Bestselling author, spiritual teacher, grief counselor, and poet Stephen Levine spent more than 40 years in the Southwest, living near the Carson National Forest and the Picuris Pueblo in northern New Mexico and tending a wildlife reserve in southern Arizona for The Nature Conservancy. He spent every day interacting with, meditating on, and learning from the local wildlife and landscape as well as from his own companion animals. Inspired by the Jataka Tales--hundreds of anecdotes and fables depicting earlier incarnations of the future Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama--Levine collected his own stories of transcendent moments with animals. These memoirs, essays, and poems comprise an open-hearted, vulnerable, sometimes apologetic, and often humorous exploration of the mystical importance of animals in the cultivation of meaning and purpose in our lives and in teaching us compassion and empathy.