A Creative Journey Starts With An Expression of Gratitude

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.
- Melody Beattie

Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty.
- Doris Day

The Meditations on Beauty and Mystery Gratitude Journal celebrates the beauty and mystery of the natural world and of life. It contains my nature paintings, excerpts from Heron Dance interviews and a wide variety of other sources who have created unique lives out of their imagination, persistence and hard work:

• The backwoods wanderers — Thoreau, Emerson, Sigurd Olson, Whitman, Burroughs, Everett Ruess. (See my book on Amazon, Thoreau and the Art of Life).

• The ancient Taoist hermit poets of the mountains of South China. (See my book Wild Waters and the Tao).

• The mystics Rumi, Rabindranath Tagore, Kahlil Gibran, Abraham Joshua Heschel among many others.

• Those who probe for the deeper mysteries of the universe underlying science – Einstein, Loren Eiseley, Carl Sagan.

• People who devote their lives to some concept of a greater good — those who work in refugee camps, soup kitchens, with the addicted and homeless, people who work to protect wilderness.

I look for wisdom, for insight into this precious gift of life we’ve been given, it’s meaning and potential sources of strength wherever those insights might be found.

This work is the basis of the Substack, A Pause for Beauty, and will be printed in hardcover or wire-o editions sometime in 2025, and a PDF:

• The PDF will probably sell for $25.

• A wire-o bound book that will probably sell for $49, shipping and taxes included.

• A set of inserts for binders into which you can also insert blank pages for your own journaling. These inserts will probably sell for $39, taxes and shipping included, and each will eventually be a part of a series of six. The custom Heron Dance binders themselves will also sell for $39, and links to less expensive mass-produced polypropylene binders will be available.

• If we get a Kickstarter funded, there will be a hardcover special edition with a Smyth sewn lay-flat binding. Each copy will be signed and numbered. More here.

The binders hold standard 11 x 8.5 inch paper, though hole punched for oblong or landscape.