Gratitude For The Wild

Since the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, a hotly contested debate over the value of wilderness reveals cultural anxieties about an American society that has spurned limits. Gratitude for the Wild explores how the wild known in wilderness raises our tolerance for mystery in the recognition of our limits and in the celebration of a God-loved world that exceeds our grasping. The idea of wilderness introduces questions about the balance between utility and appreciation, and between enjoyment and restraint. Wilderness is a nexus of competing and contested accounts of responsibility. In conversation with the work of Doug Peacock, Terry Tempest Williams, James Gustafson, and Martin Luther King Jr., Nathaniel Van Yperen offers an original argument for how wilderness can evoke a vision of a good life in which creaturely limits are accepted in gratitude, even in the face of ambiguity and mystery. Through the theme of gratitude, the book refocuses attention on the role of affection and testimony in ecological ethics and Christian ethics.

An excerpt from the poem, Wild Gratitude: "Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey, And put my fingers into her clean cat's mouth, And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens, And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air, And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight, I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart, Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing In everyone of the splintered London streets, And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke's With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude, And his grave prayers for the other lunatics, And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry. All day today—August 13, 1983—I remembered how Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759, For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience."

Beautifully illustrated book following the correspondence between a young girl and Santa over the course of a year. The illustrator is best known for her book TOne Woolly Wombat' and the author has written numerous books including TThe Very Best of Friends', which won the 1990 Picture Book of the Year Award.

The Grumbles were a happy family . . . some of the time. They tried hard to not complain but bills and laundry and sibling squabbles kept the Grumbles rumbling. But when Grandma Grateful came for a visit, they noticed something different. Will Grandma be able to show the Grumbles how to approach life with gratitude? Bestselling authors Tricia Goyer and Amy Parker have teamed up to provide children and their families a sweet, simple, and silly story about how to turn grumbles into gratefulness.

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.

Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, Joan Z. Borysenko, Lee Carroll, Sri Daya Mata, Doreen Virtue, Bernie Siegel, M.D., Dan Millman, John Randolph Price, and others share their understanding of the practice of gratitude.