Quiet Beauty

*Gold Medal winner in the 2014 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for Home & Garden* "Just flipping through the pages of Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America will instantly lower your blood pressure."—The New York Times Book Review Quiet Beauty: Japanese Gardens of North America is an extraordinary look at the most beautiful and serene gardens of the United States and Canada. Most Japanese garden books look to the gardens of Japan. Quiet Beauty explores the treasure trove of Japanese gardens located in North America. Featuring an intimate look at twenty-six gardens, with numerous stunning color photographs of each, that detail their style, history, and special functions, this book explores the ingenuity and range of Japanese landscaping. Japanese gardens have been part of North American culture for almost 150 years. Quiet Beauty is a thought provoking look at the history of their introduction to the world of North American gardening and how this aspect of Japanese culture has taken root and flourished. Japanese gardens include: Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California Nitobe Memorial Garden, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia Japanese Garden, Fort Worth Botanic Garden, Texas Garden of the Pine Winds, Denver Botanic Gardena, Colorado Japanese Garden, Montreal Botanical Garden, Quebec Tenshin'en (The Garden of the Heart of Heaven), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts Roji'en (Garden of Drops of Dew), The George D. and Harriet W. Cornell Japanese Gardens, The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens, Delray Beach, Florida Japanese Friendship Garden of Phoenix, Margaret T. Hance Park, Arizona Garden of the Pine Wind, Garvan Woodland Garden, Hot Springs, Arkansas

God’s peace is waiting for you. Many women long for God’s presence in their lives. Although they try to find time for God, they still find themselves distracted by a busy world and even busier minds. Based on an ancient and biblical Christian practice, Quiet Prayer meditation reveals how the power of Jesus-centered silence suppresses distractions, igniting your prayer time and revitalizing your relationship with God. Quiet Prayer will help you ● learn the history and importance of Christian meditation, ● develop the daily practice of Quiet Prayer through thirty-one guided meditations, ● increase your awareness of God and yourself, and ● see God’s living love and power move in your life. Begin your journey of embracing God’s transformative peace through Quiet Prayer.

Three is a numerical symbol used throughout literature, especially Holy Scripture, to signify completion, the full whole, the circle joined. In Volume III of Quiet Sheba, the final volume of the trilogy, I have, again, my lamentations, with their similar subjects and themes as different and repeated vehicles of carriage for thought, finishing the construct provided by work already known to my readers. There are death- and triumph, joy beside heavy sorrow, but, more, the very purposed movement within experience, carrying toward a conclusion, that of ones own place, again, at table. We do conclude, as we began, at table, but with more cautious steps and thoughtful strategies; and continuing, beauty remains, for many, for me, the antidote to sorrow, with illness and bitter acceptance, full, still, often. The valediction then, is thoughtful: for morning, it remains, sunrise; for evening it falls gently as twilight. But whether a passage in nature, or the appearing of a memory- a hymn or prayer of any of many methods of closure these verses finally conclude, a coming back to table, to the feast of life, for we come to know that there is no antidote to truth, and ours, now, is the only life we can objectively know; when living is no longer a reality, it is not. As Stephen Cranes desert beast states, while eating its own heart, crying bitter, bitter we, as the beast, embrace, take into ourselves eat, drink, - all for it is the only one we have, and we love it if to the side, to use the French poet, Verlaines poignant strikingly powerful closing words describing the falling seasonal ambiance of the year: Et je pleure (And I weep) the fullest source of working truth, reason, giving up the response poetic beautiful or no: And I weep. In life, we are not wise, but willful, yet in the holistic view, we live our most sentiment lying over reason, it very now hurting, but with that arrangement with which we look, always, to find the grail, the feast, the peace.

In a world ever more congested and polluted with both toxins and noise, award-winning photographer Pete McBride takes readers on a once-in-a-lifetime escape to find places of peace and quiet—a pole-to-pole, continent-by-continent quest for the soul. We tend to think of silence as the absence of sound, but it is actually the void where we can hear the sublime notes of nature. In this National Outdoor Book Award winning work, photographer Pete McBride reveals the wonders of these hushed places in spectacular imagery—from the thin-air flanks of Mount Everest to the depths of the Grand Canyon, from the high-altitude vistas of the Atacama to the African savannah, and from the Antarctic Peninsula to the flowing waters of the Ganges and Nile. These places remind us of the magic of being “truly away” and how such places are vanishing. Often showing beauty from vantages where no other photographer has ever stood, this is a seven-continent visual tour of global quietude—and the power in nature’s own sounds—that will both inspire and calm.