Heartwood Author Event with Lindsay Branham and Sonya Renee Taylor

Join us in-store when environmental psychologist Lindsay Branham presents Heartwood: The Wisdom and Healing Kinship of Trees, in conversation with spiritual and social theorist Sonya Renee Taylor.

The event is free but registration is required to reserve your seat.

Emmy‑nominated filmmaker and University of Cambridge Environmental Psychologist Lindsay Branham invites readers into an embodied, reciprocal relationship with trees to heal our severed connections to ourselves and the earth, returning home to the living world.

In the midst of the California wildfire season, Lindsay Branham was besieged by unexplainable health symptoms. Her descent into chronic illness challenged her notion of Western frameworks of “healing,” compounded alongside rapid ecological loss. Through a catalytic love affair with a family of trees in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado, an odyssey of healing unfolds—a poetic evocation to love the Earth, and to be loved back. What if human and planetary health is connected? What if healing is an embodied ecological process, not an outcome? What if trees are our guides to connection?

Through the intertwining rings of science and spirit, this is the story of how Lindsay was summoned by trees, brought together to share their enduring wisdom—we each belong to this world, and it’s up to us to protect the whole of it. Heartwood conjures an invitation to go on a journey with trees; from strangers to kin because, as Lindsay lays out in detail, everything belongs, and trees in all their sentinel, entangled, alchemical generosity embody that kinship, defy domination and can help us both repair a lost relationship with the Earth and learn to embody mutuality, collectivity and care for the forest. Combining scientific research from her PhD studies at Cambridge on interoceptive awareness, our body’s “eighth sense,” which she suggests is the sensuous language of the Earth, readers will be walked through a step‑by‑step wonder-filled process of creating an intimate and reciprocal relationship with the more than human world, while learning why remembering our birthright of belonging to nature is a central antidote to mitigating climate collapse.

This tender, lyrical work explores concepts such as eco‑grief, reciprocity as life force, the pace of place, erotic ecology, attachment healing with nature, composting suffering, entangled futures, loving inter-species kinship and death doulaship. Heartwood speaks directly to what is the missing piece at the heart of the unfolding environmental mega-crisis: the fact that our dissatisfaction, discontent and despair are core symptoms of being separated from nature and shares exactly how to rediscover the medicine that is right under our feet.

Dr Lindsay Branham is an environmental psychologist, Emmy-nominated film director and eco-doula. Her PhD research titled "The Body of the World" envisages co-created spaces of colonial resistance and imaginative fields for radical futurities between humans and the living world. Lindsay’s first book, Heartwood: The Wisdom and Healing Kinship of Trees (Hachette/2026) was praised by Richard Rohr as, “A gift to us all to widen our hearts with more love for this suffering world.” Heartwood invites readers into an embodied, reciprocal relationship with trees to heal our severed connection to ourselves and the Earth, returning home to the living world. Dharma Teacher Brother Spirit at Plum Village Monastery writes that Heartwood “restores our ability to hear and understand the language of the land.” Lindsay is trained as a Buddhist eco-doula to provide spiritual support in climate collapse. She is committed to the spiral-like relationship between personal and collective transformation and intersectional equity and justice. Lindsay is the founder of Novo Films, a social and environmental impact studio where she has directed 40+ films reaching 200 million people and is also the founder of The Heartwood Institute, weaving ecology, science and spirituality together to restore kinship between humans and the living world. She has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic and more.

Sonya Renee Taylor is one of many hands currently called to midwife the new world. She is a spiritual and social theorist, guide, poet, storyteller, vision holder, intuitive astrologer, and evangelist of evolutionary radical love. She is the author of seven books including the New York Times bestseller The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love (2021) and her most recent offering for young readers The Book of Radical Answers (2023). From International Poetry Slam Champion, to wilderness counselor, to public health professional to the visionary and architect of the global media and education company and movement, The Body is Not an Apology, Sonya’s journey has been about touching the hem of those on the margins and weaving our stories back into oneness. Sonya is a global citizen currently helping to birth written, digital, and land-based offerings that move the world toward the embodiment of liberatory radical love. To learn more visit www.sonyareneetaylor.com