The qualities I love most in Mary Rose O’Reilley’s writing are humor, honesty, and the bestowal of permission—on herself and on the reader—to be "imperfect," to embrace uncertainty and see where it leads. The Love of Impermanent Things is subtitled “A Threshold Ecology,” and I haven’t quite figured out what she might mean by that. Human ecology is the study of communities, the patterns of relations between people and their environment. A threshold is a demarcation of a new place—and can sometimes be a breaking point. Even though I don't know what she intended with the combination of those words, each of them provides a hint as to what goes on inside the book.

O’Reilley’s “memoir” writings are, to me, reminiscent of Annie Dillard’s (as in An American Childhood or The Writing Life); they mix autobiographical facts with nostalgia-fogged memory as well as lessons learned (or learning) and ruminations on creativity. On the idea of “productivity” while at a writer’s retreat: “Should I count it a productive morning, having learned to watch drops of water stand at attention, or do I have to write a double sestina to earn my keep?” Giving herself permission to nourish creative needs, she writes, “It’s okay to throw pots all year… You don’t have to write a book… dig out the buckthorn, learn Spanish… clean your office…. Mary, just throw pots.”

O’Reilley also explores her own spiritual life, from her Catholic childhood to her call to the novitiate to Buddhism to the Society of Friends. Although this path is traced more explicitly in The Barn at the End of the World, it weaves in and out of The Love of Impermanent Things, as well. She writes of the sense of relief at discovering the use of the word “guidelines”—rather than rules—within the Quaker community, and that “Quakers are good at trying out the terrors of freedom within a circle of support.” She notes that Merton often wrote about “how difficult it was for him to live the religious life with the spiritual equipment of the artist.” She follows with this declaration from friend Parker Palmer: “I value spontaneity more than predictability, exuberance more than order, inner freedom more than the authority of tradition, the challenge of dialogue more than the guidance of a rule, eccentricity more than staying on dead center.”

The entire book is a quiet declaration (non-linear and often non-narrative) of a belief in exploration, letting-go, trusting, trying, trying again, holding conflicting ideas simultaneously—the master potter making the teabowl who must “in the same breath, obey the rules and transcend them.” The book is offered as memoir, and the subject headings provided by the publisher are biographical, but O’Reilley lays out her hopes in the introduction that what the reader will find out “will not be the story of [her] life, but of your own.” She invites you “not to work but to rest. Stare and ponder.”