NATURE WISDOM

About the Book

Nature Wisdom: Mystical Writer of the Big Sur-Monterey Coast, is a coffee table book -- an enlarged revision, in full color, of the author's black and white version, Shepherds of Pan on the Big Sur-Monterey Coast. Both books are a medley of provocative essays about the perennial philosophy linking some unlikely bedfellows: Robert Louis Stevenson, Richard Henry Dana, Gertrude Atherton, Jack London and 'The Bunch,' Robinson Jeffers, Jaime de Angulo, John Steinbeck, Eric Barker, and Henry Miller, with a tribute to the 'blood conscious' mysticism of D. H. Lawrence and a postscript on the 'organic psychology' of William James.
Under the spell of the alternately soft and violent landscape of California's Central coast, these writers intuited the awesome power of divinity in Nature and became what the author calls 'shepherds' of Pan, defenders of the ancient Greeks' metaphorical pipe-playing, hoof-stomping god of Nature.
This new edition is a multicolored meditation on a deeply rooted, and often overlooked, all-too-human need to reconnect with Nature, wellspring of our inner joy and psychic wholeness.

About the Author

ELAYNE WAREING FITZPATRICK (BA English, MS Philosophy) was a city desk reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune; promotion director of KUED, Utah’s public television station; and an associate professor at the University of Utah before relocating in California in 1974 to teach Philosophy and Humanities at Monterey Peninsula College on California’s Big Sur-Monterey coast. She is also a freelance journalist who, after raising a family, began travelling to -- and writing about -- some of the world’s most charming places unspoiled by industrial development. Other books by the author include: A Quixotic Companionship: Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Ethics for Rascals; Doing It with the Cosmos: Henry Miller’s Big Sur Struggle for Love Beyond Sex; Shepherds of Pan on the Big Sur- Monterey Coast; Nature Wisdom: Mystical Writers of the Big Sur-Monterey Coast, a revision and expansion of Shepherds of Pan in color; and an initial edition of this book in black and white. Her features have appeared in numerous periodicals. Web site: www.capricornbrae.com