A rich and diverse collection of creative heart-shaped floral arrangements - bouquets, centrepieces and garlands - to celebrate a special event or just to bring a touch of love and sweetness to the home.

This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.

The beauty of nature surrounds us, but its beauty is often wasted as we rush through lives filled with work, family, and other responsibilities. What if we were to slow down for a moment and take a look around? What would we notice; what would we learn? Surely, more than we could have imagined. Poet Ajit Sripad Rao Nalkur admires the wilderness around him, while living in southern India. His words bridge the gap between the human world and the world of nature, where small details speak volumes and inspire peace. He writes not only of natures majesty but also of our connection to ita connection we can choose to ignore or embrace. In this collection, an artist seeks and waits for his muse. Little things bring great joy, like a single wildflower or the serene power of silence. Nalkurs words reach beyond the page and into the readers innermost being, challenging each of us to emotionally connect with nature. These poems remind us all to slow down and admire the miracle that is life on Earth.

Simple text and photographs depict the parts of flowers and their pollination.

The way we talk to ourselves is often unkind and filled with self-judgments. These overly harsh self-criticisms can make us feel unworthy and incomplete. What if what you really need is not higher standards for yourself, but greater self-compassion? In Living with Your Heart Wide Open, you’ll discover how mindfulness and self-compassion can free you from the thoughts and beliefs that create feelings of inadequacy and learn to open your heart to the loving-kindness within you and in the world around you. Based in Western psychotherapy and Buddhist psychological principles, this book guides you past painful and self-limiting beliefs about yourself and toward a new perspective of nonjudgmental awareness and acceptance of who you are, just as you are. You’ll receive gentle guidance in mindfulness and compassion practices that will lead you away from unproductive, self-critical thoughts and help you live more freely and fearlessly, with your heart wide open.

With love comes pain.And with pain comes scars. Believe me, I have had my share of it all.After my mother's death, my father couldn't deal.So once again, we're moving.To a town full of lies, darkness, and corruption.All masked in sunshine and money. But then I meet him...My biggest mistake.My biggest temptation.A royal pain-in-the-ass. And Darrian King is no prince.He's controlling, aggressive, and downright wrong for me.But what he dishes out,I give right back.After all, love hurts.And so do we.

An enchanting and captivating novel about how our untold stories haunt us — and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak. Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family’s story. In her early twenties, Alice’s life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man. Spanning two decades, set between sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart follows Alice’s unforgettable journey, as she learns that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.