A new boy cat in the neighborhood introduces his friend--a potted sunflower--to a skeptical skateboarding cat.

Cancer—that unfair, indiscriminate, devastating disease—affects everyone at some point, whether a family member, a friend, or ourselves. It is a life-altering event of seismic proportions that forever impacts the landscape of our lives and, with raw force, pushes us to reorder priorities, reassess values, and perhaps rethink our faith. A diagnosed tumor forced Heather King to this crisis of mortality, to live at the crossroads of uncertainty, belief, fear, culture, and modern medicine. Only her faith in Christ, the Great Physician, helped her sort through the crippling uncertainty and choose her best way forward. Stripped is a heartfelt expression of profound Catholic faith in the face of a cancer diagnosis. It chronicles King’s informed decision not to blindly declare “war on her cancer” but to carefully examine all the medical evidence available and to choose to bring God into her decision making, even if that meant going against established medical advice. The story of Stripped demonstrates how King’s medical and spiritual journey led her to a place of freedom in Christ, where she could make an informed and faith-filled decision about her course of treatment and ultimately, accept her vulnerability. King learned, as we all must, that healing means so much more than simply “getting well.”

There is a poem Esther Lazarson will never forget. It was written by her mother, when Esther was five. Esther’s mother was born in Lithuania, which was under Russian rule at that time. She loved Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, a great poet and political activist. She did not forgive his wife for cheating on him, embroiling him in a duel that caused his early death. Esther was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north of England. Here is the poem: Little Esther won a prize And it isn’t a surprise, For she’s clever and she’s good, And not often very rude. She’s delighted all the same With her newly found fame, And the prize is in her sight From the morning till the night. Rhyme became very familiar to Esther because her mother always tried to win crossword puzzles. She would give Esther the clue and ask “is it devil or revel, is it wonder or ponder?” When Esther was eleven she wrote “The Ballad of Red Riding Hood.” When she was thirty-three she wrote a love poem. On her sixty-ninth birthday, she was with Fred, her Love, on Ward’s Island, where he gardened for the Green Guerrillas. While he planted, she wrote a poem. She hasn’t stopped in twenty years. Esther came to New York in 1951 and is a veteran New Yorker.

From a small farmhouse in Ashburn, Virginia at only nine years old, Frawny, who was almost abducted and experience an apparition of a young girl at a lake by her farm and helped a detective friend in the captured of her presumed killer on this twenty-five-year-old case. She left the farm, her mother, and friends to attend the University of Karlton, Virginia to pursue her education in criminology; while there she encountered a mysterious enemy, whose intentions to kill her goes after her friends first; injuring one and killing another. In going after her friend's killer and finding clues that leads her to her hometown in Ashburn; she encounters FBI files of cold cases of missing six nine-year-old girls and she decides to follow the clues and, in the process, finds connections to the previous twenty-five year remains of the girl in the lake. Frawny's obsession to find more clues takes her to an elderly lady's old house, a shed behind it and an old green truck. The killer aware of her pursuit tries to find ways to avoid it, but soon falls into her trap.

Hailed as a “classic” by leading herbalist Rosemary Gladstar, this botanical compendium provides a wide-ranging history of herbalism and useful guidance for healing with herbs Matthew Wood is one of the United States’ most renowned herbalists and the author of Seven Herbs: Plants as Healers, a watershed book in teaching herbal healing as a part of total wellness. With The Book of Herbal Wisdom, he continues and expands this study, creating a must-read guide for anyone who works in the natural health field or is interested in self-healing with herbs. Wood creates a vast and sweeping history of herbalism, drawing on Western botanical knowledge, homeopathy, Traditional Chinese medicine, and Native American shamanic botany. Detailing the history and use of more than forty plants, he shows how each tradition views a plant, as well as its use in cases drawn from his own herbal and homeopathic practice. An initial section describes signatures, similar, and patterns in these traditions, and elements, temperaments, and constitutions. Wood has two objectives: to demonstrate how herbal medicines are agents of healing and wisdom, and to give the reader a useful catalog of plants for medicinal uses. His clinical observations of his patients bear the wry wisdom of the country doctor; his love of plants is evident in lush botanical descriptions, which show the connection between remedies—whether homeopathic, Chinese, or Native American—and the plants from which they are derived. An introduction to centuries of lore about healing from indigenous traditions, The Book of Herbal Wisdom integrates and describes North American Indian medicine, homeopathy, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Western herbalism like no other contemporary botanical compendium.