A collection of personal essays from a non-profit nature education center director who also created award-winning environmental literacy programming, outlining the challenges of balancing life and work in the same fields and forests. Here we find the pairings of the power of place and right livelihood, prioritization and perspectives that were foundational to the education centers early successes, and the authors continued work in environmental mentoring, and celebrating wild places and public parks and lands set aside for human connection to Nature.
The essays in Walking in Awe were written over two decades as the author strove to balance the demands of running a vibrant nonprofit with his thirst for being in Nature. Readers will delight in walking with Ranger Dave as he shares his insights and observations of Nature's magic. This collection of essays also offers an intimate look at the joys as well as the challenges of an individual committed to the health and well-being of the nonprofit he founded, the natural world, and himself. The thread that ties these essays together is the author's deep love of Nature and of place. Through heartfelt prose, Walking in Awe captures the author's gift for applying Nature's wisdom to his professional and his personal life. About the Author: Dave Van Manen is a New York City native whose love of Nature helped lead him to Colorado in the mid-1970s. Following a career as a musician, Dave founded a nonprofit Nature education center in the small town of Beulah in Colorado's southern foothills, where he has lived for nearly fifty years in a funky little cabin on a ponderosa pine hillside. He is an educator, musician, nonprofit consultant, writer, father, grandfather, husband, activist and an advocate for wild Nature, public lands, and Nature education.