Author Mary Rose O Reilly is a decidedly eclectic woman--confidently blending sheep tending with her Quaker background as well as her passion for Mahayana Buddhism (the ancient form of Buddhism which Vietnamese monk Thich N hat Hahn has helped to popularise in the West). This may sound like the recipe for a soup of spiritual mush, but nothing could be further from the truth. O Reilly also happens to be a hysterically funny storyteller who understands the importance of humility when writing spiritual autobiography. (One reviewer called O Reilly a social anthropologist from the Planet Mongo, a stand-up mystic going for the belly laugh...) Whether she s talking about the grief over dying lambs, the plague of Monkey Mind, flipping sheep, or a barnyard fashion crisis, O Reilly keeps her metaphors down to earth and her epiphanies humble. The structure is especially inviting--a collection of brief essays, only about 3-5 pages each. Yet this collection also reads like a journey with a beginning and an end. It starts with O Reilly as a college professor who decides to try some part-time animal husbandry at a local farm and ends with her finding a new direction in life that we can only hope will inspire her to write a sequel. --Gail Hudson