Quiet Fire Press is the home of a lifelong body of work — memoir, fable, and fiction — shaped by field ecology, contemplative practice, and the wonder of noticing.

The Ecology of Awareness

Field Notes from a Life of Noticing

Some things arrive without asking permission.

What does a mouse trembling in your hands beside a pair of nail clippers, a dog who has climbed into the dryer to wait out a thunderstorm, and a hurricane that took the house and the neighborhood have to do with ecology?

Everything, it turns out.

That is what an ecologist notices when he turns his scientific lens inward, through fifty years of meditation.

For forty years, Robert F. Doren worked as a wetland ecologist, studying how living systems function. He did not expect that the same habits of attention in the natural world would one day turn inward, or that a lifetime of quiet meditation would gradually reveal a pattern he had been living inside all along.

The Ecology of Awareness is a memoir in field notes: patient, observant, and unafraid to say that love and attention may be the same thing.

Together, these books form four intertwined movements of one life’s work.