The River of Heaven

Author: Robert Aitken
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1582438889
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 90

Book Description
“In this, his final work, American senior Zen Roshi Robert Aitken lovingly ties together two threads, Zen practice and haiku.” —Spirituality & Health Known to many as the study of quiet stillness and introspection, Zen Buddhism distinguishes itself through brilliant flashes of insight and its terseness of expression. In River of Heaven these concepts and pillars lend themselves to an exploration of Haiku, one of the most delicate and interpretive poetic forms in the world. The haiku verse form, with its rigid structure and organic description is a superb means of studying Zen modes of thought because its seventeen syllables impose a limitation that confines the poet to vital experience. In Haiku as in Buddhism, the silences are as expressive as the words. In this volume, American Senior Zen Roshi Robert Aitken gives new insight into Haiku by poetic masters Basho, Issa, Buson, and Shiki. In presenting themes from Haiku and from Zen literature, Aitken illuminates the relationship between the two. Readers are certain to find this an invaluable and enjoyable experience for the remarkable revelation it offers. “I am grateful for Robert Aitken’s enthusiastic sharing of poems in The River of Heaven, together with his rich personal and cultural perspectives. It is a book where the author joyfully calls each of us as readers to share in the transcendent joys of haiku.” —Juxtapositions “Aitken mines the meanings in these brief gems about nature, impermanence, travel, awareness, silence, beauty, being present, the turn of the seasons, and much more.” —Spirituality & Practice

River of Heaven

Author: Lee Martin
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307407330
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
“You have to know the rest of my story, the part I can’t yet bring myself to say. A story of a boy I knew a long time ago and a brother I loved and then lost.” Past and present collide in Lee Martin’s highly anticipated novel of a man, his brother, and the dark secret that both connects and divides them. Haunting and beautifully wrought, River of Heaven weaves a story of love and loss, confession and redemption, and the mystery buried with a boy named Dewey Finn. On an April evening in 1955, Dewey died on the railroad tracks outside Mt. Gilead, Illinois, and the mystery of his death still confounds the people of this small town. River of Heaven begins some fifty years later and centers on the story of Dewey’s boyhood friend Sam Brady, whose solitary adult life is much formed by what really went on in the days leading up to that evening at the tracks. It’s a story he’d do anything to keep from telling, but when his brother, Cal, returns to Mt. Gilead after decades of self-exile, it threatens to come to the surface. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Bright Forever, Lee Martin masterfully conveys, with a voice that is at once distinct and lyrical, one man’s struggle to come to terms with the outcome of his life. Powerful and captivating, River of Heaven is about the high cost of living a lie, the chains that bind us to our past, and the obligations we have to those we love.

The River of Heaven

Author: Garrett Kaoru Hongo
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon Classic Contem
ISBN: 9780887483585
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A reissuing of The River of Heaven, poems by Garrett Hongo.

From the River of Heaven

Author: David Frawley
Publisher: Lotus Press
ISBN: 9780910261388
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
This text presents an overview of Indian spiritual tradition and its relevance to the modern mind. It introduces Vedic knowledge as the root of many mystical traditions and as a complete system of spiritual science, including the practice of yoga as part of a field of spiritual culture.

A River Called Heaven

Author: Scotland Payne
Publisher: Scotland Payne
ISBN: 9780979284700
Category : Racially mixed people
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
The Segregated South a power keg ready to explode after the passage of the '1964 Civil Rights Act.' Our nation did just that with assassinations, race riots, fires and the War raged in Vietnam. See why Integration is a great blessing, yet a curse in this story of young love, prejudice, sex, humor, and tragedy. Against the backdrop of all this turmoil, bigotry and racism, in North Carolina a laid back River Called Heaven flows. A sanctuary for this multiracial band of brigands, challenges the segregated South and bigoted North.

Ganga

Author: Vatsala Sperling
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1591439086
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
Tells how the Hindu goddess Ganga came to Earth as the Ganges River • Introduces children to one of the most beloved characters of Hindu mythology • Illustrated throughout with full-color paintings in traditional Indian style The Ganges River, which flows from the high reaches of the Himalayas all the way down to the Bay of Bengal, is sacred to the Hindu people, who consider it to be the earthly form of the goddess Ganga. The story of how Ganga was born, and how she became a river, tells of a journey from a place even higher than the Himalayan mountaintops--a journey from Heaven itself. Born in a pot of sacred water, the baby Ganga grows into a beautiful and lighthearted girl, the darling of Heaven. But one day her sense of humor gets her in trouble. When grumpy Sage Durvasa is caught in a whirlwind that blows his clothes right off him, Ganga makes the mistake of laughing at him. In a rage, the sage puts a curse on her: “You must go to Earth as a river!” Ganga is heartbroken and begs the sage to forgive her. He can’t take back the curse, but seeing that she is truly sorry, he gives her a blessing as well: her water will purify the souls of men, releasing them from sin. When Sage Baghirath prays to the gods to help him release the souls of his ancestors, Ganga comes tumbling from the sky and follows the sage across India, the river unfurling behind her. To this day millions of people take comfort in her healing waters, and Ganga, too, takes comfort in relieving their suffering.

The Book of Heaven

Author: Patricia Storace
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375707557
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
From the author of the acclaimed Dinner with Persephone comes a radically original novel about four women who invite us to imagine the divine anew: what if “a woman’s point of view” were also God’s? Patricia Storace’s Eve begins by telling us her version of what happened in Eden, and by revealing that our familiar constellations conceal other heavens we have never allowed ourselves to see. Each of the four subsequent chapters is the story of one of these new zodiacs, featuring images central to women: a knife, a cauldron, a garden, a pair of embracing lovers. The four women whose stories they tell are Job’s daughter, the Queen of Sheba, a polytheistic cook, and a transformed Sarah, wife of Abraham. Storace brilliantly reimagines the worlds of these women, freeing them from the old tales in which they were trapped and putting them in the foreground of their stories and of the Old Testament itself.

The Lathe Of Heaven

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1668014963
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
With a new introduction by Kelly Link, the Locus Award-winning science fiction novel by legendary author Ursula K. Le Guin, set in a world where one man’s dreams rewrite the future. During a time racked by war and environmental catastrophe, George Orr discovers his dreams alter reality. George is compelled to receive treatment from Dr. William Haber, an ambitious sleep psychiatrist who quickly grasps the immense power George holds. After becoming adept at manipulating George’s dreams to reshape the world, Haber seeks the same power for himself. George—with some surprising help—must resist Haber’s attempts, which threaten to destroy reality itself. A classic of the science fiction genre, The Lathe of Heaven is prescient in its exploration of the moral risks when overwhelming power is coupled with techno-utopianism.

The Blood of Heaven

Author: Kent Wascom
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802193501
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
“The work of a young writer with tremendous ambition, a bildungsroman of religion and revolution set during an obscure chapter of American history.” —The Washington Post A powerful and impressive debut novel from the winner of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction—first in the Woolsack family saga that continues with Secessia and The New Inheritors. The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr. The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut. “Wascom is a craftsman, and each of his lengthy, winding sentences shimmers with the tang of blood and bone and sweat, and the archaic splendor of his language.” —The Boston Globe

Water from Heaven

Author: Robert Kandel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231507755
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
From where—and what—does water come? How did it become the key to life in the universe? Water from Heaven presents a state-of-the-art portrait of the science of water, recounting how the oxygen needed to form H2O originated in the nuclear reactions in the interiors of stars, asking whether microcomets may be replenishing our world's oceans, and explaining how the Moon and planets set ice-age rhythms by way of slight variations in Earth's orbit and rotation. The book then takes the measure of water today in all its states, solid and gaseous as well as liquid. How do the famous El Niño and La Niña events in the Pacific affect our weather? What clues can water provide scientists in search of evidence of climate changes of the past, and how does it complicate their predictions of future global warming? Finally, Water from Heaven deals with the role of water in the rise and fall of civilizations. As nations grapple over watershed rights and pollution controls, water is poised to supplant oil as the most contested natural resource of the new century. The vast majority of water "used" today is devoted to large-scale agriculture and though water is a renewable resource, it is not an infinite one. Already many parts of the world are running up against the limits of what is readily available. Water from Heaven is, in short, the full story of water and all its remarkable properties. It spans from water's beginnings during the formation of stars, all the way through the origin of the solar system, the evolution of life on Earth, the rise of civilization, and what will happen in the future. Dealing with the physical, chemical, biological, and political importance of water, this book transforms our understanding of our most precious, and abused, resource. Robert Kandel shows that water presents us with a series of crucial questions and pivotal choices that will change the way you look at your next glass of water.