Books
Grateful By Nature
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.
“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 and author of Wake Up Grateful
Grace and Tranquility
To be at peace is not an easy task. It’s a daily challenge to embody grace and tranquility in the midst of conflict and uncertainty. Yet even within our most difficult days, there are natural paths of ease and calm to be followed, found in our own stillness and the world’s persistent beauty. Grace and Tranquility maps a shared journey down these paths, which reveal themselves given our vision, our patience, and our mindful footsteps. Through photographs and meditative wisdom, Grace and Tranquility offers a daily practice of peace, as peace really is.
“Gypsy Soul did a fantastic job of setting Eric Alan’s inspired writing to music. The lyrics are perceptive and insightful — some of my favorite lyrics ever — because they make sense and I relate to them. The musical compositions and production is consistent and strong throughout this wonderful recording.”
~ Steve Smith, Modern Drummer Hall of Fame member; drummer for Journey, Vital Information, Jean-Luc Ponty, Mariah Carey and many others
This Is Our Time!
Out of the millions who chase baseball’s dream, only a few scale the sport’s most rarified heights. With uniquely wild style, the 2010 San Francisco Giants followed the 1969 New York Mets and the 1988 Los Angeles Dodgers into history as a World Championship team whose success was supposed to be impossible. Welcome to the place where rally thongs meet Zen lessons, where relentless discipline meets fake beards, where the yearlong San Francisco neighborhood party culminates in a million being blessed by the team’s Pope in the name of Mays and McCovey. This is the kind of legendary year for which all baseball lovers live—a rich story even for those who never knew before why to care about the game.
“I love the human spirit, and that’s what this team was all about. It wasn’t ‘our team beat your team.’ It’s what the human spirit can overcome. That’s the story of this whole thing. And that story is beautifully told in This is our Time!” — Tim Flannery, Giants Third Base Coach
“It’s our time. You can’t pick the time. For some reason, the time is now for us.” — Brian Sabean, Giants General Manager
Wild Grace: Nature as a Spiritual Path
One spiritual path contains all others and conflicts with none. It is nature itself, which fosters the life of all seekers. Nature speaks only wordlessly, offers no absolution, and has hard ways as well as sweet vistas. Yet within its quiet and its graceful, tightly woven forms are philosophical and practical answers, useful in our daily lives—regardless of where we live and how damaged the natural order may be there.
What is this spirituality, and how can we apply it? In reflecting upon this question, Eric Alan’s Wild Grace: Nature as a Spiritual Path integrates clear photographic and prose visions to create a beautiful celebration of the details of the natural world, and a meditation upon living mindfully within it.
“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