They eventually feel what struck me as a bit of a quarter-life (or mid-life?) crisis and veers off-course to visit an old monastery.

Tea monks basically show up, listen to people’s feelings, and then make the perfect cup of tea for whatever their current needs are. The book follows Dex’s journey from an urban monk to a traveling tea monk who roams around the countryside on a bicycle/tiny house extravaganza. It means there are cute carvings and things of bears everywhere. Dex is in particular service to Allalae, who is tied to bears somehow. It’s got a lot of Buddhist traditions but tied to a set of 6 gods/goddesses. That said, this religion seems like kind of a mash-up of Buddhism and Hinduism to me. The most notable clear indicator that this is not Earth is the universal religion, which Dex is a monk in service of. Sibling Dex’s planet is a lot like Earth but definitely is not Earth. If that tv show was progressive enough to have a non-binary main character that is. Things happen but reading it feels sort of like visiting a 1990s era fantasy/scifi tv show where nothing truly dangerous happens and everything gets wrapped up nicely within 60 minutes. This book just oozes coziness and relaxation. When Dex diverges suddenly from their usual traveling path, a robot makes contact for the first time in generations. The robots found sentience years ago and left for the wild themselves. Dex is a tea monk on a planet that lives an eco-friendly lifestyle on a minimal share of the planet with a large portion left wild.

A psalm for the wild built cover