Insiya Rasiwala-Finn

Organizer, Camp Moomba Yogathon & Blissfest

campmoombayogathon.com

What book is on your bedside table? Chasing Clayoquot: A Wilderness Almanac (Raincoast), by the naturalist David Pitt-Brooke, who lives in Tofino.

Page-turner or doorstop? You wouldn’t believe it, but the author makes the history of one singular rock seem as interesting as Angelina Jolie’s and Brad Pitt’s newest domestic drama. So I would say it’s a page-turner.

Would you put it on your desert-island list of must-haves? Well, considering that it would definitely take you far, far away from a desert-island landscape since it does focus on the moisture-filled, temperate rainforest right here in our backyard, probably yes.

Describe the book in one sentence. A wondrous journey through one of Canada’s as-yet wild frontiers in a voice that brings focus, history, and humour to humanize and contextualize the most abstract principles of ecology and geology.

If you designed a poster for the book, what would it look like? A human being entwined with a glorious, old-growth tree—one melding into the other.

List three new words you learned from reading it. Definitely expanded my beyond-the-urban vocabulary. Here’s to using one of these soon: argillite, a fine-grained sedimentary rock composed predominantly of clay and silt-sized particles; semaphore, a visual signalling apparatus with flags, lights, or mechanically moving arms, as is used on a railroad; Evinrude, a brand of outboard motor.

To whom would you recommend this book? Anyone who wants to experience the magnitude and natural rhythms of nature—even from the confines of our urban landscape.

How often did you find yourself re-reading a paragraph because it was so delicious? I’ve actually been re-reading bits of it during the yoga classes I teach. Here is a passage that resonated with me: “A breaking wave in deep water moves with dignity, slow and ponderous. In sunlight, it’s a beautiful thing to behold, a mountain of green water, its shoulders cloaked in a mantle of snowy white foam, massive, sedate, majestic. In the dark of a storm, the same wave becomes ominous and menacing. These are Kipling’s ‘great, grey-green, hissing widow makers.’”

—Erica Gehrke