Yak Butter Blues

An inspiring true tale of one couple's endurance, courage, love, faith, and resolve to trek an ancient pilgrim's trail 1,000 kilometers across Tibet. This IPPY Award winner provides an intimate firsthand look at the valiant struggle of the Tibetan culture to survive--and at the humanity connecting the world.

Determined to hang prayer flags at Mt. Everest Base Camp, Olivia trekked through Tibet while under the scrutiny of Communist China. She survived earthquakes, landslides, and a middle-of-the-night hijacking while enroute to a remote village in Nepal. Confronted with her own sense of meaning, she went toe-to-toe with the suffering, challenges, and decisions that all beings face, which included the capacity to love and let go.

One morning at breakfast, while gawking at his phone and feeling increasingly disconnected from family and everything else of importance in his world, it strikes writer Bruce Kirkby: this isn’t how he wants to live. Within days, plans begin to take shape. Bruce, his wife Christine, and their two children—seven-year-old Bodi and three-year-old Taj—will cross the Pacific by container ship, then travel onward through South Korea, China, India and Nepal aboard bus, riverboat and train, eventually traversing the Himalaya by foot. Their destination: a thousand-year-old Buddhist monastery in the remote Zanskar valley, one of the last places where Tibetan Buddhism is still practised freely in its original setting. Taken into the mud-brick home of a senior lama, Tsering Wangyal, the family spends the summer absorbed by monastery life. In this refuge, where ancient traditions intersect with the modern world, Bruce discovers ways to slow down, to observe and listen, and ultimately, to better understand his son on the autism spectrum—to surrender all expectations and connect with Bodi exactly as he is. Recounted with wit and humility, Blue Sky Kingdom is an engaging travel memoir as well as a thoughtful exploration of modern distraction, the loss of ancient wisdom, and the challenges and rewards of intercultural friendships.

Living dangerously with the members of the world-renowned Explorers Club.

Katie Morton's son Liam was born with profound brain damage. When he died six-and-a-half weeks later, she searched for answers in books on grief and coping, but none seemed to address her situation. Without completely understanding why, Morton embarked on a wider search for solace. "The Blue Poppy and the Mustard Seed" takes readers along as she travels to foreign lands to illuminate her inner journey through emotional highs and lows. She interweaves what she witnesses -- simple rituals like children's baths and picnics, and rites of passage like birth and death -- with her own progress. In the process she discovers that the pain she has experienced is both unavoidable and necessary, a pivotal part of the process of healing that can lead to "a victorious kind of joy, of acceptance." In discovering herself, Morton shows readers suffering from similar tragedies how to endure world-shattering pain and come out whole.

20 multi-colored woodcuts and other images depicting the art of woodcut prints. Also available in a Special hand-bound, boxed in Saifu cloth, edition

Here are real stories about young Buddhists in their own words that affirm and inform the young adult Buddhist experience of trying to live in the modern world, and bring Buddhism into their lives.

In an age when the Dalai Lama's image has been used to sell computers, rock stars have used tantra to enhance their image, and for many, Nirvana calls to mind a a favorite band, what does Buddhism mean to twenty-somethings? Blue Jean Buddha offers real stories about young Buddhists in their own words that affirm and inform the young adult Buddhist experience. This one-of-a-kind book is about the experiences of young people in America-from their late teens to early thirties-who have embraced Buddhism. Thirty-three first-person narratives reflect on a broad range of life-stories, lessons, and livelihood issues, such as growing up in a Zen center, struggling with relationships, caring for the dying, and using marathon running as meditation. Throughout, up-and-coming author Sumi Loundon provides an illuminating context for the tremendous variety of experiences shared in the book. Blue Jean Buddha was named a finalist in the 2002 Independent Publisher Book Awards (Multicultural Non-Fiction - Young Adult) as well in NAPRA's Nautilus Awards, in the Personal Journey/Memoir/Biography category.