Grateful by Nature offers gratitude as our shared path home, within a return to nature. Through poetic stories and vivid photographs, the book’s mindful walk through five seasons in the Oregon backwoods outlines gratitude as a devoted practice. It guides gratitude into daily action, able to transform our most painful challenges into healing and compassion. Being grateful is like being a carpenter: the skills are only realized when you use them to build shelter for others. Grateful care for each other and the life around us becomes the shelter we share. Gratitude becomes as beautiful as the wild earth, as comforting as awakening peacefully at home.
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Grateful By Nature
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“Eric Alan’s beautiful book Grateful by Nature invites us into a soul-stirring journey where the sacred nature of our lives, one another, the seasons, and the natural world is illustrated on every page through thoughtfully placed words, stories, and images. We are challenged to open our hearts to a pervasive and generous experience of gratitude that lives beyond our customary concepts and in service of a sense of peace and possibility which few of us have ever known but for which many of us are longing. The book’s case for committing to gratitude in every moment is compelling. It would be impossible to read this book and not find nuggets of wisdom in each short chapter that want to be memorized, shared, and posted as guiding affirmations for how to more intentionally live our truly poignant days on this truly precious Earth.”
–Kristi Nelson, Executive Director, A Network For Grateful Living
About the Author
Eric Alan is an author, photographer, lyricist, and feral forest resident. His book Wild Grace: Nature as a Spiritual Path has inspired workshops and meditations on the reintegration of nature into daily life. Its sequel Grace and Tranquility offers contemplative peace in a turbulent world. The companion Grace and Tranquility album merges the music of international recording artists Gypsy Soul with lyrics adapted from both books. The wild spirit within baseball is in This Is Our Time!, co-written with Major League Baseball writer Chris Haft.
Grateful by Nature integrates photography and prose from a decade of contributions to Celebrate What’s Right with the World, a movement founded by former National Geographic photographer Dewitt Jones. It also arises from community events called The Nature of Gratitude, which gather authors, musicians, poets, social activists, and others to raise gratitude and awareness for local causes. As a founding board member of Cerro Gordo Land Conservancy, Eric assisted in obtaining conservation easements to protect 1,000 acres of vital open land. He was also the full-time caregiver for his mother in the forests, until her passing near her 94th birthday.
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“Eric Alan has produced a lovely book, matching evocative writing with absolutely stunning photography. It is personal and probing, providing an intimate connection to nature. He describes it as a spiritual path, and indeed it is—a book designed to strengthen one’s heart and soul.”
– Bill Meadows, President, The Wilderness Society
“His worthwhile voice forms a useful and needed bridge to the truly natural language we all share and have forgotten how to speak.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Splendid book.”
– David James Duncan, author of The River Why and The Brothers K
“Does nature offer not only an environment conducive to spiritual awakening, but a relevant model for living in a world overrun by rampant consumerism and corporate homogenization? Readers of Wild Grace will conclude the answer is a definitive ‘yes.’ Comprehensive and cogent, beautiful and often brutally honest, Wild Grace draws wisdom from both the spectacular and the mundane. It’s an artful combination of prose and images that is both contemporary and timeless.”
– The Harbinger/Brushwood Institute
“What Hemingway would call a ‘movable feast’… Alan’s astoundingly beautiful nature photography and lyrical prose pulls the reader into a deep contemplation of the natural world and one’s relationship to it… Few will be able to read it without deep introspection, learning and pleasure.”
– U.S. Congressman Les AuCoin (D-OR, retired)
“A delight; a living testimony to the truth that all things Celestial are hidden in the common — once we have learned how to read the book of Life.”
– Guy Finley, best-selling author of The Secret of Letting Go, Apprentice of the Heart and others.
"A book that reminds us of connections the world conspires to make us forget."
– Bill McKibben, author, environmentalist, founder of 350.org
“Eric Alan's Wild Grace lives up to its name, and captures the imagination of those of us that love the great outdoors.”
– Chuck Leavell, Rolling Stones keyboardist, tree farmer and conservationist
“Blends stunning color photography with graceful and profound insights on how to encounter the natural world as a sacred space.”
– Powell’s Books, Portland
“Beautiful, compelling book… A book for delving, more like a walk than a study, a poking into ideas, images, questions.”
– Kim Stafford, Oregon Poet Laureate