Back to the Wild

ALAIN SAURY was born in Enghien, Belgium, in 1932 to Catalan and Brazilian parents. He was forced to work to support himself at age sixteen. He wanted to be a shepherd, but his father wanted him to be a doctor. By all appearances, this obvious conflict made him a worker first of all. The practice of about fifty trades then guided him toward his true vocation: poetry, which he transmitted through various artistic media.

He endured a long series of pathological mishaps brought on by ignorance and ambition—and aggravated by deadly allopathic therapies—which forced him to undergo an intense period of agony from which he was relieved, little by little, through vegetarianism and fasting. This long process of awareness brought him to take on other media through which he shared his conversion. He gave lectures, wrote books, and gave consultations. Undoubtedly influenced by Hanish, Tomatis, Jesus, John of the Cross, Leclerc, Goethe, Steiner, and Saint Francis of Assisi, he turned to the plant.

In 1972, he became head editor of the magazine Guitare et musique chanson poesie, which he transformed during his three years there (until the founder of the magazine’s passing). He was then named Vice President of the Vegetarian Association of France, and embarked on a lecture tour that took him across Europe and into Canada. He created “psycho-dietetics,” which considers all vibrations to be nutritional, especially the most subtle of these vibrations, which arise out of the giving of oneself and out of the revelation of that unique being each of us is carrying within. Art therapy, occupational therapy, spirituality, and music therapy become his focus, through an asceticism of fasting, reflection, and prayer.

In 1977, he organized the Health and Nature Congress in Nice, in partnership with Nature and Progress, and then suggested a series of lectures with the most dedicated upholders of ecology and spirituality. At this time he became president and founder of the Green Hands Foundation, whose purpose was “to rediscover the laws of life, and to follow them, and to teach these laws in such a way so that every individual might harmoniously heal, protect, and save him or herself, and everything around him/her, and to selflessly pour his/her energy into personal and altruistic creations …” In this way, we recover the virtue of humility and dismiss ourselves as kings of nature.

In 1977, he received the “Craftsman without Borders” Prize in Nice for one of his sculptures. In 1979, he was named a member of the Accademia Tiberina già pontificia in Rome, for his selfless work as a poet, sculptor, painter, journalist, and writer.

In 1981, he created and directed the collection “Vie et survie” (Life and Survival) at Éditions Dangles, which saw the publication of some dozen books aimed at protecting our environment.

He created “Le Jardin des Affinities” cultural center in Nice, where he served as professor of dramatic arts and stagecraft.

He died in 1991, in Coaraze, a tiny medieval village in the Alpes-Maritimes region of France. There he had devoted his time to naturopathy, painting, sculpture, his spirituality, poetry… to nature and to human nature.

Jean Cocteau said, “Alain Saury seeks to embody words and to penetrate the soul as others penetrate the body: poetry is an act of love.”