work of being human, shaped by three decades of living close to the land.

“Why do so many religious people look up for comfort instead of down, as if heaven were our only home and not this earth under our feet? Why not both? Who said we had to choose?”

For decades, bestselling author Barbara Brown Taylor has helped readers rediscover the sacred in the ordinary. In a moment when many feel unmoored by climate anxiety, political division, the twisting of religion into something ugly, and the speed of modern life, Taylor offers an alternative: a spirituality grounded in dirt, birdsong, weather, seasons, chores, and the irrepressible life of the world around us.

In Coming Down to Earth, Taylor turns to her 175-acre farm in rural Georgia to reflect on what being in relationship with the land has to teach her. This intimate account of awakening and falling love with a landscape becomes, over time, a meditation on mortality, legacy, and what it means to entrust the world to future hands.

Through droughts and storms, seasons of abundance and decay, encounters with wild creatures and stray animals, reckonings with history, and the deep quiet and deeper darkness of the woods, Taylor finds everything she needs to know about being human in a world she did not make and cannot control. She writes candidly about making peace with impermanence, and embracing a faith rooted not in escape from this world but in a deeper intimacy with it. “The earth knows more than I do about almost everything,” she writes, “and I am finally learning to listen.”

Certain to become a modern spiritual classic, Coming Down to Earth invites us to come back to earth and notice what has been waiting for us all along.