Living on the Earth - 50th Anniversary, 5th English Edition

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$ 24.95 Regular price $ 30.95

Book trailer on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/482912881?share=copy

For Alicia's personalized inscription in your book, click here.

Published on February 22, 2021, the Echo Point Books & Media 5th edition has thick, cream-colored sustainably-sourced paper, plant-based inks, and features an introduction by architecture, design and counterculture historian Greg Castillo, a professor at University of California at Berkeley.


This is a classic, best-selling unguide to alternative country life, entirely handwritten in the author's script and illustrated with her line drawings. It is a practical home reference volume that includes information on organic gardening, outdoor cooking, crafts, herbology, midwifery, backpacking, survival, first aid, making and playing musical instruments, sewing, pattern drafting, building a kiln, a kayak, an ice chest, making candles, soap, ink, beaded curtains, ice cream, tamales, and, at the end, how to cremate. A list of magical books, and websites for finding intentional communitees and ecovillages, along with a star map and an old English poem to the moon, follow the index.


Originally published in 1970, Living on the Earth is about permaculture, sustainability, simplicity and environmentalism--words that came into our vocabulary ten to twenty years later. Most of the projects involve recycling--stoves and flotation devices from 55 gallon drums, individual greenhouses from glass jugs, patchwork skirts from neckties. It's about withdrawing from consumerism and finding true happiness through creativity, respectful interactions with nature, appreciation of other people, and consciousness of the Divine.



It is a spiritual book that uplifts and instructs largely through the illustrations of people living outdoors serenely and vigorously. The message of the front cover illustration--ecstatic union with the natural world--resonates with people because it is our birthright. Living on the Earth was and is a freedom call to people in all parts of society---yes, it IS possible to find a simpler and more satisfying life outside of the industrial-military complex. Yes, it is possible to live in a world of innocent, smiling nudes, surrounded by things you grew, found or made yourself.

Living on the Earth is also a historical document, an insider's view of the artisanal life of the communes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, today widely used in university history courses. Along with Ram Dass's Be Here Now and The Whole Earth Catalog, it bespoke the joyous upwelling of global stewardship, trusting comradery, and direct communion with the Universal Spirit that marked the era's sudden and enormous counterculture.


Living on the Earth is a milestone in twentieth century art. (Publishers Weekly took note immediately upon publication of the Random House second edition with a handwritten two-page review surrounded by Alicia's drawings.) Within months after Living on the Earth was first published, dozens of new books and commercial art (packaging, advertising, giftware designs and greeting cards) based on its design and illustrations began to appear. Its influence is still clearly evident five decades later, especially on packaging for natural foods.

Living on the Earth was written, illustrated and designed by a teenager. As such, it speaks to young people as one of their own, daring them to create books, live adventurously, learn the sources of things they take for granted, follow their dreams. Alternative schools (where drawings of smiling nudes are not forbidden) happily use the book as a craft project and/or coloring book for students.
In 2012, Living on the Earth was chosen by a panel of food and cookbook experts chosen by the Fales Library at New York University (which holds the largest collection of books about food in the United States) as one of the 101 most influential American cookbooks of the 20th century - even though it defies definition as a cookbook.

Wholesale ordering is available on this item.
Please contact Alicia at alicia@aliciabaylaurel.com

About the 50th Anniversary 5th English edition, with reader comments

Reviews and reader response to the first and second editions

Reviews and reader response to the 3rd and 4th editions

Book trailer at: https://vimeo.com/552592036?share=copy

Originally published in 1973, and newly released in 2021, Being of the Sun is a totally hand-lettered and lavishly illustrated un-guide to creating and curating your own spiritual path, including practices Alicia Bay Laurel and Ramón Sender Barayón adapted from pre-historic nature worship, plus the ceremonial music they imagined to accompany them.

Widely read for decades by wiccans, pagans, and Druids, and beloved in Japan, where Shinto, another animistic nature religion, is practiced in addition to Buddhism, Being of the Sun also (unknowingly) recalls the 19th century European nature/nudist/vegan cults that were the ancestors of the 20th century hippies (about which Alicia much later learned from Gordon Kennedy's wonderful book, Children of the Sun.)

Alicia's illustrations for Being of the Sun have been reproduced on high fashion clothing in Japan by two famous designers. The spiritual songs and chants, created separately and in collaboration by composer/philosopher Ramón Sender Barayón and singer/songwriter Alicia Bay Laurel, have been performed as a part of North American indigenous peyote rituals, as part of Nicholas Alva's stage show "Morningstar, the Musical," in the soundtracks of documentaries about Alicia and about Ramón, and on their album, Songs from Being of the Sun, available here in this store.

Feast on Ramón's musical lore about scales, modes, drones, and combining music with sounds of nature. Learn how to sing overtones, tune a zither or a waterfall, and create a drone orchestra, a sun strobe, a bamboo root oboe, a May pole, a harvest goddess doll, a yoga routine or a meditation altar.

The color illustrations for the 2021 English language edition were scanned directly from Alicia's drawings made in 1972, preserving her original vibrant color palette, rather than the toned-down colors used by publishers in previous editions.

Being of the Sun is also available here in a Japanese translation.

A few precious copies of the original 1973 edition are available here.

This book is available to retail businesses at wholesale prices; if you are interested, please contact Alicia at alicia@aliciabaylaurel.com.

History and Reader Comments about Being of the Sun

Rare first edition, published in 1973 by Harper & Row, San Francisco.

Condition: like new.

Designed, handlettered and illustrated by Alicia Bay Laurel, with poetry by the late Joseph Pintauro.

The Earth Mass is a series of gentle, joyous and colorful ceremonies for celebrating nature and humanity, written by a former Catholic priest who became a celebrated poet and playwright.

A large format book with many color pages, and illustrations on every page.

"Earth Mass
is super
sensitive soft
full of spirit
and things to do
to let you be
free innocently
like little children."

Dr. Bernard Gunther PhD, co-founder of Esalen Institute

"Passion and gentleness are interwoven in this poetical manual that concerns the unbashedly human and evocatively holy rituals of our lives. It is exuberant and a signal work of art."

Rev. Malcolm Boyd
Civil Rights activist

"The Earth Mass is just right for those who long for new ways to say a blessing over that fleeting strangeness we call life. Its recipes and incantations for freshening things could help you to wake up singing."

Sam Keen
Philosopher, author and professor


The book later became a favorite among wiccans, Druids and pagans over the intervening decades.

"Hard to find, and worth its weight in emeralds." Dama, Onelist.

Sylvie Sunflower is a children's book about life on a hippie commune in the late 1960s, featuring the title character, who gives the reader a tour of her home, family and neighbors. Published by Harper & Row in 1973.

The book was centerfolded in Ms. Magazine's Stories for Free Children, curated by Lety Cottin Pogrebin, in 1973. It was released in Japanese translation by Shoshisha Ltd. in 1974.

It is part of a boxed set of three coloring books, the other two of which are The Family of Families and Happy Day, Cried the Rainbow Lady, Full of Light. The boxed set was also published by Soshisha.

In the 21st century, Sylvie Sunflower is often studied as part of university counterculture programs, both for its lifestyle elements, and its early second wave feminist content.