The Watch - by Paula Sager (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Sometimes the most ordinary object can open a door to life's greatest mysteries. For Paula Sager, it's a wristwatch-one that takes on a life of its own after her father's death, prompting questions concerning synchronicity and the nature of relationship. Paula walks alongside her father to the threshold of life, bearing witness to every step. Time is the landscape. Contemplative practice spreads out the crumpled map. The Watch delves into the mystery of time as lived experience, and to the possibility that every moment can be a portal to the invisible realm beyond time.

Insights from the author's own well-developed paths of practice shed light on new ways of perceiving, new ways of knowing and being. Cultivating embodied presence, intuitive insight, and the capacity to bear witness can enhance our most essential relationships: that of parent and child, teacher and student, doctor and patient, and even our human bond with nature and the numinous.

The twelve chapters of the book are framed by a prologue and an epilogue. At the end of each chapter, the reader finds a place to pause and reflect. Here, in poetic form, Paula Sager invites the reader to enter their own contemplative experience and inquiry.

With the aperture of the lens keenly focused on the final year of a life well-lived, The Watch offers a compelling perspective, bringing new questions to important conversations about life, death, and relationship beyond death.

Review Quotes

"Paula's memoir, beginning with a wristwatch and ending with a swan, reveals the extraordinary experience they shared after he became sick. Time disappears; their reality becomes mysteriously and beautifully something known only to the two of them. As the horizon beckons her father onward, Paula achieves a clarity about life, death, and love and an affirmation that "all earthly beings are participating in something vastly larger and more intertwined than any of us can fathom." This memoir holds a powerful message for the reader; I've already started my second round."

- Bill Moyers, journalist and public commentator

"In this luminous meditation on the death of a beloved parent, Paula Sager gracefully dances between embodiment and contemplation, between heartbreak and gratitude, between memory and presence. Her vivid depictions of lives being fully lived, from kayaking the Atlantic waters to shopping for a watch in a suburban mall, make this book sing, and render her father's dying a holy, holy thing."

- Mirabai Starr, author of Wild Mercy and Ordinary Mysticism

"Paula Sager seamlessly weaves the threads of loving connection, intimate glimpses of family life, childhood memories, and contemplations on the complex of feelings evoked during this momentous time. Moving with grace between the gnarly realities of dealing with cancer in the family, and a wider perspective that embraces past and future within the present, Sager is "left with a clear knowing: Now is the time to savor being in this body, in this life." This book is indeed a celebration of life lived to the full, moment by moment, even as it traces the path of grief at the loss of a loved one."

- Linda Hartley, author of Wisdom of the Body Moving and Embodied Spirit, Conscious Earth.