In My Father's Garden: A Daughter's Search for a Spiritual Life - Paperback

Kim Chernin's mother was a leftist firebrand, an American Marxist at mid-century, when it was dangerous to be one. Her father, a quiet man, was no less radical. Why then, decades later, does their daughter--a liberal California psychoanalyst and writer--find herself drawn toward a spirituality that would have shocked her parents? Through three personal stories, Chernin tackles the questions that pull at all of us: how to make sense in a world whose order isn't always apparent, and how to find balance between the mind and the spirit. "Kim Chernin writes with immediacy and intimacy."--City Life, London.

Back Jacket

For years Kim Chernin thought her activist mother was her role model. She grew up in a household where her mother, a stormy revolutionary, organized meetings and debated politics. She was, she thought, her mother's daughter. Now, decades later, the author, a California psychoanalyst, finds that it is her father's gentle manner that has profoundly influenced her. While her mother taught her that she could change the world through bold action, in large and important ways, her father sought to make things happen in small ways. Now Chernin finds herself drawn to recollections of her father quietly working in his garden, which was, for her, she now realizes, a sanctuary and a school. Through three personal stories, Chernin, author of In My Mothers House, reflects on her own spiritual impulses. Whether she is comforting a dying woman or seeking wisdom from a Hindu holy woman, she keeps returning to the image of her father in his garden. That image helps awaken Chernin to a spiritual awareness and a realization that the world can be changed through gentle, caring deeds on a small scale - as small (and as large) as her father's garden.