Falling In The Flowers

When she loses her job and her lover in one fell swoop, art history professor Rose Ming agrees to accompany her mother on an annual visit to relatives in her Chinese hometown of Three Rivers. Once there, Rose learns that she, her mother, aunt, and her cousin, Hong-Mei, have all shared a strange dream prompting them to search for an ancestor nobody seems to remember. With her future uncertain, Rose decides to solve the family mystery, and instead unearths an unutterable tragedy hidden for over a hundred years.Living in the last decades of the Qing dynasty, Peony, Lady Han, has every material comfort, a doting husband, and two beautiful children. With so much to share, she decides to adopt Jasmine, the daughter of her devoted maidservant, A-mei, giving her the advantages of a comfortable upbringing. But while Peony's daughter, Iris, embraces Jasmine as a sister, the the new addition to the family has deeper repercussions throughout both families, altering more than one future. And when Rose discovers the true history of the Han and Wang families, including their unbearable losses, she learns the meaning of love, friendship, family, faith, and the sacrifices people are willing to pay to achieve them, a lesson that allows her to face her own future with new courage.

Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Children's Illustrated Book A New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book of the Year In this wordless picture book, a little girl collects wildflowers while her distracted father pays her little attention. Each flower becomes a gift, and whether the gift is noticed or ignored, both giver and recipient are transformed by their encounter. “Written” by award-winning poet JonArno Lawson and brought to life by illustrator Sydney Smith, Sidewalk Flowers is an ode to the importance of small things, small people and small gestures. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.7 Use illustrations and details in a story to describe its characters, setting, or events.

In this sweet story, a young girl in modern-day Japan takes a special trip to visit the blossoming cherry trees with her grandmother. What is more fun than the zoo, more beautiful than a shrine, and prettier than the neon lights of Tokyo? Mayumie and her grandmother are taking a train ride into the heart of the biggest city in Japan to see something special, but Grandmother won't say what it is. Mayumie tries to guess what this special place might be, but the excitement of riding the train and seeing the sights of the city is almost thrilling enough. Finally, they turn down a quiet street and find what Grandmother has been looking for--a grove of Japanese cherry trees, all in blossom. This touching story of a little girl's outing with her grandmother takes place in modern-day Japan, where cherry trees bloom for one week every spring. With text simple enough for beginning readers, author Jennifer Reed captures the excitement and wonder of a young girl's day in the big city, while illustrator Dick Cole's watercolors complement both the serenity and animation of Tokyo in the springtime.

Presents simple techniques for an early spring garden of color profiling 30 hardy annual flowers.

Hope for the Flowers: A must read during this time of the corona virus and civil unrest in 2020. Caterpillars, Butterflies, Life & a real Hope Revolution THE WORLD HAS BEEN COCOONING; LET US EMERGE WITH HOPE. We have all lived through months of strange relationships with ourselves and the world around us. Virtual gatherings have become the norm, while the pain, uncertainty and injustice goes on. What will our new normal possibly become? What new work? How can we do our part to heal the world from whatever limited space we have? How can our United States truly be one nation under God with liberty and JUSTICE FOR ALL? “What might I do to help others during this global crisis? Is likely still your question as well as still mine. I will continue to offer my e-book for $2.99 with my hope that it can strengthen hope and courage in each of you and your children. We will need all we can get! If inspired, please join our Facebook group - Hope (For the Flowers) Revolution. Maybe we can inspire each other to build the better world that's possible. My hope for us is that, like our caterpillar heroes, Stripe and Yellow, we transform in the darkness of the cocoon to something new and totally unexpected. May we each find a way to use this time of darkness to light the way to justice and peace in the world. May we discover our own new beauty as we discover the beauty in our differences. May we each discover our purpose and live with passion this thing called life, while we still can. “How does one become a butterfly” Yellow asks pensively. “You must want to fly so much That you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.” I can't think of anything more transformational and radical than the change that happens when a lowly caterpillar worm becomes a flying beautiful butterfly. And it doesn't end with flying! They find their true purpose, to carry the pollen of love from one flower to another and receive in return the sweet nectar that keeps them alive. What wondrous exchange! Sharing is the answer to so much! I'm so grateful the story seems to reach every culture, and over 3 million have loved and shared the paper version in English and countless more in other languages for 50 years. May each of us and the world flourish after this strange dark cocoon of isolation.

This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.

The induction of Dо̄gen into the modern academic world, or per­haps more accurately, the academic world's first real engagement with Dо̄gen came about 1924 when Watsuji Tetsurо̄ (1889–1960) published a provocative essay entitled "Shaman Dо̄gen." It was this essay that to many of Watsuji's contemporaries seemed to rescue Dо̄gen from what they considered to be his entrapment for nearly seven centuries in the sectarian embrace of the Sо̄tо̄ school. Watsuji insisted that Dо̄gen no longer should be thought of as belonging exclusively to the monastic community. Claiming, instead, that Dо̄gen "belongs to mankind," Watsuji with this declaration initiated the non-sectarian study of this thirteenth-century figure and in effect commenced what are called Dо̄gen Studies [Dagen kenkyii] in modern times. As one way of exploring what it might possibly mean to say that Dо̄gen "belongs to mankind," the Kuroda Institute held a conference on Dо̄gen at Tassajara Springs, California from October 8 to 10, 1981. The essays of this volume are a part of its result.