Zen Ties by John J. Muth is a continuation from the Caldecott Award winning book, Zen Shorts.
This time, Stillwater, the large, loveable, very Zen Panda, has his nephew, Hi Koo come to visit. Hi Koo only speaks in Haiku.
Together, they make the lives of the neighborhood children and an elderly neighbor a heartwarming and surprising experience. We all learn from Stillwater in a gentle manner.

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Love Letter
by Sylvia Plath (1932-63)

Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit.
You didn't just toe me an inch, no -
Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars.

That wasn't it. I slept, say: a snake
Masked among black rocks as a black rock
In the white hiatus of winter -
Like my neighbors taking no pleasure
In the million perfectly-chiseled
Cheeks alighting each moment to melt
My cheek of basalt. They turned to tears,
Angels weeping over dull natures,
But didn't convince me. Those tears froze.
Each dead head had a visor of ice.

And I slept on like a bent finger.
The first thing I saw was sheer air
And the locked drops rising in a dew
Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay
Dense and expressionless round about.
I didn't know what to make of it.
I shone, mica-scaled, and unfolded
To pour myself out like a fluid
Among bird feet and the stems of plants.
I wasn't fooled. I knew you at once.

Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.
My finger-length grew lucent as glass.
I started to bud like a March twig:
As arm and a leg an arm a leg.
From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
Now I resemble a sort of god
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Pure as a pane of ice. It's a gift.


From No Bliss Like This - Five Centuries of Love Poems by Women pages 74-75.
Compiled by Jill Hollis


No Bliss Like This is a delightful and highly original collection, showing that on the subject of romantic and sexual love, women can be just as eloquent as men - if not more so.

Here, the bitter and the sweet mingle as women from the last five hundred years write about jealousy, fickleness, exhilaration, the pain of parting and the transience of love. Included are surprises from women who are known from other things, like Elizabeth I and Mary Shelley as well as classics old and new such as Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Erica Jong, and Dorothy Parker.

Shall we close with one more? Maybe a little Dorothy Parker to put it all into perspective?

Comment
Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
and I am Marie of Rumania.
- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

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The Botany of Desire - A Plant's-Eye View of The World by Michael Pollan

There are flowers, and then there are flowers: flower, I mean, around which whole cultures have sprung up, flowers with an empire's worth of history behind them, flowers whose form and color and scent, whose very genes carry reflections of people's ideas and desires through time like great books. It's a lot to ask of a plant, that it take on the changing colors of human dreams, and this may explain why only a small handful of them have proven themselves supple and willing enough for the task. The rose, obviously is one such flower; the peony, particularly in the East, is another. The orchid certainly qualifies. And then there is the tulip. Arguably there are a couple more (perhaps the lily?), but these few have long been our canonical flowers, the Shakespeares, Miltons, and Tolstoys of the plant world, voluminous and protean, the select company of flowers that have survived the vicissitudes of fashion to make themselves sovereign and unignorable.

So what sets these flowers apart from the run of charming daisies and pinks and carnations, not to mention the legions of pretty wildflowers? Perhaps more than anything else, it is their multifariousness. Some perfectly good flowers simply are what they are, singular and, if not completely fixed in their identity, capable of ringing only a few simple changes on it: hue, say or petal count. Prod it all you want, select and cross and reengineer it, but there's only so much a coneflower or a lotus is ever going to do. Fashion is apt to pick up such a flower for time and then drop it - think of the pink, or gillyflower, in Shakespeare's day or the hyacinth in Queen Victoria's - since it won't let itself be remade in some new image once its first one is passe.

By contrast, the rose, the orchid, and the tulip are capable of prodigies, reinventing themselves again and again to suit every change in the aesthetic or political weather. The rose, flung open and ravishing in Elizabethan times, obligingly buttoned herself up and turned prim for the Victorians. When the Dutch decided the paragon of floral beauty was a marbleized swirl of vividly contrasting colors, the petals of their tulips became extravagantly "feathered" and "flamed." But then, when the English went in big for "carpet bedding" in the nineteenth century, the tulips duly allowed themselves to be turned into a paint box filled with the brightest, fattest dabs of pure pigment, suitable for massing. These are the sorts of flowers that bear our oddest notions gladly. Of course, their willingness to take part in the moving game of human culture has proven a brilliant strategy for their success, for there are a lot more roses and tulips around today in a lot more places, than there were before people took an interest in them. For a flower the path to world domination passes through humanity's ever-shifting ideals of beauty.


Excerpts from Pages 77-78 - The Botany of Desire A Plant's-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan, Bestselling Author of The Omnivore's Dilemma (recently selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the Top Ten Books of 2007) and the new book, In Defense of Food

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned thirty, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She had everything an educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want - a husband, a house, a successful career. But instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed with panic, grief, and confusion. She went through a divorce, a crushing depression, another failed love, and the eradication of everything she ever thought she was supposed to be. To recover from all this, Gilbert took a radical step. In order to give herself the time and space to find out who she really was and what she really wanted, she got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world - all alone. Eat, Pray, Love is the absorbing chronicle of that year. Her aim was to visit three places where she could examine one aspect of her own nature set against the backdrop of a culture that has traditionally done that one thing very well. In Rome, she studied the art of pleasure, learning to speak Italian and gaining the twenty-three happiest pounds of her life. India was for the art of devotion, and with the help of a native guru and a surprisingly wise cowboy from Texas, she embarked on four uninterrupted months of spiritual exploration. In Bali, she studied the art of balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. She became the pupil of an elderly medicine man and also fell in love the best way - unexpectedly. An intensely articulate and moving memoir of self-discovery, Eat, Pray, Love is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment and stop trying to live in imitation of society's ideals. It is certain to touch anyone who has ever woken up to the unrelenting need for change.

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Girl Overboard by Justina Chen Headley

Girl Overboard - The worst thing about having it all is having to deal with it all - the good, the bad, and the just plain weird. Everybody thinks Syrah is the golden girl. After all, her father is Ethan Cheng, billionaire, and she has everything any kid could possibly desire, right down to a waterfront mansion, jet plane, and custom-designed snowboards. But as Syrah reveals in her manga journal, most of what glitters in her life is fool's gold. Her half-sibs hate her, her best friend is in a consuming relationship, and a snowboarding accident exiles her from the mountains - the one place where she feels free and accepted for who she is, not what she has. As she rehabs her busted-up knee, Syrah rehabs her heart and learns that she's worth her weight in real gold.

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Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson

In 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time - Greg Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban. The powerful and profoundly moving story of how one man really is changing the world - one school at a time.

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The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan's critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, "the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect" (New York Times).

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The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present.

The first Afghan novel to be written in English, this is the unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant. The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sons-their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

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The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

Ken Follet's historical masterpiece, The Pillars of the Earth is a spellbinding epic tale of ambition, anarchy, and absolute power set against the sprawling medieval canvas of twelfth-century England.
This is the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known. This is also the story of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect - a man divided in his soul and of the beautiful, elusive, Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame. A struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state, and brother against brother.

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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson's first travel book opened with the immortal line, "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." In this hilarious new memoir, he travels back to explore the kid he once was and the weird and wonderful world of 1950s America. He modestly claims that this is a book about not very much: about being small and getting much larger slowly. But for the rest of us, it is a laugh-out-loud book that will speak volumes - especially to anyone who has ever been young.

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Atonement by Ian McEwan

On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment's flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia's childhood friend. But Briony's incomplete grasp of adult motives - together with her precocious literary gifts - forces a situation that will change the course of their lives. As it follows that event's repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.
Now a major motion picture.

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Death Pans Out by Ashna Graves

Things don't always pan out as you expect...
In the mid-1800s miners used the phrase "pan out" to describe their mining success. On a good day, their pans were filled with precious gold; on a bad day their pans were filled with dirt. But in Death Pans Out Ashna Graves demonstrates that sometimes it's what you don't expect to find at the bottom of the pan that proves most interesting.
Journalist Jeneva Leopold doesn't expect much out of life after her double mastectomy, but her uncle's idle gold mine proves the perfect place to rekindle her enthusiasm for living. However, when a young miner turns up dead in the eastern Oregon town and Jeneva begins to investigate, she uncovers her own family secrets.

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