Streams of Contentment: Lessons I Learned on My Uncle’s Farm

With over 200,000 books sold, Robert J. Wicks, the bestselling author of Riding the Dragon, applies lessons learned as a city boy spending summers on his family’s farm to the complex and hectic reality of contemporary life. For the first time, author, speaker, psychologist, and spiritual guide Wicks opens a window into his personal life, relating stories of the people and places that have shaped his spiritual perspective in youth and early in his professional career. Streams of Contentment: Lessons I Learned on My Uncle’s Farm takes as its focus Wicks’s experiences as a New York City boy spending summers on his uncle’s farm in the Catskills. He highlights the resonance between life in the country and the insights of spiritual writers on gratefulness and mindfulness, concluding: The crucial calling for me now is to be content with who and where I already am.
With characteristic charm and insight, Wicks offers a simple prescription for finding contentment: have low expectations and high hopes, recognize that a little silence and solitude is no small thing, and discover the surprising power of humility. He also includes thirty brief reflections and simple practices for discovering contentment. In fifteen poignant, sometimes humorous, and always instructive lessons, Wicks builds on the insights first developed in Riding the Dragon to demonstrate how contentment is found through simplicity, gratitude, and compassion.