Determined to hang prayer flags at Mt. Everest Base Camp, Olivia trekked through Tibet while under the scrutiny of Communist China. She survived earthquakes, landslides, and a middle-of-the-night hijacking while enroute to a remote village in Nepal. Confronted with her own sense of meaning, she went toe-to-toe with the suffering, challenges, and decisions that all beings face, which included the capacity to love and let go.
New ways to heal the spirit during the most challenging times. Traci Rhoades, author of Not All Who Wander (Spiritually) Are Lost, continues to find profound beauty and endless insights in her spiritual wanderings among church traditions. In this new book, Rhoades encourages readers to explore practices – some ancient and others unconventional – that offer solace for those times when ‘the bottom drops out.’ Sharing what she’s learned about God, Rhoades shakes off the limits of denominational boundaries, making this book particularly valuable for younger Christians or those who are longing to take a deeper dive into their faith.
Annotation The interrelated essays in this book explore the coming together of ethics and poetics in literatures that engage with their contemporary moments to become wagers on the future of meaning. The central concern of The Poethical Wager is the relation of poetics to agency in a chaotic world.
WHERE STILLNESS SPEAKS, Inspired by original Shaker journals By Margaret C. Price Experiencing a mystical flight through time to a Shaker utopia (Civil War, 1863), an investigative journalist discovers a secret that frees her from demons of her past, empowering her to speak her truth in WHERE STILLNESS SPEAKS, historical fiction. The novel unfolds a woman’s transformational healing journey in two different time periods. Present day at the authentically restored Shaker village of Pleasant Hill, and the Past, a short time after the horrific battle of Perryville. WHERE STILLNESS SPEAKS is a love story played out against the backdrop of a Shaker utopia. It is a utopia of time-travel, of places where the skin between the worlds is thin, a place apart from modern day chaos and violence. The core values of the Shaker utopia (respect for the earth, pacifism, racial and sexual equality, belief in a spirit world) resonate still today. The novel invites the reader to Pleasant Hill where Trappist monk Thomas Merton wandered among the abandoned buildings and “listened to the Silence” while sitting on a chair made by someone “perfectly capable of believing an Angel could come and sit down on it.”
Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller & Wall Street Journal Bestseller In The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy, bestselling author Ryan Holiday made ancient wisdom wildly popular with a new generation of leaders in sports, politics, and technology. In his new book, Stillness Is the Key, Holiday draws on timeless Stoic and Buddhist philosophy to show why slowing down is the secret weapon for those charging ahead. All great leaders, thinkers, artists, athletes, and visionaries share one indelible quality. It enables them to conquer their tempers. To avoid distraction and discover great insights. To achieve happiness and do the right thing. Ryan Holiday calls it stillness--to be steady while the world spins around you. In this book, he outlines a path for achieving this ancient, but urgently necessary way of living. Drawing on a wide range of history's greatest thinkers, from Confucius to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius to Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stuart Mill to Nietzsche, he argues that stillness is not mere inactivity, but the doorway to self-mastery, discipline, and focus. Holiday also examines figures who exemplified the power of stillness: baseball player Sadaharu Oh, whose study of Zen made him the greatest home run hitter of all time; Winston Churchill, who in balancing his busy public life with time spent laying bricks and painting at his Chartwell estate managed to save the world from annihilation in the process; Fred Rogers, who taught generations of children to see what was invisible to the eye; Anne Frank, whose journaling and love of nature guided her through unimaginable adversity. More than ever, people are overwhelmed. They face obstacles and egos and competition. Stillness Is the Key offers a simple but inspiring antidote to the stress of 24/7 news and social media. The stillness that we all seek is the path to meaning, contentment, and excellence in a world that needs more of it than ever.
Embark on a thrilling international quest to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Sean McQueen is a staid, middle-aged NYU literature professor leading an uneventful life, until he receives a cryptic letter from his intellectually and poetically gifted best friend, Dylan Byrne. Following years of extensive research, Dylan claims that he has discovered "the theory of everything": a revelation that promises to alter man’s view of existence by reconciling science with spirituality. The two men arrange a meeting to discuss the paradigm-shifting theory, but after Dylan never shows, Sean discovers his friend has died under mysterious circumstances and the theory has gone missing. Sean teams up with Dylan’s scientific collaborator, quantum cosmologist Emily Edens, to find the lost theory. Together they embark on the adventure of a lifetime—traveling from the busy streets of New York City to the mystical corners of Kathmandu where Dylan realized his groundbreaking theory. On their quest, they encounter extraordinary allies and fearsome adversaries, including a covert government operative code-named "Guru," who is hell-bent on finding the theory first and preventing Sean and Emily from sharing it with the world. The Lost Theory is an exhilarating adventure of self-discovery, full of magical realism, mystery, and romance, all wrapped up in a story overflowing with wit, intrigue, and a sense of ultimate redemption.
Tailey came from the humblest of beginnings. His life had begun as a stray barn cat, and though he was now the beloved companion and protector of a young, deaf girl named Megan, he still had no idea of how far afield his destiny would soon take him, or how dangerous things would become. Megan is under grievous threat from Ichneumon, Possessor of Souls, who seeks to erase her and the threat of her powerful, unrealized magic from existence, assuring his own continued supremacy on his home world of Katlyn. But when a mysterious cat’s eye stone whisks Tailey off to that other world, under its blue sun, and he finds himself in the midst of an epic battle between good and evil, all he can think of is getting back to his little girl and keeping her safe. With the help of the cats of Katlyn, a wolf cub, a small but magical creature called Nep, and the enormous and wise Animond, Yahmond Yah, he searches for a way back home, even as Katlyn is being torn asunder by the dark forces of Ichneumon on one side and the ancient evil of the ebony sword on the other. As peace unravels and blood is shed on all sides, ancient enemies will come together, forging new bonds of trust, and working together to stand against the darkness. But amidst such chaos and uncertainty, how can one small gray cat ever hope to find his way home ... before it’s too late.
Medicine and healing have always played a central role in human civilization. Before the birth of synthetic medicine in the 19th century, nearly every civilization around the world employed herbs and plants to deal with disease.
Insists on the importance of embodiment and movement to the creation of Black sociality Linking African diasporic performance, disability studies, and movement studies, Falling, Floating, Flickering approaches disability transnationally by centering Black, African, and diasporic experiences. By eschewing capital’s weighted calculus of which bodies hold value, this book centers alternate morphologies and movement practices that have previously been dismissed as abnormal or unrecognizable. To move beyond binaries of ability, Hershini Bhana Young traverses multiple geohistories and cultural forms stretching from the United States and the Mediterranean to Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South Africa, as well as independent and experimental film, novels, sculptures, images, dance, performances, and anecdotes. In doing so, she argues for the importance of differential embodiment and movement to the creation and survival of Black sociality, and refutes stereotypic notions of Africa as less progressive than the West in recognizing the rights of disabled people. Ultimately, this book foregrounds the engagement of diasporic Africans, who are still reeling from the violence of colonialism, slavery, poverty, and war, as they gesture toward a liberatory Black sociality by falling, floating, and flickering.
