My Heart Knows What The Wild Geese Know

Inspired by Rumi, this poetry reflects my own spiritual understanding and is not intended to speak for any spiritual path, teacher or religion. I am deeply grateful for the insights I have gained while studying the path of Eckankar for the past 45 years. If you’d like to learn more about Eckankar and receive a free Eckankar book, please call 1-800-LOVE-GOD or visit www.Eckankar.org.

My Brother's Madness is based on the author's relationship with his brother-who had a psychotic breakdown in his late forties-and explores the unfolding of two intertwined lives and the nature of delusion. Circumstances lead one brother from juvenile crime on the streets of Brooklyn to war-torn Vietnam, to a fast-track life as a Hollywood publicist and to owning and operating The Tin Palace, one of New York's most legendary jazz clubs, while his brother falls into, and fights his way back from, a delusional psychosis. My Brother's Madness is part thriller, part exploration that not only describes the causes, character, and journey of mental illness, but also makes sense of it. It is ultimately a story of our own humanity, and answers the question, Am I my brother's keeper?

In this extraordinary memoir, James Webb writes vividly about the early years that shaped his remarkable personal journey. It is rare in America that one individual is recognized for the highest levels of combat valor, as a respected member of the literary and journalistic world, and as a blunt-spoken leader in national politics. Webb's account of his childhood is a tremendous American saga as the family endures the constant moves and challenges of the rarely examined post-World War II military. Webb also tells of his four years at Annapolis in a voice that is painfully honest yet ultimately triumphant. His description of Vietnam's most brutal battlefields breaks new literary ground. One of the most highly decorated combat Marines of that war, he is a respected expert on the history and conduct of the war. Webb's novelist's eyes and ears invest this work with remarkable power. He also describes his election to the Senate, where he was a respected leader on issues of national defense, foreign policy, and economic fairness. This is a life that could happen only in America. -- Back cover.

Mary Oliver is one of America's best-loved poets, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her luminous poetry celebrates nature and beauty, love and the spirit, silence and wonder, extending the visionary American tradition of Whitman, Emerson, Frost and Emily Dickinson. Her extraordinary poetry is nourished by her intimate knowledge and minute daily observation of the New England coast, its woods and ponds, its birds and animals, plants and trees.

"Scrolling the pages of a Hughes narrative is like lighting a lantern into the darkest recess of poker's subculture. [Hughes] brings the legends of the past and present to life and often provides the very best portrait of these unique, real-life characters of anyone on record." -Nolan Dalla, media director, World Series of Poker, best-selling author and columnist for Card Player "Johnny Hughes's poker stories are a national treasure . hilarious stories and colorful characters . timeless classics . the stuff of history . one of my all-time favorite poker writers." -Iggy, a.k.a. Ignatius J. Reilly, the Blogfather of Poker, GuinnessandPoker.com "Told with authenticity and the knowledge that only a true road gambler could possess . a book that you will love . a highly enjoyable read." -Anthony Kelly, editor-in-chief, Player Europe magazine. Dublin. "Cryptic, dark. Irrefutably unique. Elliptical euphemism and metaphor are (Hughes's) tools. Gambling folklore and parables abound. All told with a twinkle in the eye and one finger on the trigger ... Johnny writes evasively, challenging us to refute, compelling us to believe." -James Dodd, a.k.a. Tetuso, Bet-the-Pot.com. London.

Japan is the only country in the world where women writers laid the foundations of classical literature. The Kagero Diary commands our attention as the first extant work of that rich and brilliant tradition. The author, known to posterity as Michitsuna’s Mother, a member of the middle-ranking aristocracy of the Heian period (794–1185), wrote an account of 20 years of her life (from 954–74), and this autobiographical text now gives readers access to a woman’s experience of a thousand years ago. The diary centers on the author’s relationship with her husband, Fujiwara Kaneie, her kinsman from a more powerful and prestigious branch of the family than her own. Their marriage ended in divorce, and one of the author’s intentions seems to have been to write an anti-romance, one that could be subtitled, “I married the prince but we did not live happily ever after.” Yet, particularly in the first part of the diary, Michitsuna’s Mother is drawn to record those events and moments when the marriage did live up to a romantic ideal fostered by the Japanese tradition of love poetry. At the same time, she also seems to seek the freedom to live and write outside the romance myth and without a husband. Since the author was by inclination and talent a poet and lived in a time when poetry was a part of everyday social intercourse, her account of her life is shaped by a lyrical consciousness. The poems she records are crystalline moments of awareness that vividly recall the past. This new translation of the Kagero Diary conveys the long, fluid sentences, the complex polyphony of voices, and the floating temporality of the original. It also pays careful attention to the poems of the text, rendering as much as possible their complex imagery and open-ended quality. The translation is accompanied by running notes on facing pages and an introduction that places the work within the context of contemporary discussions regarding feminist literature and the genre of autobiography and provides detailed historical information and a description of the stylistic qualities of the text.

Human love, evolution, creative minds, disease, earthquakes, wars, skyscrapers & sonnets; the ever-present life-in-death/death-in-life & that ever-present duo of good & evil: ALL of these have their way of being through the en-choiring of sympathies/antipathies that make them as they are. This book explores this EVENTUM. There is a magic of belongingness at play, whereby the longing to belong (a plus finds its minus as a bee finds its flower): a power evident in all forms of life and being, just as Goldilocks finds the best porridge. So, we find ourselves on a planet where life fine-tunes a coming together of what belongs together: a real unia sympathetica en-choiring of sympathies. - Anything that has being (as any Rabbit, Robot, Roberta or Robert) are as they are because they manifest the belongingness of things. They en-choir, become a choir that sings its song: the resonance interacting with others to form new en-choirings - and the music plays on. This a music book. Follow the bouncing ball and sing along. How these harmonies relate to breakdowns of insanities that plague human existence, is not so easy to grasp. But the same dynamics apply! We are fine-tuned to what's sympathetic and what is not: same for worms and robins. Wars and the inhumanities we perform are due to fall-out from sympathies: this causes antipathies to take-over (Newtown). Mother Nature is neutral (Sandy Hook), but operates by the same dynamic of this longing to belong in sympathy; becoming the belongingness of what can be and is as it is: love or disease. This is a book about the simplicities of this complexity, which by their interplay birth coherences in the midst of chaos: rational-stable structures form in the mayhem of the random. - Those who stay in the saddle will ride with a new vision, a new faith for the journey - "from/of the Uttermost" - to Auguries. In this en-choiring of sympathies in the context of belongings, my poems and essays sing with a full choir of others: poetries all.