Sacred Play

About the Book

Sacred Play: Lessons from Procreating with Nature provides women who have never before found the courage to hike or camp alone, but who have longed to do so, the information and inspiration which will propel them into their first outing. Bowlsbey’s tales of confronting her inner demons and her foibles of venturing into the outdoors without the succor of a man demystify the fears women commonly confront when contemplating being alone in the outdoors. Her reflections explore the transformation that precedes as well as results from confronting one’s self alone in the wild. The wild spaces that she comes to intimately know and love transform her fears into an appreciation of the sanctity of the unknown and joyful anticipation of the mystery of not always knowing where her path is leading or what will be there when she arrives.

Sacred Play: Lessons from Procreating with Nature opens a door to a different kind of outdoors than that typically experienced in the company of men. In this new outdoors, safety is found in intuition, women need not compete with or dominate their surroundings, and communion is possible with the flora and fauna that share the wild. Topics shift from the practical issues of shelter and safety to issues such as meeting men in the outdoors and dealing with the energy of the full moon and finally to the metaphor that living in the uncertainty of the wilderness provides for confronting the uncertainties of daily life.

The vignettes which comprise Sacred Play not only provide a discourse on the origins and nature of fear, but also an intimate description of many of the wild spaces of the American Southwest. Bowlsbey’s journey reveals some of the last wild spaces unmarked by human encounter.

About the Author

Becky Bowlsbey offers wilderness camping retreats to women through her company SacredPlay Nature Tours LLC. Her love affair with nature was incubated in childhood camping trips to the beach and later bloomed when Becky realized that only her intuition could protect her in the outdoors. At the age of nineteen, she bought a whitewater kayak and financed her education in part by working as a whitewater raft guide. At age 24, she joined the Peace Corps and moved to Arab North Africa. She then went on to live on the Sudanese-Ethiopian border, where she worked with Ethiopian refugees. Germaine Shames, writing for Tucson Guide Quarterly, describes Bowlsbey as “a self-taught outdoorswoman with the instincts of a she-lion.” Travel writer Alison Gardner, writing for Focus on Women, quips that Bowlsbey “gave up the career paycheques .. and now she earns a living teaching the rest of us to play!”