California, 1906. Hope Newfield and Leong Po-yo fall in love. Defying every taboo, this independent American woman and aristocratic Chinaman marry. But in the coming years, as they move from San Francisco to China, their love is tested by prejudice, conflicting loyalties and different traditions.

All her life, Audrey has done what is expected of her, following her father’s footsteps into the civil service, the “iron rice bowl” of Singapore. When a chance opportunity arises to attend a writing retreat in the Wonju mountains of South Korea, she grabs it, not knowing what to expect. Unexplainable things soon start happening to her, while a long-buried memory surfaces, threatening to unravel her calm and carefully-orchestrated world.

Let history drop behind as we explore the sacred confines of a temple city built by a race that was here long before us; before our species was even a glimmer in the cosmic eye, and whose work is still evident, usable, and heuristic. Dominated by a mountain, sculpted as a pregnant women, with a lion at her feet and a rearing serpent behind, the site is still alive with eddies of spiritual energy. Between the colossal lady and lion is a saddle in the mountain beautified by mazes of stone, sparkling sand terraces, and the gardens of windswept splendor with the rock everywhere seeming to be incised with aesthetic, undecipherable hieroglyphics. The site is beautiful, bolstering, and enlivened; geometrically tuned to the cosmos, whose forces it appropriates to utilize in various ways. Join in as we uncover a few of the marvels of an authentically magical place with a psychedelic consciousness adapted to tuning into the ancient mysteries; giving a new dynamism to the on-going story if a truly sacred mountain.

Over the course of nineteen essays, Alan Watts ("a spiritual polymatch, the first and possibly greatest" —Deepak Chopra) ruminates on the philosophy of nature, ecology, aesthetics, religion, and metaphysics. Assembled in the form of a “mountain journal,” written during a retreat in the foothills of Mount Tamalpais, CA, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown is Watts’s meditation on the art of feeling out and following the watercourse way of nature, known in Chinese as the Tao. Embracing a form of contemplative meditation that allows us to stop analyzing our experiences and start living in to them, the book explores themes such as the natural world, established religion, race relations, karma and reincarnation, astrology and tantric yoga, the nature of ecstasy, and much more.

What do we seek and what do we find when we visit parks and protected areas? What does it mean to become so deeply attached to a beautiful, wild place that it becomes part of one's identity? And why does it matter if a particular landscape doesn't speak to one's soul? Part memoir and part scholarly analysis of the psychological and societal dimensions of place-creation, Canyon, Mountain, Cloud details the author's experiences working and living in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Denali National Park and Preserve, Adirondack State Park, and arctic Alaska. Along the way, Olstad explores canyons, climbs mountains, watches clouds, rafts rivers, searches for fossils, and protects rare and fragile vegetation. She learns and shares local natural and cultural histories, questions perceptions of "wilderness," deepens her appreciation for wildness, and reshapes her understanding of self and self-in-place. Anyone who has ever felt appreciation for wild places and who wants to think more deeply about individual and societal relationships with American parks and protected areas will find humor, fear, provocation, wonder, awe, and, above all, inspiration in these pages.

"It opens to a spring day, when a middle-aged doctor named Dao-sheng leaves the mountaintop Taoist monastery where he has been living and sets out for the Region of the South, to the city he had once visited thirty years earlier and where his life had been irrevocably changed. He had then been a strapping but poor young musician traveling with a theater troupe. One evening, during a performance, he caught the eye of a well-born young woman named Lan-ying. Their contact lasted but a minute, but to them it felt like an eternity. For this act of audacity he was banished to hard labor by the girl's jealous fiance, the dissipated scion of a powerful family, who had witnessed their exchange and grasped its significance. Across the decades of a life spent either on the run or hiding out in monasteries, where he mastered medicine and divination, Dao-sheng never forgot Lan-ying. One exchange of glances had sealed something forever, something whose enduring power would decide their fates."--BOOK JACKET.

As the struggle to protect Northwest salmon runs and the urgency of the fight against environmental deterioration escalates, Mountain in the Clouds remains an important and illuminating story, as timely now as when it was first written. The 1995 edition includes a selection of historical photographs.

A funny and engaging guide to finding awareness in daily activities beyond sitting meditation—from a rising leader in the Insight Meditation community Meditation is great, but it's not what Buddhist practice is all about. Deep insight and liberation from suffering can be found in any ordinary activity—from sorting the laundry to data entry—as long as we approach them with the necessary awareness. Such is the teaching of Buddhist monk Sayadaw U Tejaniya, who himself learned to cultivate awareness in the raucous years he spent in the Burmese textile business before taking his final monastic ordination at the age of thirty-six. In this refreshingly modern guide, Sayadaw U Tejaniya teaches us how to bring awareness to all activities. By training ourselves to be aware of the clinging and aversion that arise in any situation, calm and deep insight will naturally follow. “The object of attention is not really important,” he teaches, but “the observing mind that is working in the background. If the observing is done with the right attitude, any object is the right object.” The flame of wisdom can be kindled in the midst of any life, even one that might seem too full of personal and professional commitments to allow for it.

Ginger Kathrens continues the saga of the wild horses of the Arrowheads in Cloud’s Legacy, a companion volume to PBS’s NATURE program. An award-winning wildlife documentary filmmaker, Kathryns is passionate about the plight of wild horses in North America, and it is with great joy that she watches the cast of Cloud’s Legacy run and interact freely on America’s wide open spaces. Her great story-telling abilities are beautifully enhanced by the exciting color photography that adorns each chapter of this handsome volume. The cast of characters in this saga has expanded beyond the first Cloud documentary to include over thirty different horses (all of which are listed in the appendix of the book). The story is told in 22 engaging chapters that follow Cloud and his growing family through their real-life adventures in the Rocky Mountains. Kathrens’s documentaries about Cloud, his cohorts, and family won the CINE Golden Eagle Awards, Chicago International Television Competition, U.S. International Film and Video Festival, and the WorldFest Houston International Film Festival.