Rolf Potts Recommended Books

When Walt Whitman self-published "Leaves of Grass" in 1855, he rocked the literary world and forever changed the course of poetry. In subsequent editions, Whitman continued to revise and expand his poems--but none matched the raw power and immediacy of the first edition. This beautifully designed volume presents the 1855 "Leaves of Grass" in its entirety, unchanged, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous letter to Whitman. [Published by www.AmericanRenaissanceBooks.com.]

Story provides insight and inspiration for screen and television writers, novelists, playwrights, journalists - anyone with a story to tell.'In difficult periods of writing, particularly with structure, I often turn to Robert McKee's wonderful book, Story, for guidance.' -- Dominic Dunne, novelist of Another City, Not My Own, The Two Mrs Grenvilles.'...stimulating, innovative, refreshingly practical.' -- Lawrence Kasdan, screenwriter/director of The Accidental Tourist, The Big Chill, Body Heat, The Empire Strikes Back'McKee is the arch defender of story; his book is a revelation.' -- Griffin Dunne, screenwriter/director/producer of After Hours, Addicted To Love, Running On Empty, Chilly Scenes Of Winter'An amazingly important course.' -- John Cleese'Since I first attended Robert McKee's course, I have sold four screenplays and two novels. I could not have done so without the wisdom and inspiration he provided.' -- Tim Willocks, novelist/screenwriter of Bad City Blues, Green River Rising, Swept From The Sea

A special 10th anniversary edition of Roy Peter Clark's bestselling guide to writing, featuring five bonus tools.Ten years ago, Roy Peter Clark, America's most influential writing teacher, whittled down almost thirty years of experience in journalism, writing, and teaching into a series of fifty short essays on different aspects of writing. In the past decade, Writing Tools has become a classic guidebook for novices and experts alike and remains one of the best loved books on writing available.Organized into four sections, "Nuts and Bolts," "Special Effects," "Blueprints for Stories," and "Useful Habits," Writing Tools is infused with more than 200 examples from journalism and literature. This new edition includes five brand new, never-before-shared tools.Accessible, entertaining, inspiring, and above all, useful for every type of writer, from high school student to novelist, Writing Tools is essential reading.

Vagabonding is about taking time off from your normal life--from six weeks to four months to two years--to discover and experience the world on your own terms. Veteran shoestring traveler Rolf Potts shows how anyone with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel. Visit the vagabonding community's hub at www dot vagabonding dot net.

A generation of screenwriters has used Syd Field’s bestselling books to ignite successful careers in film. Now the celebrated producer, lecturer, teacher, and bestselling author has updated his classic guide for a new generation of filmmakers, offering a fresh insider’s perspective on the film industry today. From concept to character, from opening scene to finished script, here are easily understood guidelines to help aspiring screenwriters—from novices to practiced writers—hone their craft. Filled with updated material—including all-new personal anecdotes and insights, guidelines on marketing and collaboration, plus analyses of recent films, from American Beauty to Lord of the Rings—Screenplay presents a step-by-step, comprehensive technique for writing the screenplay that will succeed in Hollywood. Discover:•Why the first ten pages of your script are crucially important•How to visually “grab” the reader from page one, word one •Why structure and character are the essential foundation of your screenplay•How to adapt a novel, a play, or an article into a screenplay•Tips on protecting your work—three legal ways to claim ownership of your screenplay•The essentials of writing great dialogue, creating character, building a story line, overcoming writer’s block, getting an agent, and much more.With this newly updated edition of his bestselling classic, Syd Field proves yet again why he is revered as the master of the screenplay—and why his celebrated guide has become the industry’s gold standard for successful screenwriting.

Poetry. As three worlds collide, a mother's Philippines, a father's India and the poet's contemporary America, the resulting impressions are chronicled in this collection of incisive and penetrating verse. The writer weaves her words carefully into a wise and affecting embroidery that celebrates the senses while remaining down-to-earth and genuine. "We see that everything is in fact miracle fruit, including this book itself"-Andrew Hudgins.

John Crowley's masterful Little, Big is the epic story of Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place called Edgewood—not found on any map—to marry Daily Alice Drinkwater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family, living in a house that is many houses on the magical border of an otherworld. It is a story of fantastic love and heartrending loss; of impossible things and unshakable destinies; and of the great Tale that envelops us all. It is a wonder.

From the author of the award-winning book of poems, Miracle Fruit , comes the eagerly anticipated second collection, At the Drive-In Volcano . In this new and imaginative followup, Aimee Nezhukumatathil examines the full circle journey of desire, loss, and ultimately, an exuberant lovetraveling around a world brimming with wild and delicious offerings such as iced waterfalls, jackfruit, and pistol shrimp. From the tropical landscapes of the Caribbean, India, and the Philippines to the deep winters of western New York and mild autumns of Ohio, the natural world Nezhukumatathil describes is dark but also lovelyso full of enchantment and magic. Here, worms glow in the dark, lizards speak, the most delicious soup in the world turns out to be deadly, and a woman eats soil as if it were candy. Her trademark charm, verve and wit remain elemental and a delight to behold, even in the face of a crumbling relationship. These poems confront delicate subjects of love and loss with an exacting exuberance and elegance not hardly seen in a writer so young.

From pickpockets to peacocks, elephant rides to electrocuted oysters, miracle fruit to the Incrdible Hulk, Aime Nezukumatathil teases the uncommon out of the commonplace,the miraculous out of the mundane. With a sensory zest that tickles both mind and tongue, she invokes her heritage in inimitable poems that go straight for the heart. Her gift for gloriously exact detail, her vulnerability, and her humor make Fishbone an impressive and eclectic debut.

Another set of antidotal lyrics and story-poems from Stuart Dischell Sly, comic, inventive, and exuberant, the brokenhearted lyrics and dark parables of Backwards Days are cast in the spirit and craft Stuart Dischell's poetry is known for. In this, his fourth full-length collection, he revs up both music and experience and writes startling poems of emotional intensity that chronicle the restlessness of desire. Sometimes grim, ever buoyant and hopeful, even in the most sorrowful or macabre situations, the poems of Backwards Days are most particularly about the movement of time, physical movement, and the movement of the heart. Through landscapes both real and of the psyche, they live on the edge of an elusive understanding never quite gotten right.

Stuart Dischell's poetry is passionate, darkly comic, heartbreaking, and always unpredictable. Dig Safe reaffirms why he commands high regard among poets and critics and popularity among his readers. Taking as their metaphor the markings that construction workers use to warn of utilities below street level--these new poems pierce the body politic as they evoke interconnection and misalliance, movement and inhabitation.

Evenings & Avenues, the new collection of poems by award-winning writer Stuart Dischell, captures the yearning spirit of the end of our century. These lyrics and story-poems are set in locales as varied as Boston, Sarajevo, and London, in wax-works, shops, bedrooms, and, most frequently, a street, an avenue, or a boulevard, where the seven "Evening" poems that punctuate the book take place. Dischell's poems are passionate, sometimes darkly comic, sometimes heartbreaking, and always unpredictable. They animate a world between possibility and destiny.

Good Hope Road is one of those rare books of verse that combine lyricism with the momentum of narrative, a concern for dailiness with a willingness to embrace wildness. Like Joyce’s Dubliners, the twelve poems of the opening sequence, “Apartments,” reflect a wide panorama of contemporary urban consciousness. Dischell’s subjects are wronged lovers, thwarted citizens, an idealistic veteran, bickering relations―all with their entangled, fractious alliances. In “Household Gods,” the book’s second section, Dischell presents dramatic monologues whose scenes are the shore, the city, and the countryside. Here are homages and elegies; poems of childhood, betrayal, and loss. Observant and compassionate, this edition of Good Hope Road reintroduces the work of a striking and powerful writer.

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These are the Faroe Islands as they were some fifty years ago: sea-washed and remote, with one generation still tied to the sea for sustenance, and a younger generation turning toward commerce and clerical work in the towns.At the post-hunt whale-meat auction, Ketil enthusiastically bids for more meat than he can afford. Thus when Ketil is seventy, he and his wife struggle to repay their debt.Heðin Brú (1901–1987), novelist and translator, was considered the most important Faroese writer of his generation and is known for his fresh and ironic style.

In his philosophical reflections on the art of lingering, acclaimed cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han argues that the value we attach today to the vita activa is producing a crisis in our sense of time. Our attachment to the vita activa creates an imperative to work which degrades the human being into a labouring animal, an animal laborans. At the same time, the hyperactivity which characterizes our daily routines robs human beings of the capacity to linger and the faculty of contemplation. It therefore becomes impossible to experience time as fulfilling.Drawing on a range of thinkers including Heidegger, Nietzsche and Arendt, Han argues that we can overcome this temporal crisis only by revitalizing the vita contemplativa and relearning the art of lingering. For what distinguishes humans from other animals is the capacity for reflection and contemplation, and when life regains this capacity, this art of lingering, it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness.

Lucky Fish travels along a lush current — a confluence of leaping vocabulary and startling formal variety, with upwelling gratitude at its source: for love, motherhood, “new hope,” and the fluid and rich possibilities of words themselves. With an exuberant appetite for “my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew,” anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet’s third collection of poems is her strongest yet.

The debut collection of a poet whose savage, hilarious work has already received extraordinary notice. Since his poems first began to appear in the pages of The New Yorker and Poetry, there has been a lot of excited talk about the fresh and inventive work of Michael Robbins. Equal parts hip- hop, John Berryman, and capitalism seeking death and not finding it, Robbins's poems are strange, wonderful, wild, and completely unlike anything else being written today. As allusive as the Cantos, as aggressive as a circular saw, this debut collection will offend none but the virtuous, and is certain to receive an enormous amount of attention.

A long-awaited new book on personal writing from Phillip Lopate—celebrated essayist, the director of Columbia University’s nonfiction program, and editor of The Art of the Personal Essay .Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” ( Dallas Morning News ).Here, combining more than forty years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction.A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone and immense gift for storytelling, To Show and To Tell reads like a long walk with a favorite professor—refreshing, insightful, and encouraging in often unexpected ways.

This new English translation of the Faroe-Islander Saga (Faereyinga saga) --a great medieval Icelandic saga--tells the story of the first settlers on these wind-swept islands at the edge of the Scandinavian world. Written by an anonymous 13th-century Icelander, the saga centers on the enduring animosity between Sigmundur Brestirsson and Thrandur of Gota, rival chieftains whose bitter disagreements on the introduction of Christianity to the Faroe Islands set the stage for much violence and a feud which then unfolds over generations of their descendants. Making the saga accessible to a wider English readership, the translation is accompanied by a brief introduction, explanatory notes, genealogical and chronological tables, detailed maps and an excerpt from Jomsvikings' Saga which informs missing passages from the Faroe-Islander Saga manuscripts.

"Followers and newcomers to Nhat Hanh’s teaching alike will find this collection inspiring for everyday practice and for social engagement in the world."— Publishers WeeklyThis collection of autobiographical and teaching stories from peace activist and Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh is thought provoking, inspiring, and enjoyable to read. Collected here for the first time, these stories span the author’s life. There are stories from Thich Nhat Hanh’s childhood and the traditions of rural Vietnam. There are stories from his years as a teenaged novice, as a young teacher and writer in war torn Vietnam, and of his travels around the world to teach mindfulness, make pilgrimages to sacred sites, and influence world leaders.The tradition of teaching the Dharma through stories goes back at least to the time of the Buddha. Like the Buddha, Thich Nhat Hanh uses story–telling to engage people’s interest so he can share important teachings, insights, and life lessons.

From Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch ( a New Yorker and Fortune Book of the Year) and who coined the term -net neutrality---a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time. Feeling attention challenged? Even assaulted? American business depends on it. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of messaging, advertising enticements, branding, sponsored social media, and other efforts to harvest our attention. Few moments or spaces of our day remain uncultivated by the -attention merchants, - contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to the explosion of the mobile web; from AOL and the invention of email to the attention monopolies of Google and Facebook; from Ed Sullivan to celebrity power brands like Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump, the basic business model of -attention merchants- has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your consideration, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Wu describes the revolts that have risen against the relentless siege of our awareness, from the remote control to the creation of public broadcasting to Apple's ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants are always growing new heads, even as their means of getting inside our heads are changing our very nature--cognitive, social, political and otherwise--in ways unimaginable even a generation ago. -A startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attention...We've become the consumers, the producers, and the content. We are selling ourselves to ourselves.- --Tom Vanderbilt, The New Republic -An erudite, energizing, outraging, funny and thorough history...A devastating critique of ad tech as it stands today, transforming -don't be evil- into the surveillance business model in just a few short years. It connects the dots between the sale of advertising inventory in schools to the bizarre ecosystem of trackers, analyzers and machine-learning models that allow the things you look at on the web to look back at you...This stuff is my daily beat, and I learned a lot from Attention Merchants.- --Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing -Illuminating.- --Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review of Books From the Hardcover edition.

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.From the team that brought you The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy, a beautiful daily devotional of Stoic meditations—an instant Wall Street Journal and USA Today Bestseller.Why have history’s greatest minds—from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson, along with today’s top performers from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities—embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise.The Daily Stoic offers 366 days of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations from the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the playwright Seneca, or slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus, as well as lesser-known luminaries like Zeno, Cleanthes, and Musonius Rufus. Every day of the year you’ll find one of their pithy, powerful quotations, as well as historical anecdotes, provocative commentary, and a helpful glossary of Greek terms.By following these teachings over the course of a year (and, indeed, for years to come) you’ll find the serenity, self-knowledge, and resilience you need to live well.

There is a gentleness in the midst of savagery in Stuart Dischell’s fifth full-length collection of poetry. These poems are ever aware of the momentary grace of the present and the fleeting histories that precede the instants of time. Part elegist, part fabulist, part absurdist, Dischell writes at the edges of imagination, memory, and experience. By turns outwardly social and inwardly reflective, comic and remorseful, the beautifully crafted poems of Children with Enemies transfigure dread with a reluctant wisdom and come alive to the confusions and implications of what it means to be human.

Stuart Dischell's new chapbook sings of adventuresome travel and camaraderie. On the waterfront, we find drunken captains, dissolute merchants and, improbably, a momentary restful pause. In the countryside and in the city, Dischell focuses not on any landscape or sight, but on the way one's friendships frame experience, expanding it beyond known dimensions.Poetry.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.For as long as people have traveled to distant lands, they have brought home objects to certify the journey. More than mere merchandise, these travel souvenirs take on a personal and cultural meaning that goes beyond the object itself. Drawing on several millennia of examples-from the relic-driven quests of early Christians, to the mass-produced tchotchkes that line the shelves of a Disney gift shop-travel writer Rolf Potts delves into a complicated history that explores issues of authenticity, cultural obligation, market forces, human suffering, and self-presentation. Souvenirs are shown for what they really not just objects, but personalized forms of folk storytelling that enable people to make sense of the world and their place in it.'Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Souvenir features illustrations by Cedar Van Tassel

In her fourth collection, Aimee Nezhukumatathil hums a bright blue note—a sensuous love song to the Earth and its inhabitants. Oceanic is both a title and an ethos of radical inclusion, inviting in the grief of an elephant, the icy eyes of a scallop, “the ribs / of a silver silo,” and the bright flash of painted fingernails. With unmatched sincerity, Oceanic speaks to each reader as a cooperative part of the natural world—the extraordinary neighborhood to which we all belong. This is a poet ecstatically, emphatically, naming what it means to love a world in peril.

Celebrating thirty years, the 2018 edition of the Best American Poetry—“a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune)—collects the most significant poems of the year, chosen by Poet Laureate of California Dana Gioia.In a review of Best American Poetry 2017, The Washington Post said, “The poems, ordered alphabetically by author, have a wonderful cohesion and flow, as if each contributes to a larger narrative about life today.” The guest editor for 2018, Dana Gioia, has an unconventional poetic background. Gioia has published five volumes of poetry, served as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently sits as the Poet Laureate of California, but he is also a graduate of Stanford Business School and was once a Vice President at General Foods. He has studied opera and is a published librettist, in addition to his prolific work in critical essay writing and editing literary anthologies. Having lived several lives, Gioia brings an insightful, varied, eclectic eye to this year’s Best American Poetry.With his classic essay “Can Poetry Matter?”, originally run in The Atlantic in 1991, Gioia considered whether there is a place for poetry to be a part of modern American mainstream culture. Decades later, the debate continues, but Best American Poetry 2018 stands as evidence that poetry is very much present, relevant, and finding new readers.

Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a genre-defying book of essays—some as short as a paragraph; some as long as five pages—that record the small joys that occurred in one year, from birthday to birthday, and that we often overlook in our busy lives. His is a meditation on delight that takes a clear-eyed view of the complexities, even the terrors, in his life, including living in America as a black man; the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture; the loss of those he loves. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: the way Botan Rice Candy wrappers melt in your mouth, the volunteer crossing guard with a pronounced tremor whom he imagines as a kind of boat-woman escorting pedestrians across the River Styx, a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, pickup basketball games, the silent nod of acknowledgment between black people. And more than any other subject, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world—his garden, the flowers in the sidewalk, the birds, the bees, the mushrooms, the trees.This is not a book of how-to or inspiration, though it could be read that way. Fans of Roxane Gay, Maggie Nelson, and Kiese Laymon will revel in Gay’s voice, and his insights. The Book of Delights is about our connection to the world, to each other, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. Gay’s pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight. Preface1. My Birthday, Kinda2. Inefficiency3. Flower in the Curb4. Blowing It Off5. Hole in the Head6. Remission Still7. Praying Mantis8. The Negreeting9. The High-Five from Strangers, Etc10. Writing by Hand11. Transplanting12. Nicknames13. But, Maybe ..14. "Joy Is Such a Human Madness15. House Party16. Hummingbird17. Just a Dream18. "That's Some Bambi Shit" ..19. The Irrepressible: The Gratitudes20. Tap Tap21. Coffee without the Saucer22. Lily on the Pants23. Sharing a Bag 24. Umbrella in the Café25. Beast Mode26. Airplane Rituals27. Weirdly Untitled28. Pecans29. The Do-Over30. Infinity31. Ghost32. Nota Bene33. "Love Me in a Special Way"34. "Stay," by Lisa Loeb35. Stacking Delights36. Donny Hathaway on Pandora37. "To Spread the Sweetness of Love"38. Baby, Baby, Baby39. "REPENT OR BURN"40. Giving My Body to the Cause41. Among the Rewards of My Sloth . .42. Not Grumpy Cat43. Some Stupid Shit44. Not Only . .45. Microgentrification: WE BUY GOLD46. Reading Palms47. The Sanctity of Trains48. Bird Feeding49. Kombucha in a Mid-century Glass50. Hickories51. Annoyed No More52. Toto53. Church Poets54. Public Lying Down55. Babies. Seriously56. "My Life, My Life, My Life, My Life in the Sunshine57. Incorporation58. Botan Rice Candy59. Understory60. "Joy Is Such a Human Madness": The Duff Between Us61. "It's Just the Day I'm Having" ..62. The Purple Cornets of Spring63. The Volunteer64. Fishing an Eyelash: Two or Three Cents on the Virtues of the Poetry Reading65. Found Things66. Found Things (2)67. Cuplicking68. Bobblehead69. The Jenky 70. The Crow's Ablutions71. Flowers in the Hands of Statues72. An Abundance of Public Toilets73. The Wave of Unfamiliars74. Not for Nothing75. Bindweed ... Delight?76. Dickhead77. Ambiguous Signage Sometimes78. Heart to Heart79. Caution: Bees on Bridge80. Tomato on Board81. Purple-Handed82. Name: Kayte Young; Phone Number: 555-867-530983. Still Processing84. Fireflies85. My Scythe Jack86. Pawpaw Grove87. Loitering88. Touched89. Scat90. Get Thee to the Nutrient Cycle!91. Pulling Carrots92. Filling the Frame93. Reckless Air Quotes 94. Judith Irene Gay, Aged Seventy-six Today!95. Rothko Backboard96. The Marfa Lights97. The Carport98. My Garden (Book):99. Black Bumblebees!100. Grown101. Coco-baby102. My Birthday

“Perhaps a future of environmental writing begins in trying to meet all people where they are, wherever they are,” writes Lauret E. Savoy. “It’s acknowledging and honoring difference as enriching.” In Trespass , twenty women essayists challenge the traditional boundaries of place-based writing to make room for greater complexity: explorations of body, sexuality, gender, and race. Traveling across time and place―from a Minnesota summer camp to the peacock-lined streets of Kerala, India―these essays reveal their authors as artful and singular observers of their homes, lives, and histories. Emerging writers along with celebrated voices in the field, including Belle Boggs, Camille T. Dungy, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Terry Tempest Williams, reclaim spaces that have always been theirs.Observing the policing of Detroit, Aisha Sabatini Sloan bears witness to environmental racism, and finds community with family and neighbors. Toni Jensen traces the erasure of Native culture on college campuses and challenges notions of safety in light of sexual and gun violence. Laurie Clements Lambeth paints the strength and fragility of the human body through the lens of a progressive neurological disease. And Shuchi Saraswat’s trip to the Bay Area to document a ceremony honoring Ganesha leads her on her own journey home.Originally published in the pages of Ecotone, the award-winning literary magazine that reimagines place, these essays recount how women uniquely shape and are shaped by their environments. Together, they spark new conversations, showing the ways we forge identity through larger cultural considerations―in our bodies, our neighborhoods, and the natural world.

The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks. Nobody needs to be told there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and ceaseless battle against distraction; we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient and life hacks to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing that many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.

A valuable new companion journal for the best-selling Falling Upward In Falling Upward, Fr. Richard Rohr seeks to help readers understand the tasks of the two halves of life and to show them that those who have fallen, failed, or "gone down" are the only ones who understand "up." The Companion Journal helps those who have (and those who have not) read Falling Upward to engage more deeply with the questions the book raises. Using a blend of quotes, questions for individual and group reflection, stories, and suggestions for spiritual practices, it provides a wise guide for deepening the spiritual journey. . . at any time of life.Explains why the second half of life can and should be full of spiritual richness Offers tools for spiritual growth and greater understanding of the ideas in Falling UpwardRichard Rohr is a regular contributing writer for Sojourners and Tikkun magazines This important companion to Falling Upward is an excellent tool for exploring the counterintuitive messages of how we grow spiritually.

“Thought-provoking, encouraging, and inspiring” (Gretchen Rubin) reflections on the power of travel to transform our daily lives—from the iconoclastic travel writer, scholar, and author of VagabondingFor readers who dream of travel, yearn to get back out on the road, or want to enrich a journey they’re currently on, The Vagabond’s Way explores and celebrates the life-altering essence of travel all year long. Each day of the year features a meditation on an aspect of the journey, anchored by words of wisdom from a variety of thinkers—from Stoic philosopher Seneca and poet Maya Angelou to Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Grover from Sesame Street . Iconoclastic travel writer and scholar Rolf Potts embraces the ragged-edged, harder-to-quantify aspects of travel that inevitably change travelers’ lives for the better in unexpected ways. The book’s various sections mirror the phases of a trip, including• dreaming and planning the “All life-affecting journeys—and the unexpected wonders they promise—become real the moment you decide they will happen.”• embracing the rhythms of the “The most poignant experiences on the road occur in those quiet moments when we recognize beauty in the ordinary.”• finding richer travel “Developing an instinct to venture beyond the obvious on the road allows you to see places as mysteries to be investigated.”• expanding your comfort “No moment of instant gratification can compare to savoring an experience that has been earned by enduring the adversity that comes with it.” The Vagabond’s Way encourages you to sustain the mindset of a journey, even when you aren’t able to travel, and affirms that travel is as much a way of being as it is an act of movement.

This is a 3-volume set of oversize books that span the continent of Asia. Ancient and beautiful traditions in Asia that are rapidly disappearing are recorded here in 9,000 images on 1,000 pages. The author has visited 35 countries in Asia and has travelled to the end of the road in its most remote places to capture the costumes, architecture, festivals, and lifestyles that are vanishing. The diverse cultures range from Turkey in the west to Japan in the east, from Siberia in the north to Indonesia in the south, and everything in between. Volume 1 covers West Asia, Volume 2 Central Asia, and Volume 3 East Asia. Every one of its 1,000 pages is uniquely designed, and every one of its 9,000 images is captioned. This is an ambitious and extreme passion project that the author/photographer has worked on for 49 years. Many of the scenes depicted in the book are now gone from the world, and others are becoming rarer by the day. There is no other book like it.