Where S My Oasis

G. Scott Graham first started practicing vipassana meditation in 1996. In addition to his daily practice, Scott joined 10-day courses twice each year, whenever possible, alternating between sitting and serving. Scott joined a course on December 11, 2019. On the early hours of Sunday, December 22, 2019, the day Scott's course ended, his husband of 31 years, Brian Stephens, burned to death in a horrific automobile accident. Two months later, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world essentially shut down. In this book, Scott shares his successes, struggles, insights, and shifts from more than a year of grieving-in-isolation. A year where ānāpāna-sati, vipassanā-bhāvanā, and most importantly, mettā-bhāvanā became his most important allies. Most of the people who initially provided support to Scott moved on, as they often do, from those who are grieving. More than an inspirational memoir, "Come As You Are" provides pragmatic guidance for those who are actively experiencing loss and grief. The reader will find techniques, strategies, and resources. Scott has also chosen to include a month from his personal diary, raw and unedited. An often emotional, heart-wrenching journal where he explored his grief, Scott's intention is to validate the experiences of others who are grieving and to empower them to integrate grief and carry it forward in their life. May all beings be happy. May all beings live with ease. May all beings be at peace.

Tashi Hansen du Toit was 15 years old when her mother, Karen, suffered a severe haemorrhagic stroke which left her with multiple physical and cognitive impairments. This beautifully written and poignant account tells Tashi’s story from the first moments after her mother’s stroke, following her and her family through the experience of her mother’s hospitalisation and rehabilitation. Tashi offers a rare glimpse into the impact of her mother’s stroke on her family and on her life as a teenager as she juggles the stresses and demands of family, school, and friends alongside coping with her mother’s brain injury. As she describes how she is learning to cope with her unresolved grief three years on, she provides hope, perspective, and insight on how to work towards growth and acceptance despite the catastrophe of a parent’s stroke. Presenting the rarely heard adolescent perspective on parental brain injury, Tashi’s moving story also features Karen’s account as she comes to terms with her experience. This authentic book offers great support to others, particularly teenagers, who may be going through a similar experience. It is also valuable reading for those working in brain injury services and the education system, and for any professional or student involved in neurorehabilitation or supporting families of parents with brain injury.

All She Wrote: Charmaine's Version instantly takes the reader on an emotive journey through life's countless spirit-lifting triumphs and inevitable trials. These snippets of self-discovery in poetic form reveal a heartfelt narrative that jolts the depth of one's psyche wide awake. Through Charmaine's eloquent use of alliterative lines, striking stanzas, and lulling metaphors, this ultimate awakening of the senses gains momentum page by page. Both insightful and equally as expressive, poetess Charmaine Glass Davis invites you to lose the notion of all things superficial and trivial, so you can discover what really matters in this life: authenticity and true depth at a soul level. By the book's end, you will hold in your hands not a typical collection of poems, but a one-of-a-kind transformational story that you won't soon forget.

Only one more year to survive High School. It would be so much easier if Petunia could sit back and let the bullies take out their cruelty on Marilyn. Who had the body of every girl's dreams, only she wasn't a boy, but a girl. Loathed by the students, feared by the administration. Petunia was her only friend. Together, they may just make it through.

"All families have a history that goes back centuries. In Faith Of The Fathers a family's history is discovered very unexpectedly and what they found brings great joy."

Buddy Hemp a Twenty Four year old Vietnam vet and Joe Fuller, a skinny eighteen year old social misfit neighborhood boy with a speech problem become trustworthy friends and with Buddy’s share of Moonshine money from his elderly father He buys a store and builds a tavern with help from Joe. As they plant marijuana on the side and eventually join Buddy’s Vietnam comrade who happens to be from a rich drug cartel family. After a few years of non-violent outlaw ventures, both Buddy and Joe team up with a business savvy woman and her husband and invest their sizeable nest eggs into their own newly established corporation. Twenty years and several hurdles later, both are Multimillionaire family men with everyday problems. Their life styles remain very country and simple by the Bay. It’s side hurting comedy with every emotion shown and felt. The book is based on outlaw lyrics from Joe Hester, an old petty has been, outlaw songwriter. It’s all fiction, wishes, laughter, love, near death experiences, and religion during a forty plus year span of time. You won’t be able to put it down.

'Late afternoon. An isolated lagoon, water glassy, teeming with birdlife—black swans, ducks, a pelican. Sunset begins to tint the sky. I point the camera at the water to catch the clouds reflected there just as a solitary duck swims into view. Everything in the photograph is familiar yet the effect is entirely strange. The duck is swimming across the sky...' The reflections in Sky Swimming can be read as meditations on the enigmas of love, family, ageing, memory, home and belonging. At its heart is a mudbrick house built by two women on an ancient lava flow in the Warrumbungle Mountains, circling back to a childhood filled with music in Melbourne and an early career in the theatre. It fans out across the world to a family mystery in The Netherlands of the 1950s and a friendship in Montreal in the 1990s. Reflections on the process of writing feminist biography are included and the women from Martin’s biographies thread their way through the narrative alongside the people who have helped shape her life, often in unexpected directions.

Three real life love stories and fifty nine delectable romantic poems centering around three lovely women whom the author met after a series of strange visions and mysterious phone calls at midnight.Was any of these women the author’s wife in his previous life? These fascinating stories of magic and coincidence give compelling reasons to make one believe in a definite past life connection. This volume includes engaging and compelling reads such as “A Woman’s Scent”, “Two Women”, "Twenty Years After", "Love Before First Sight", “Sex Museum”, “After the Act”, “Anklets of Fire”, “Samadhi”, “Butterflies and Bees”, “Radha’s Soliliquy” and “Rubber Love”.