Photo: Ben Goldstein/Studio D

Guardians of Being
Written by Eckhart Tolle, Illustrated by Patrick McDonnell
128 pages; New World Library

Take a good long walk. See the sea. Don't worry about a thing. The sublimely relaxing lesson of Guardians of Being, an inspired collaboration between spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle  and comic strip artist Patrick McDonnell, is, hey, you can knock off now! Stop thinking, take a gander at the world around you. Sniff the air. And if you don't know how, just watch your pet. "I have lived with many Zen masters," Tolle writes, "all of them cats." His serene text tells you how to relish each moment, and McDonnell responds with droll, delicately rendered drawings, some perfect little visual meditations (a moonlit beach, raindrops on a footbridge), others funny, disarming comic strips—a bee consulting his to-do list ("just bee"), a dog helping its owner get away from it all ("Although," muses the dog, "I don't have that much of an 'all' to get away from"). A book to make you wriggle with joy.

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