Oregon author Eric Alan works daily spreading a new message about gratitude. He compares the qualities of being thankful not as a feeling but an action, in the way the skills of a carpenter are realized when used to build a shelter.
Alan’s latest book, “Grateful by Nature,” is centered on caring for his aging mother, aviator and artist Shirley B. Froyd. In 1977, she left a Southern California suburb where she was a flight instructor to pioneer an environmentally based, intentional community deep in the forests southeast of Eugene.
There, at age 51, she designed and built by hand two adjoining log homes with a Quaker couple who had crossed the country, also in search of a new way of life. It took years to complete the two homes and install running water and electricity in the remote location.
In 2010, when Froyd was alone and almost 84, Alan relocated to be by her side. At the time, he hoped they’d enjoy one or two more years together. They were given 10. He wrote in his new book that caring for her “was the most loving work I can imagine, if also painful.” She died at age 94 in 2020.
During her last decade, they’d walk a mile to the mailbox. “I breathed our walk in deeply, grateful we’d been able to share that simple pleasure for so long,” he wrote.
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Together, they also worked with neighbors and others to legally protect 1,000 acres of oak groves, meadows and riparian areas around her home. The community formed the nonprofit Cerro Gordo Land Conservancy, which partnered with McKenzie River Trust to restore owl habitats, remove invasive plants and make other nature-supportive improvements.
When wandering through a meadow, especially when his shoes leave tracks deep in snow, Alan said he understands a path forward always exists. “Each of us, within our personal wilderness, needs a path to walk with gratitude, to live to our capacity,” he wrote in the chapter called “Dormancy and New Beginnings,” which also contains his original song lyrics and photographs.
Throughout the 224-page book, he offers a deeper meaning of gratitude; in one part, comparing it to “warming work, like chopping wood is a refuge from the cold even before the fire is lit.” He’s been reflecting on gratitude for 20 years. A half-empty glass of water can be full of light, he said.
The benefits of being grateful — acknowledging the good in life — have also been studied by medical practitioners, scientists and economists. Psychologist and University of California Davis professor Robert Emmons’ decades-long studies found links between gratitude and wellbeing.
Alan’s new book — after “Wild Grace: Nature as a Spiritual Path” and its sequel, “Grace and Tranquility: Natural Peaceful Paths Through Every Living Day,” which he helped adapt for the Gypsy Soul album, “Grace and Tranquility” — is a project of healing and service, he said.
He poetically describes the rewarding chores of growing food and cooking meals for his mother, the changing of the seasons and nature’s unwavering connection to his life.
“I walk outside at 2 a.m. on a sleepless winter night, into silence almost as profound as that beyond air,” he wrote. “There’s no border between where I am and the infinite. No moon at the moment. Stars descend until it seems I could stir them with my fingers into whirlpools of light.”
Since 2011, Alan has contributed essays to the “Celebrate What’s Right with the World” online journal, founded by Dewitt Jones, and since 2015, Alan and “Words on the Nature of Life” blogger Tom Titus have been organizing The Nature of Gratitude community gatherings across Oregon. An ensemble of artists present live music, spoken word and photography to raise donations for humanitarian causes.
On Nov. 12, at Tsunami Books in Eugene, they raised money for “Bags of Love,” which provides necessities and comfort items to children who are in crisis due to neglect, abuse, poverty, homelessness or disaster.
Tsunami Books owner Scott Landfield said Alan and Titus are “the progenitors of the gratitude movement in Oregon.” He said Alan has led eight Nature of Gratitude events at the bookstore, “and we’re just plain thankful to have him around.”
On Nov. 15, the presentation at the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library collected donations for Stone Soup Corvallis, a nonprofit, volunteer organization that gives a full meal each day to any person in need.
Alan said time with his mom and his predawn writing helped him understand gratitude as something selfless, like caregiving. With both, he said, “You put into action whatever the needs are of the day.”
He wrote that Froyd learned to fly before she could drive, performing barrel rolls, roll-off-the-top turns and other aerobatic maneuvers in open cockpit planes in the 1940s. She grew up in New York and earned her pilot’s license at Stephens College, a private women’s college in Columbia, Missouri, that offered the first aviation program entirely for women in the country.
“She graduated number one in her class, which doesn’t surprise me at all,” said Alan. She won the 1952 All-Woman Transcontinental Air Race and, 62 years later, she co-piloted a 1929 Fleet biplane on her 88th birthday, and again, on her 89th birthday.
She earned two master’s degrees, in aviation and art. Froyd created 750 watercolor paintings in her home studio. More than 600 are installed in residences and businesses. Many fill the walls of her log home.
“I live within my mother’s greatest piece of artwork,” Alan said. “To me, this entire house is art, from the shape of it to the way the art studio was placed in the middle, to the acoustic design of the house, which was very conscious. This is a beautiful place for music.”
Standing vertically in the art studio is a 1940s airplane propeller, its wood stain, mottled over time, looks like giraffe skin. Nearby is a photo of Alan and his mom in a biplane. When he was 18 and she was a flight instructor at the Bates Aeronautics Program at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, they flew together to Colorado.
Alan wanted to be an astronaut when he was a kid, to explore free from gravity. He became an aerospace engineer in his 20s, then stopped to be a writer. Each year, instead of New Year’s resolutions, he thinks about New Year’s appreciations, being grateful for what’s “already real,” not what’s missing.
In the last pages of the book, Alan thanks his family, friends and all those doing “gratitude’s carpentry” to make the world a more compassionate place.
— Janet Eastman | 503-294-4072
jeastman@oregonian.com | @janeteastman