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These days 'nature poetry' is often disparaged as irrelevant in modern society with the presumption that poets should be writing poems about humans: our suffering, our problems, our wars, prejudices, and injustices. In our culture of money, nature is mostly devalued as scenery or as an exploitable resource, a place to cut timber, extract minerals, and divert water for manufacturing. These powerful and accessible poems of loss and praise view nature as a resource-to assist in our awakening. They challenge us to find the spiritual in the everyday, the sacred in the secular. They examine the natural world as a local expression of the cosmos. By exploring mountains and rivers they move toward a fusion with the geography of our inner world, showing that in the mindfulness created by our experiences of nature lies our best hope of addressing human problems. As well as notes from the wilderness they include news from the edge of consciousness, wintry prayers, and the happiness of the ordinary, even within the context of ecological peril. These are poems with an intricate sense of our connection to the natural world for a disconnected time. "Poetry, for me, is an instrument of investigation and a mode of perception, a way of knowing and feeling both self and world...I am interested in poems that find a clarity without simplicity; in a way of thinking and speaking that does not exclude complexity but also does not obscure; in poems that know the world in many ways at once-heart, mind, voice, and body." -Jane Hirshfield, judge of the 2024 Wildhouse Poetry Chapbook Contest

I'm what you might call a regular guy. For virtually all of my adult life, I've worked a nine-to-five job in an office. Yet, like many of you, I've been on a spiritual quest since I was in my twenties. Wondering if there might be more to life than the daily cycle of work-home-sleep-repeat, I began reading voraciously--everything from books on Buddhism, Hinduism, and the Jesus teachings I grew up on, to the latest spirituality bestsellers, self-help columns, and human-interest stories in my local newspaper. Eventually, I came to this realization: for me, true wisdom is not found in a single magical book or a particular religion or one enlightened spiritual teacher. Wisdom comes from many sources. Wake Up Call is a compendium of commentaries I've written over the years inspired by this unending spiritual quest. I hope this book inspires you on your quest, wherever it may lead.

Most Americans view ping pong as either a basement recreation or the focus of a fraternity-party drinking game. Yet table tennis is an Olympic sport and one of the most popular athletic activities in the world. The Ping Pong Player and the Professor is a quirky memoir about the adventures of a Jewish anthropologist and his son, an elite player, in the colorful subculture of this extraordinary sport. The tale of their exploits in this hidden world is peppered with anthropological wisdom-the professor can't help himself-on a range of topics, including ethnicity, religion, sport, family, and how humans create and discover meaning in life. At its core The Ping Pong Player and the Professor is a heartwarming love story about the relationship between a father and son, two introverts who share a common bond over a nine-foot by five-foot table.

Meridian is a collection of poems that reflects the poet's deep and abiding love affair with the natural world. The poems draw on the alchemy that binds the visible and the invisible, capturing moments with people, places, and things that cannot be reduced and therefore diminished. Written over a span of years, the poems reflect the author's ongoing fascination with things that can be perceived but neither measured nor explained in surface conceptions. The two pieces that bookend this collection feature a mysterious hum, and that thread traces its way through the collection as a whole: the early poems begin with abstract ideas about time and binary thinking, subsequently widening the frame to explore the poet's expansive sense of humankind and her engagement with nature. With an architect's eye, she shapes these poems to meet the varied contexts from which they arose, opening to us a vision of creation that seeks to engage readers with a sense of wonder and invite them into the spacious embrace of gratitude.This chapbook was the winning selection for Wildhouse Poetry's "2023 'con/verge/nce' Chapbook Contest, judged by Jane Hirshfield. In selecting Meridian, Ms. Hirshfield wrote of this collection: "In Meridian, Julie Sumner offers readers a chapbook of quietly particular observations and tensile strengths. Body, speech, and mind are equally present, in poems that reference philosophy and photons, hold archeology and a patient's post-surgical staples, present a sly flash of the comic and an empathy extending to humans, vegetables, birds, and one almost-extinct monk seal looking back at those who marvel at its arrival. The ethics of interconnection inform each page, along with the wonder of transformation, both natural and human. In one poem, a glassblower's globe makes of its single, held human breath a world. Just so, these pages conjure and hold in hand, eyes, and ear the ranges of our human lives: our shapes, fates, forms, choices, pausings, ponderings; our borrowed feathers, our mysteries, our resilience."-Jane Hirshfield

In Refuge for Cranes, Jerome Gagnon writes at the intersection of inner and outer landscapes, finding refuge in nature, art, and awareness itself. These are poems of wonder and alarm, in awe of the natural world yet full of concern for the harm we do to it, and to ourselves. They range in topic from climate fires and the demise of bees to the "transparency of grace" and "the soul's deep-down unfathoming." There's praise here for beauty, glinting among the detritus, but there's also a call to action, a plea to restore a damaged world. "If you enter these pages, be prepared to open yourself wider to the world, like a flower to the sun," said Phyllis Cole-Dai, author and co-editor of the anthologies, Poetry of Presence I & II." "Gagnon's touching poems remind us of the beauty and value of nature now threatened worldwide by our carelessness," commented George Archibald, co-founder of the International Crane Foundation.

In Heart-Centered Business, spiritual business teacher Mark Silver, M.Div. speaks to those who want an approach to business that is as nourishing as it is powerful. The effects of global business have brought devastation and injustice to the world. Yet we yearn for beauty and real vibrancy in the world around us, and healthy heart-centered business must be part of the healing. This book is a guide to doing business, your business, in a truly spirit-centered way. We need to, and can, realize the truth that every act of business can be an act of love.

Many of us find ourselves living in ways making the question "Do I have a problem with alcohol or other drugs," unavoidable. No one can answer this question for another; each of us must answer for our own self. The questions in this workbook will invite new insights, which may challenge our own certain or even dogmatic views of ourselves. If we believe ourselves to be broken beyond repair or unsalvageable, we remain trapped and unwilling to try anything different. Loosening the grip of that certainty may make us willing to embrace new possibilities about how we can live. There are multiple paths out of addiction; there is no one right way. Recovery requires self-knowledge and willingness. Recovery is a deeply creative process, where each of us has the opportunity--as unwanted as it is--to transform ourselves and our lives.