Each year as I put together some suggestions for Christmas gifts and stocking stuffers, I look to see if there’s some underlying theme or idea. What seems to unite my choices this year is the glimpses that they offer into worlds that are hidden or largely unseen. And in doing so, each in its own way provides a revelatory window into the mysterious and grace-filled experience of being alive. Great works of spirituality are like great poetry, so rich with insight and beauty that they make you want to go slow and savor them. A book of sketches of plants and animals might not seem on the surface like a spiritual text, and yet reading through Jo Brown’s sketch journal of the flora and fauna that she’s encountered, I found myself proceeding in a similar fashion, reading just a single a page a day or every couple days, so that I could enjoy it for that much longer. Each image is like a little encapsulation of the grandeur of God about which Gerald Manley Hopkins, Mary Oliver and so many other great poets have eloquently written. It’s the kind of book that makes you treasure the smallest things of the world more deeply; I think of it as something to clutch in the cold days to come, a glimpse of the beauty that persists beneath the surface, waiting patiently for its moment to live again.