Douglas Wood
Composer, recording artist, wilderness guide, and self-taught naturalist-Douglas Wood is perhaps most widely known as the highly acclaimed author of OLD TURTLE, a 1993 ABBY Award winner and an International Reading Association Book of the Year. Author of several books for readers of all ages, Douglas says he is always seeking themes that are universally significant to both children and adults. His first book for Candlewick Press, GRANDAD'S PRAYERS OF THE EARTH-winner of the Christopher Medal for "affirming the highest value of the human spirit"-quietly explores the theme of grief and healing while celebrating a human connection to the natural world and the enduring spirit of love. Douglas Wood kept in mind someone very special to his own life when writing GRANDAD'S PRAYERS OF THE EARTH. "I feel I've been getting ready to write this book all my life, for it is about my wise and gentle hero, my Grandad. It's a prayer and a thank you, a walk in the woods, and a remembering smile; and it is for anyone who has ever had a woods to walk, a prayer to whisper, a hero to love."
Douglas Wood lives with his family in a log cabin on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minnesota.
“We do not give thanks because we are happy. We are happy because we give thanks." --Douglas Wood”
“There's a willow tree that stands by my river She holds me in her arms when I am cold. And we listen to the sounds Of the pebbles on the ground, And I know what it means to be old.”
“The heart that gives thanks is a happy one, for we cannot feel thankful and unhappy at the same time.The more we say thanks, the more we find to be thankful for.And the more we find to be thankful for, the happier we become.We don't give thanks because we're happy.We are happy because we give thanks.”
“Most prayers are not really questions...and if we listen very closely, a prayer is often its own answer. ...We pray because we are here - not to change the world, but to change ourselves. Because it is when we change ourselves...that the world is changed.”