Dancing through the Storm focuses on these concepts: - You can recognize and resist abuse in relationships. - Love can only be expressed properly through knowing God intimately and knowing yourself. - A healthy relationship doesn't just happen. It is the fruit resulting from heeding the promptings of the Holy Spirit and applying God's Word in every situation. - Marriage is a "God thing," created by God before sin entered the world. - A blessed marriage is a synthesis of three not two because Christ is to be the head. - Through Christ, you can fully recover from an abusive situation.

This is the story of Barbara's journey with her mother through her mother's battle with Alzheimer's. While it is a devastating and debilitating disease, they found moments of joy and laughter along the way. It also tells the story of Barbara's journey from childhood family dysfunction to forgiveness. Both journeys converge when Barbara and her three sisters unite as adults to give their mother loving care during the final years of her life. Barbara's love of dance weaves in and out of both journeys, culminating in a surprising interaction between Barbara and her mother during her mother's advanced stage of Alzheimer's. Barbara Rudnicki is retired after teaching high school English for 40 years. Now, she works part-time at Danson Feet Dance Studio, where she clogs once a week with fun women of all ages. For over 25 years, she has enjoyed summer trips exploring Minnesota with a group of teacher friends and finds that no matter how small the town, it always has fun surprises. She loves spending time with her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. While this is Barbara's first adventure in publishing, she has read her work at places such as The Loft, Patrick's Cabaret, and the Blue Moon Café. Barbara Rudnicki's Dancing Through the Storm is a memoir about a woman who forgets and the women around her-her daughters-who refuse to forget. The slow, then quick, then slow presentation of Barb's mother's descent into Alzheimer's disease is carefully woven into Dancing Through the Storm, making the book feel like a dance between the author and the reader. Indeed, the dancing motif, used as an extended metaphor throughout, provides moments of joy in a book that is deeply sad but necessary reading for anyone whose life has been touched by dementia or Alzheimer's disease. - Nicole Helget, Minnesota Book Award Author, The End of the Wild

Bella is the most beautiful and amazing flower. One afternoon as the skies darken and a storm moves in, Bellas parents tell her to bend with the wind and rely on her roots to survive. As hail batters little Bella, she remembers her parents words and stands strong. As the storm passes and she rises in color and life, Bella has no idea that she is about to face an ever greater danger than nature. But through Bellas splendor and tenderness, she teaches a valuable lesson that proves that her beauty is not only on the outside, but also within her heart. The Dancing Flowers is an inspirational childrens story about a beautiful little flower who finds the courage to weather all her storms through love, compassion, and family.

The loss of a loved one, divorce, unemployment, terminal illness, struggles with finances . . . Have any of these heart-wrenching realities come knocking on your door? Even if your life seems relatively calm, you know someone who is suffering immeasurably. Dancing in the Rain will help you and your loved ones weather the storms of life with grace and strength. Join Cindy Shufflebarger as she chronicles a life-altering event—the loss of her child. Cindy honestly shares her thoughts, feelings, and attitudes, and how God has changed them throughout her journey. She offers hope, understanding, reassurance, and God's love to those who are hurting. As someone who has been there, Cindy identifies with you as she walks you from the door of despair to the window of hope by helping you: • Understand the true meaning of joy, • Change your focus—towards heaven instead of worldly suffering, • Experience God's love, • See God's goodness, and • Make the choice to be better instead of bitter.

From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich's fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports. Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future. "Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead."—Terry Eagleton, The Nation

"In a pamphlet saturated in colour, Damien Donnelly takes us on an immersive journey through a landscape of pigments. Written with great lyricism and emotional intensity, these poems contrast darker hues with lighter tones to create a sequence of poems that will linger in the memory."

When a tragic car accident took the life of our twenty-one year old daughter, Maia, we began a journey that has been paradoxically the most heart-wrenching and spiritually uplifting period of our lives. Learning to Dance in the Rain chronicles the first year of this journey. Through pain and despair to renewed energy and spiritual discovery, we write about the many ways in which we are finding strength and inspiration to carry on. With help from family and friends, a variety of religious/spiritual traditions, encounters with the natural world, and, most profoundly, continued connection with our beloved daughter, we are learning that death is as much a beginning as it is an end and that pain can be a catalyst for personal & spiritual growth. It is our greatest hope that sharing our story in this way will help others find strength to face the storms that come their way and live their lives with greater awareness. www.learningtodanceintherain.net