As women’s spirituality continues to gain popularity, The Buddha’s Wife offers to a broad audience for the first time the intimate and profound story of Princess Yasodhara, the wife Buddha left behind, and her alternative journey to spiritual enlightenment. What do we know of the wife and child the Buddha abandoned when he went off to seek his enlightenment? The Buddha’s Wife brings this rarely told story to the forefront, offering a nuanced portrait of this compelling and compassionate figure while also examining the practical applications her teachings have on our modern lives. Princess Yasodhara’s journey is one full of loss, grief, and suffering. But through it, she discovered her own enlightenment within the deep bonds of community and “ordinary” relationships. While traditional Buddhism emphasizes solitary meditation, Yasodhara’s experience speaks of “The Path of Right Relation,” of achieving awareness not alone but together with others. The Buddha’s Wife is comprised of two parts: the first part is a historical narrative of Yasodhara’s fascinating story, and the second part is a “how-to” reader’s companion filled with life lessons, practices, and reflections for the modern seeker. Her story provides a relational path, one which speaks directly to our everyday lives and offers a doorway to profound spiritual maturation, awakening, and wisdom beyond the solitary, heroic journey.

Includes the plays Get Up and Tie Your Fingers, Devil's Ground and Safe Get Up and Tie Your Fingers, Ann Coburn’s first play, was premiered at the 1995 Borders Festival and had a successful run at the 1996 Edinburgh Festival. It is the achingly sad and ultimately uplifting story of three women coping with death, dealing with guilt, and learning to let their children go. Safe is a play which taps into the deep, shared roots of childhood in order to explore contemporary parental fears about the safety of their children. Devil's Ground is the story of an historical act of genocide, told through the personal tragedy of one Reiver family.

A Trilogy: CRAZY LOVE, Part One: Harry's business travel leaves Claire alone too much, and she gets into trouble with other men. After being laid off from her job in San Francisco, Claire vacations in Paris with Harry. Escapades interwoven between this and other trips jeopardize their marriage. BAG LADY, Part Two: Harry and Claire are striving for a long graceful retirement. The Bag Lady invites herself to visit them in the Wine Country, and Harry and Claire react differently during this tense time. The woman creates a conflict between the couple, and the distressful situation becomes a problem that defies solution. SNOWSTORM, Part Three: Waking up one morning in the Great Northwest, Harry and Claire see snow coming down with no end in sight. The snowstorm puts their life on hold, and they feel like the only two people in the world. Being alone, without heat, electricity, telephone, and transportation, brings out the truth in their marital relationship.

Blood on the Thistle is an examination of the life and times of a remarkable Scottish family, the Cranstons of Haddington, East Lothian. It focuses on a period from about 1880, when the young, hard-working parents, Alec and Lizzie Cranston, arrived in Haddington, through to 1920, when the family they had produced, torn apart by the effects of the Great War, broke up as its surviving members pursued separate lives around the globe.Out of seven sons who served in the First World War, four died and two more were horrifically wounded; only one, the youngest, returned home physically unscathed. This book explores the effects of this extreme sacrifice on the sons themselves as well as the loved ones they left behind, particularly their mother, Lizzie, who mourned them for the rest of her days.This is the tale of how a once proud and aspirational Scottish family was devastated by war, and how the effects continued to ripple through time and generations. Until, a century later, the threads of this remarkable family finally begin to be drawn together again, in a book that is at once a superb documentary account and a moving tribute to a generation.