Artists today are at a crossroads. With funding for the arts and humanities endowments perpetually under attack, and school districts all over the United States scrapping their art curricula altogether, the place of the arts in our civic future is uncertain to say the least. At the same time, faced with the problems of the modern world—from water shortages and grave health concerns to global climate change and the now constant threat of terrorism—one might question the urgency of this waning support for the arts. In the politically fraught world we live in, is the “felt” experience even something worth fighting for? In this soul-searching collection of vignettes, Patrick Summers gives us an adamant, impassioned affirmative. Art, he argues, nurtures freedom of thought, and is more necessary now than ever before. As artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera, Summers is well positioned to take stock of the limitations of the professional arts world—a world where the conversation revolves almost entirely around financial questions and whose reputation tends toward elitism—and to remind us of art’s fundamental relationship to joy and meaning. Offering a vehement defense of long-form arts in a world with a short attention span, Summers argues that art is spiritual, and that music in particular has the ability to ask spiritual questions, to inspire cathartic pathos, and to express spiritual truths. Summers guides us through his personal encounters with art and music in disparate places, from Houston’s Rothko Chapel to a music classroom in rural China, and reflects on musical works he has conducted all over the world. Assessing the growing canon of new operas performed in American opera houses today, he calls for musical artists to be innovative and brave as opera continues to reinvent itself. This book is a moving credo elucidating Summers’s belief that the arts, especially music, help us to understand our own humanity as intellectual, aesthetic, and ultimately spiritual.

From the bestselling author of the The House of God comes an ambitious novel about the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, doctors and patients, the past and the present, and love and death... Settled into a relationship with an Italian yoga instructor and working in Europe, Dr. Orville Rose's peace is shaken by his mother's death. On his return to Columbia, a Hudson River town of quirky people and “plagued by breakage,” he learns that his mother has willed him a large sum of money, her 1981 Chrysler, and her Victorian house in the center of town. There's one odd catch: he must live in her house for one year and thirteen days. As he struggles with his decision—to stay and meet the terms of the will or return to his life in Italy—Orville reconnects with family, reunites with former friends, and comes to terms with old rivals and bitter memories. In the process he’ll discover his own history, as well as his mother’s, and finally learn what it really means to be a healer, and to be healed.

Built environment surrounds us for 90% of our lives but only now are we realising its influence on the environment, our health, and how we think, feel and behave both individually and socially. Spirit & Place shows how to work towards a sustainable environment through socially inclusive processes of placemaking, and how to create places that are nourishing psychologically and physically, to soul and spirit as well as body. This book's unique arguments identify important, but often unrecognised, principles and illustrate their applicability in a wide range of situations, price-ranges and climates. It shows how to reconcile the apparently incompatible demands of environmental, economic and social sustainability; how to moderate climate to make places of delight, and realign social pressures so places both support society and maximise economic viability. Thought provoking and easy to understand, Christopher Day uses everyday examples to relate his theories to practice and our experience.

Shortlisted for the Apollo Awards Book of the Year 2020 When we look at the landscape, what do we see? Do we experience the view over a valley or dappled sunlight on a path in the same way as those who were there before us? We have altered the countryside in innumerable ways over the last thousand years, and never more so than in the last hundred. How are these changes reflected in and affected by art and literature? English landscape painting is often said to be an 18th-century invention. But when we look for representations of the countryside in British art and literature, we find a story that begins with Old English poetry and treads a winding path up to the present day. Spirit of Place offers a panoramic view of the British landscape as seen through the eyes of writers and artists from Bede and the Gawain-poet to Gainsborough, Austen, Turner and Constable; from Paul Nash and Barbara Hepworth to Robert Macfarlane. Guided by these distinctive voices and imagery, and with a sharp eye for an anecdote, Susan Owens elucidates how the British landscape has been framed, reimagined and reshaped by generations. Each account, whether limned in a psalter, jotted down in a journal or constructed from sticks and stones, holds up a mirror to its maker and their world.

“Delve into this beautiful book. You’ll come away sharing his passion for the beauty that gardens bring into our lives.” —Sigourney Weaver, environmentalist, actor, trustee of New York Botanical Garden How does an individual garden relate to the larger landscape? How does it connect to the natural and cultural environment? Does it evoke a sense of place? In Spirit of Place, Bill Noble—a lifelong gardener, and the former director of preservation for the Garden Conservancy—helps gardeners answer these questions by sharing how they influenced the creation of his garden in Vermont. Throughout, Noble reveals that a garden is never created in a vacuum but is rather the outcome of an individual’s personal vision combined with historical and cultural forces. Sumptuously illustrated, this thoughtful look at the process of garden-making shares insights gleaned over a long career that will inspire you to create a garden rich in context, personal vision, and spirit.

All of Earth’s life is interconnected and sacred. An awareness of that sacred relationship opens a direct path to spiritual understanding. These powerful techniques join mind, will, spirit, and intuition to the plants, animals, and minerals sharing our world, aligning the practitioner in a deeper relationship with life’s sacred matrix.

A pictorial study of the Prince Edward Island that Lucy Maud knew and loved. Passages from her autobiography and from her voluminous personal correspondence supply the text. The illustrations have been taken specially to illustrate the landscape she described.