In 2015, I began to collaborate with author Tom Titus and other authors, musicians, poets, and community service activists on an annual event called “The Nature of Gratitude.” Our ever-evolving ensemble of artists comes together on stage to explore and share our experience of nature and gratitude in music, spoken word, and photography. We believe that art in its beautiful variety opens us to the practice of gratitude in our lives. Authentic gratitude recognizes that all life is a gift for which we can be grateful regardless of circumstances surrounding us in any given moment. NOG has been shared in a variety of community venues committed to co-creating an atmosphere of gratefulness. We augment our core ensemble by enlisting artists from our host communities who share their gratitude in words and music. At each event, NOG is honored to raise funds and awareness for a community nonprofit organization dedicated to providing universal human services.

Former National Geographic photographer Dewitt Jones has been dedicated to seeing the world through a lens of celebration for decades. I first discovered his inspiring perspective through his long-running column in Outdoor Photographer magazine, which inspired my own integration of writing and photography. Through wild synchronicities, we eventually connected personally on the island of Molokai, and began to collaborate in 2011. I’ve been honored to continue to contribute a monthly blog post of prose and photographs ever since. To practice celebration and gratitude on a daily basis has been a life-changing experience.

Grateful Living (a.k.a. A Network for Grateful Living) is a U.S.-based, global nonprofit organization serving a growing movement of individuals and communities who want to engage with life more gratefully. Through a wide range of offerings, ANGL’s mission includes supporting people to see the wonder and opportunity in every moment and to act boldly with love, generosity, and respect towards ourselves, one another, and the Earth. ANGL was founded in 2000 by Brother David Steindl-Rast, together with a small group of friends and supporters. Brother David is known as the “grandfather of gratitude” and is one of the most vital figures in the modern interfaith dialogue movement. ANGL has published several of my pieces on gratitude, and I will be offering online classes through ANGL, beginning in summer, 2023.

Cerro Gordo Land Conservancy was formed to protect 1,000 acres of precious open land on the north shore of Dorena Lake in Oregon, adjacent to where we live. My mother moved here in 1977 to become part of the attempt to build environmentally-based intentional community. When that vision didn’t come to fruition as planned, the community shifted to land preservation, successfully obtaining conservation easements via the Healthy Forests Reserve Program and the Willamette Wildlife Mitigation Program. I spent three years as a founding board member of Cerro Gordo Land Conservancy, before stepping away to care for my mother. The Conservancy is now focused on meadow restoration, oak woodlands, and riparian areas, while also creating wildlife habitat within the evergreen areas on the upper easement. 

McKenzie River Trust is a nonprofit land trust formed in 1989 to protect critical habitats and scenic lands in the McKenzie Basin. Since 2000, MRT’s service area has included the watersheds of the Long Tom, Upper Willamette, Coast and Middle Forks of the Willamette, Umpqua, Siuslaw, and coastal streams and lakes from Reedsport to Yachats. In 2021, MRT expanded its coastal service area to stretch from Reedsport north to Lincoln City and opened its first field office in Newport. Throughout MRT’s history, it has partnered with caring landowners, members, foundations, and partner organizations to forever protect land and water in western Oregon. In 2017, MRT partnered with Cerro Gordo Land Conservancy to protect 531 acres of vital land at Cerro Gordo, through the Willamette Wildlife Mitigation Program.

My personal path to a daily practice of gratitude ran through the waters at Wilbur Hot Springs in California, and through a cancer journey that began there. I had the blessed opportunity to live there as a resident artist in 1992, which was life-changing even before I discovered the lump that told me I had a life-threatening illness. The healing community at Wilbur helped guide me back to health, then into deeper health than I knew before cancer. Thirty years later, I’m now beginning to return to Wilbur to give back, through meditations and workshops based on Grateful by Nature and the Wilbur stories it contains, along with my partner Kimberly Hawkins. 

The remarkable beach labyrinth draws in Bandon, Oregon, created by Denny Dyke and his volunteer team, have been an essential inspiration for the meditative frame of Grateful by Nature. Many photos and stories from Circles in the Sand are contained within the book as well. The labyrinths are created and shared with the public for free, with the ongoing schedule posted on the Circles in the Sand website.

My lifelong passion for live music has taken another turn, as I assist in creating a rural house concert network in central Oregon. As the traditional music business has declined in its support for the artists creating that music, house and farm concerts have become an increasingly vital part of offering musicians and their audiences a healthier, more nurturing way to share music. Through various rural and town venues, Music Money 501c3—a project of the nonprofit Another Way Enterprises—is strengthening live music culture in Cottage Grove and surrounding areas, supported by a grant from the Oregon Cultural Trust, via the Lane County Cultural Coalition. 

I first met Tim Flannery, co-founder of the Love Harder Project, when he was the 3rd base coach of the San Francisco Giants, on his way to winning three World Series championships in five years. Also a stellar musician, he and his band the Lunatic Fringe began to create benefit concerts to support the healing of Giants’ fan Bryan Stow, who was savagely beaten in the Dodger Stadium parking lot in 2011. “You can’t hate the haters,” Tim says. “You have to love harder.” So the anti-violence Love Harder Project was born, expanding from its initial focus to become a wider movement of peace and healing. I’ve been honored to make my small contribution via writing the promotional sheets for the last several albums by Tim Flannery and the Lunatic Fringe.

As a survivor of intimate assault and random gang violence, I firmly believe that all of us—men and women—need better ways of relating and healing for prevention of abuse and assault, and healing its scars. This begins with each of us taking responsibility for our personal growth and healing, and finding ways to peacefully create a better community now, and a kinder generation to come. When I was in Ashland, I was introduced to the ManKind Project by co-founder Bill Kauth, among others. MKP is a nonprofit education and training organization that supports a global network of peer-facilitated men’s groups and supports men in leading lives of integrity, authenticity, and service. MKP believes that emotionally mature, powerful, compassionate, and purpose-driven men will help heal some of our society’s deepest wounds. The organization supports the powerful brilliance of men and asks them to look at—and take responsibility for—the pain we are also capable of creating, and suffering.