Crossing Thresholds Island Reflections

In Crossing Thresholds, Amba Gale deeply touches upon themes that are relevant to living our lives with meaning, gratitude, and wonder. Through photographs and poems, taken and written in the Isle Royale area of Lake Superior, she shares her own story of tapping into Silence, through connecting with the natural world, and, from there, into her own deep wisdom and creativity, as she crossed a personal threshold, which crossing necessitated embracing impermanence, letting go of resistance to what is, accepting change, making room for endings, creating completion, and opening up space for new beginnings. As a coach for and leader in people's personal development and transformation, and a stand for the awakening of human consciousness, she creates compelling reflective inquiries, inquiries to think within, associated with each poem and photograph, which allow us to engage with our own, parallel, journey, as we, too, move into our depths.

Open new doors of inspiration, wonder, possibility and perception for yourself as you allow the words of the poet, Amba Gale, to inspire you into your own deep and hidden thoughts. A companion journal to Crossing Thresholds, Island Reflections, Amba provides you with new opportunities for reflecting: for your own wisdom, creativity, and writing to guide you through your days. Discover that you are "hungry for your words" and that those very words are "food for your Soul."

This volume of work explores the politics, challenges, and future of UN peacekeeping operations from the Asia-Pacific.

"A threshold is a sacred thing," goes the traditional saying of ancient wisdom. In some corners of the earth, in some traditional cultures, and in monastic life, this is still remembered. But in our fast-paced modern world, this wisdom is often lost on us. It is important for us to remember the significance of the threshold. While it is certainly true that thresholds mark the end of one thing and the beginning of another, they also act as borders-the places in between, the points of transition. These can be physical, such as the geographical borders of a country; others, such as the spiritual border between the inner and outer world-between ourselves and others-are intangible. In To Pause at the Threshold, Esther de Waal looks at what it is like to live in actual "border country," the Welsh countryside with its "slower rhythms" and "earth-linked textures," and explores the importance of opening up and being receptive to one's surroundings, whatever they may be.

This innovative collection of essays explores the ways in which islands have been used, imagined and theorised, both by island dwellers and continentals. This study considers how island dwellers conceived of themselves and their relation to proximate mainlands, and examines the fascination that islands have long held in the European imagination. The collection addresses the significance of islands in the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century, the exploration of the Pacific, the important role played by islands in the process of decolonisation, and island-oriented developments in postcolonial writing. Islands were often seen as natural colonies or settings for ideal communities but they were also used as dumping grounds for the unwanted, a practice which has continued into the twentieth century. The collection argues the need for an island-based theory within postcolonial studies and suggests how this might be constructed. Covering a historical span from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the contributors include literary and postcolonial critics, historians and geographers.

An eye-opening exploration of the intriguing and often counter-intuitive science of human navigation and experience of place. In the age of GPS and iPhones, human beings it would seem have mastered the art of direction, but does the need for these devices signal something else—that as a species we are actually hopelessly lost. In fact we've filled our world with signs and arrows. We still get lost in the mall, or a maze of cubicles. What does this say about us? Drawing on his exhaustive research, Professor Collin Ellard illuminates how humans are disconnected from our world and what this means, not just for how we get from A to B, but also for how we construct our cities, our workplaces, our homes, and even our lives.

In recent years, urban uprisings, insurrections, riots, and occupations have been an expression of the rage and desperation of our time. So too have they expressed the joy of reclaiming collective life and a different way of composing a common world. At the root of these rebellious moments lies thresholds'the spaces to be crossed from cities of domination and exploitation to a common world of liberation. Towards the City of Thresholdsis a pioneering and ingenious study of these new forms of socialization and uses of space'self-managed and communal'that passionately revealscities as the sites of manifest social antagonism as well as spatialities of emancipation. Activist and architect Stavros Stavrides describes the powerful reinvention of politics and socialrelations stirring everywhere in our urban world and analyzes the theoretical underpinnings present in these metropolitan spaces and how they might be bridged to expand the commons. What is the emancipatory potential of the city in a time of crisis' What thresholds must be crossed for us to realize this potential' To answer these questions, Stavrides drawspenetrating insight from the critical philosophies of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Henri Lefebvre'among others'to challenge the despotism of the political and urban crises ofour times and reveal the heterotopias immanent within them.