How Long

Finally, this book makes a significant contribution to social movement theory by providing a crucial understanding of the continuity and complexity of social movements, clarifying the need for different layers of leadership that come to satisfy different movement needs.

At the end of Book I How Long is Exile? The Song and Dance Festival of Free Latvians widowed Milda Arajs had taken a new direction in her life. She had decided to break solidarity with her mainstream ethnic community and make good her promise to her daughter Ilga that they would make a "pilgrimage" to Soviet Latvia at Christmas time (1983) and welcome the baby Krijanis, born to American Mara and Latvian Igors, as the symbol of a new era. Also, Milda had chosen to give herself to Peteris Vanags, the one-armed veteran she encountered in the Esslingen DP camp after the war. (Story in Book IIOut of the Ruins of Germany.) They married shortly before the momentous trip, and soon thereafter Milda joined him in Washington, D.C. For a decade they lived happily, making up for lost years of forbidden longing and desireuntil the Soviet Union fell, and the Kingdom of Exile felt the shocks and afershocks. Unbeknown to herself, Milda's Christmas trip behind the Iron Curtain, with all its revalations, was her first step on her Long Road Home. Also, that trip at the height of American women's liberation movement, marked her adult coming of age and becoming the ruler of her life. Released from domestic bonds, she struck out on her own and challenged her mind to higher things. When Peter, in the late 1980s, was asked to join Radio Free Europe in Munich, Milda saw her Road clearly winding its way back to Latvia. This, naturally threatened the marriage. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the Road become bumpy, even trecherous. Afraid and out of step, Peter seemed to lag behind, while Milda hurried forward now that the iron curtain was swept away. With firm steps she returned to her homeland; she reunited with her sister Zelda and reclaimed their parents' apartment. Peter complied and came up with the money, but, as if lost, he often went off by himself, afraid of being watched and pursued until he could not walk anymore. After his death and after the guarded secrets were revealed, Milda took her last steps on The Long Road Home alone. Exile was over, but the sense of exile was imbedded in Milda's mind forever, and it was heavy. She felt the weight most poignantly as she watched fireworks grace the skies at elaborate festivals, where strangers celebrated, frolicking and singing to her unknown songs, and young people rush about in search for passages to new lands, where the grass seemed greener and fame and fortune beckened from clouds with silver linings. As a participant in that, so called exile state, I began writing my version of the experience after the Milwaukee festival, filtering it through the consciousness of my main character Milda Berziņa-Arajs, who, coming out of mourning for her husband Karlis Arajs, arrives at the festival, ready to turn a new leaf in her life. During the four days with like-minded people, interesting events, and common recollections of her childhood, the war and post-war experiences in a displaced persons' camp flash before her in a swirling kaleidescope and, at the end, throws her in the direction she did not plan to go. Book II captures the mood after the fall of the USSR. The ethnic communitiesthe Kingdom of Exileis shaken, and the people awake as if from a deep sleep. Milda suddenly becomes active; she makes crucial decisions and switches from an outdated romantic into a realist as she returns home, meets her estranged sister and the country she had left behind. As she tries to find her place in it, she understands that exile is a state of mind; it is a state where half the world's population liveslike sheuprooted by tyranny and wars. Yet she and other displaced persons go on living and finding pleasure in art, poetry, song, and in each otherthough with a sad, melancholy smile.

In this unique and exhilarating book, stand-up philos0pher Tim Freke shares his own amazing journey of awakening to the ecstasy of oneness and the bliss of big love. He offers profound insights and simple wake-up techniques to gently guide you ever more deeply into an experience he calls "lucid living," an ultra-awake state available to all, which transforms everyday life into a wonderful adventure full of meaning, miracles, and magic. As his spellbinding story unfolds, Tim clarifies a host of common misunderstandings about what it is to be "spiritual"; he offers wisdom about love, romance, and relationships; he presents a radical new understanding of death; and he passionately makes the case for our collective awakening. Full of warmth, laughter, tears, vitality, and style, How Long Is Now? is a timeless book to be savored and treasured.

Poet, performance artist, and critic David Antin invented the “talk poem.” He insists that his poems be oral and created in front of a live audience, in a specific time and place, with the transcription of the performance adjusted for print by presenting it not in prose but in clumps of words without justified margins or punctuation, peppered with white spaces that indicate pauses. In this book, editor Stephen Fredman provides a critical introduction to a selection of talk poems from three out-of-print collections, accompanied by a new interview with the author. As Fredman points out, Antin’s work is a form of conceptual writing that has influenced generations of experimental poets and prose writers. His profound and humorous talk poems are essential for classroom and scholarly discussions of the arts in modernism and postmodernism—offering as well an invitation to strengthen the ties between the sciences and the humanities.

TRILOGY BOOK TWO includes three books from my numerous writings. Writing and philosophizing for so long now, I am pleased to get to do this while others simply cant take the time. In my journeys, I dont know if I am getting closer to knowing anything, and it seems the more I know, the more I know I dont know. I suppose all we can be sure of, is that as long as we are alive, we have the opportunity to keep searching, while continuing to delve into our minds and hearts for clues to greater meaning and purpose on earth. How long have you been standing here, God? is the title of the book, and it comes to you along with two others, Evolution: Facts and Fairy Tales and Amistad (Spanish for friendship). All three were written with you (the reader and fellow life-mate) especially in mind. If you struggle with your personal spirituality, and need greater awareness that God is on all sides of you, then maybe How long have you been standing here, God? (Book One) will be helpful. If you are wondering about your origins, trying to figure out how it all came about, then perhaps Evolution: Facts and Fairy Tales (Book Two) will make things even more confusing! During my time in Central America, I have learned plenty about the concept of friendship, and I mean that in the context of the whole of life. Amistad (Book Three) is a book about befriending the people, places and things that make up our lives.

How Long Have I Been Here is a collection of a variety of stories, some set in 1960s Chicago, others in Mexico around the same period and later, and still others concerned with wayward youth versus adult loneliness, with worship of a dead writer, with isolation, with old age. All, in one form or another, have to do with love and longing, with the complexities of human relationships.

Three-time Hugo Award winner and NYT bestselling author N. K. Jemisin challenges and delights readers with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption that sharply examine modern society in her first collection of short fiction, which includes never-before-seen stories. "Marvelous and wide-ranging." -- Los Angeles Times"Gorgeous" -- NPR Books"Breathtakingly imaginative and narratively bold." -- Entertainment Weekly Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story "The City Born Great," a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.

So, How Long Have You Been Native? is Alexis C. Bunten's firsthand account of what it is like to work in the Alaska cultural tourism industry. An Alaska Native and anthropologist, she spent two seasons working for a tribally owned tourism business that markets the Tlingit culture in Sitka. Bunten's narrative takes readers through the summer tour season as she is hired and trained and eventually becomes a guide. A multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, cultural tourism provides one of the most ubiquitous face-to-face interactions between peoples of different cultures and is arguably one of the primary means by which knowledge about other cultures is disseminated. Bunten goes beyond debates about who owns Native culture and has the right to "sell" it to tourists. Through a series of anecdotes, she examines issues such as how and why Natives choose to sell their culture, the cutthroat politics of business in a small town, how the cruise industry maintains its bottom line, the impact of colonization on contemporary Native peoples, the ways that traditional cultural values play a role in everyday life for contemporary Alaska Natives, and how Indigenous peoples are engaging in global enterprises on their own terms. Bunten's bottom-up approach provides a fascinating and informative look at the cultural tourism industry in Alaska.