Every person has a story to tell. This is the story of a Bangladeshi who was born one cold December morning in the village of Lostimanika in East Pakistan and went on to traverse the world during the next sixty plus years. It is a story of growing up in the peaceful Hindu-Muslim community of Narayanganj, of a Muslim boy being educated in Catholic schools, and of leaving home to study in the West when he was merely seventeen. That started a fifty-year journey from his homeland to his present home in Canada. Through it all, he lived and worked in six continents and experienced the beauty and diversity as well as the complexities and hardships faced by peoples worldwide. This book is a personal story, a collection of snippets from his eventful journey through life. The author shares many delightful anecdotes, the scary moments that spelt danger, and his occasional brush with death. It is also a story of visits to many historical, cultural, and religious sites, and of learning about man’s contribution to humanity. The author has worked with many governments, civil society organizations, academics, the military, and the media under challenging circumstances and often in hazardous environments. It is in the end a story of surmounting all obstacles and of having lived a full and happy life.

My Journey Through Time is a spiritual memoir that sheds light on the workings of karma— the law of cause and effect that creates one’s present circumstances and relationships—as we see it unfold through Dena’s vivid memories of her previous births. We travel back in time as Dena learns of a life in early 20th century Russia, ranging from the overthrow of the Czar through Nazi Germany; then it’s back further to a life in early 19th century America in the Deep South, and before that to a time in Africa in the early 18th century. Her lives in the East—in Persia, Japan, and India—go back to the 15th-17th centuries. With each past life, we can see the way in which it has impacted her present life, how it has stemmed from the end of the previous birth, and how it will influence her next life. Dena Merriam is the founder of an interfaith organization, the Global Peace Initiative of Women. A long-time disciplined meditator, Dena’s access to her past lives brings a clearer awareness and purpose to her present life, and also overcomes any fear of death. The memories are triggered when Dena meets a new person or visits a new place in her current life. The memories bring remembrances of past suffering, but also recollections of spiritual teachers and wise guidance. She has not used and does not advocate past-life regressions or hypnosis as a way to prompt memories to return. Dena has decided to share her story, despite being a very private person, in hopes that it can provide comfort and awaken the inner knowing of your own ongoing journey through time.

An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy. Solnit recounts how she came to recognize the epidemic of violence against women around her, the street harassment that unsettled her, the trauma that changed her, and the authority figures who routinely disdained and disbelieved girls and women, including her. Looking back, she sees all these as consequences of the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women, and how she contended with that while becoming a writer and a public voice for women's rights. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves, the gay men around her who offered other visions of what gender, family, and joy could be, and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. These influences taught her how to write in the way she has ever since, and gave her a voice that has resonated with and empowered many others.

In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor, and a single mother at a time when this was unheard of. Vividly chronicling the intense, creative cauldron of those years, she recounts her revolutionary relationships and sexuality, and how her experimentation led her to define herself as a woman. What emerges is a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumph of the imagination, and how one woman discovered her role in the world.

A compelling past-life memoir that will open you to the mysteries and promises of your own spiritual journey When the Bright Moon Rises is first and foremost a love story—love between the sages and the cosmic forces known as the deities, love of the sages for the people, and love between individuals seeking to express this universal force of love that exists within all of us. It is also a study of karma, the cosmic law of cause and effect. This narrative begins in Vedic India, around the 9th century BCE, with the meeting of two people and the seeding of a love that cannot be fulfilled but which comes to fruition nearly 10,000 years later during the Tang Empire in China, where they are reborn as the renowned poet Li Bai and his poet wife. The awakening of her memories of previous births initiates an inner struggle that is only resolved under the guidance of her Daoist Master. This is her story.

This spiritual companion for mourners affirms their need to mourn and invites them to journey through their very unique and personal grief. Detailed are the six needs that all mourners must yield to and eventually embrace if they are to go on to find continued meaning in life and living, including the need to remember the deceased loved one and the need for support from others. Short explanations of each mourning need are followed by brief, spiritual passages that, when read slowly and reflectively, help mourners work through their unique thoughts and feelings. Also included in this revised edition are journaling sections for mourners to write out their personal responses to each of the six needs. This replaces 1879651114.

Sometimes on life's long road it is helpful to pause and reflect on the journey we are making. Macrina Wiederkehr encourages us to reflect on our memories, so that we can move into the future with new wisdom and strength.In this forty-day pilgrimage, Wiederkehr guides us to let go of bitterness and blame and to prayerfully, simply behold our lives. She helps us to open the door of memory and journey again with Jesus down our life's path. From the moment of our conception, through the joys and pains of childhood and adolescence, and on to the quest for love and the fullness of life in adulthood, she leads us to recognize the ever present, loving touch of God.Behold Your Life is a wonderful resource for a healing retreat-during Lent or whenever the Spirit of God urges us to embrace our memories and discover the goodness hidden in our wounds.

With 200 thought-provoking and lighthearted writing prompts and exercises organized into chapters based on life stages, My Life Story gets you started on your life’s memoir and allows you to create a fully realized record of your adventures.

According to legend, the Garden of Eden was located in Iraq, and for millennia, Jews resided peacefully in metropolitan Baghdad. Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad reconstructs the last years of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world through the recollections of Violette Shamash, a Jewish woman who was born in Baghdad in 1912, sent to her daughter Mira Rocca and son-in-law, the British journalist Tony Rocca. The result is a deeply textured memoir—an intimate portrait of an individual life, yet revealing of the complex dynamics of the Middle East in the twentieth century. Toward the end of her long life, Violette Shamash began writing letters, notes, and essays and sending them to the Roccas. The resulting book begins near the end of Ottoman rule and runs through the British Mandate, the emergence of an independent Iraq, and the start of dictatorial government. Shamash clearly loved the world in which she grew up but is altogether honest in her depiction of the transformation of attitudes toward Baghdad’s Jewish population. Shamash’s world is finally shattered by the Farhud, the name given to the massacre of hundreds of Iraqi Jews over three days in 1941. An event that has received very slight historical coverage, the Farhud is further described and placed in context in a concluding essay by Tony Rocca.