A MEDITATION ON IDENTITY, CULTURE, AND HEALING IN CHILDREN SEPARATED FROM ORIGINAL FAMILY. Millions of our world¿s children are forced through the curtain of separation from original family. Among the numerous causes are poverty, abuse, neglect, natural disaster, epidemic, immigration, incarceration, addiction, war, genocide, oppression, and child labor. While each experience is its own, all such separations cleave the child heart and mind into a common root wound of vacancy and drift. In the face of such woundedness, our children have the power for healing and growth waiting within them. Every aspect of their lives is affected by an often solitary quest for beauty and belonging. We who raise and serve these displaced young, through our embrace, are a vital factor in their ultimate healing. Jaiya John has shared time with thousands of uprooted children through his human relations work. Reflection Pond offers us his personal meditation, a looking glass for what these youth have whispered into his spirit. They have shared their need for reflection ponds: people, places, and experiences through which their own beauty and purpose are reflected back to them. Through allegory and parable, poetry and prose, Jaiya John draws from the natural world around us to unveil the magical inner life of children and youth. Here is a revelatory positioning of the human mirror. In its face we glimpse magnificence.

A dramatic story of the interplay between environment and economy in New England.

A beautifully written collection of essays for anyone who’s ever lived in that unwieldy group called family—a story that takes us from Iowa to the high country of Wyoming and Montana as a woman and her husband search for the perfect place to raise their five daughters and five sons. Rooted in real-life experience, this unique essay collection of passion, intimacy, work, religion, puberty, love and loss, and the struggle to be steadfast in times of enormous social change reads like a novel—full of lively characters, spirited dialogue, and a landscape that takes you from Iowa to the high country of Wyoming and Montana. As the chapters unfold, one focused on each child, Virginia Tranel and her husband search for the ideal place to raise the five daughters and five sons born to them between 1957 and 1978. Tranel artfully weaves daily moments with world events as she reflects on how our culture affects our decisions. She offers candid observations on everything from her reproductive choices and feminism's influence on her thinking to sibling rivalries and her family's emotional response when an architect son emails firsthand reports of the horrors of September 11. Whether considering the issues intrinsic to marriage and child-raising, or questioning her own common sense, her insights are always provocative and deeply moving.

Except for remodeling out first home, my wife and I had no experience in building yet dared to built two homes: a custom one for our growing family and, later, one for our retirement. Though the book is well illustrated, it is not a step-by-step instruction on how to build a home, but one well detailed in all phases of construction. . Our retirement home, built with concrete blocks, reinforced with steel, is a more permanent structure. Let me put it this way: it is not an overstatement if I say our retirement home will last thousands of years, one that will have people wondering, who the heck built a Greek temple on a California mountain? We did not go into the project blindly. The key words are research and taking the time to visit building sites. In my work clothes of white shirt and tie and with clipboard for taking note, I was seen by most laborers as a typical office worker doing his tedious job. Please try to be unobtrusive while questioning workers in different stages of construction. Carpenters were helpful in demonstrating the safe use of power tools. Stucco men loved to show off the different textures they created, Spanish lace their favorite. I strongly recommend that my readers visit construction, and please get permission from a job foreman. Good luck.

Changed: Chronicles of How and Why is an epic saga of the beginning of civilization. For two hundred thousand years, hunters hunted, gatherers gathered, they sometimes mated. Then they became civilized and things went to hell. This is the story of how it happened. 12,000 years ago, a few of our kind stepped from the path of "the way things have always been done." They changed human history for better and for worse. This is their story. Part I. The Chronicles of Pumi and Valki, the Rise of Civilization. The story of how Pumi and Valki transform hunter-gatherer tribes into an agricultural-scientific society. They meant no harm. Part II. The Chronicles of Kiya and her Children, Rise and Fall of the Titans. The story of how Kiya and her children create an industrial society and spread civilization throughout the world. They did good. They paid the price. Part III. The Chronicles of Hestia and Dionysus, Rise and Fall of the Olympians. The story of where we went wrong and why we are the way we are.

In this new edition, Vault publishes the entire surveys of current students and alumnni at more than 300 top undergraduate institutions, as well as the schools' responses to the comments. Each 4-to 5-page entry is composed of insider comments from students and alumni, as well as the schools' responses to the comments.