Though, don’t get too excited – It might be difficult to see this year because the  full waning gibbous moon is going to be rather bright tonight.

Good news: there are more meteor showers to come!

The Perseid shower can be seen on moon-free nights: late on Wednesday, August 11th till dawn on Thursday August 12th. The Perseids strengthen in number as midnight goes toward dawn, and the meteors are often bright and leave persistent trails.

To learn more about meteorites and their place in our culture, check out Christopher Conkinos’ book The Fallen Sky.

Creative Journal Writing by Stephanie Dowrick won the COVR award in the General Interest category. Feng Shui for Success by Kurt Teske was the 1st Runner Up in the General Interest category. Eileen Flanagan’s The Wisdom to Know the Difference received 1st Runner Up in the Spirituality category. 2nd Runners Up include You Can Think Yourself Thin by Ursala James (in the Alternative Health / Healing category) and Little Book On Meaning by Laura Berman Fortgang (in the Spirituality category).

Each year, The Coalition of Visionary Resources—a non-profit organization that exists to support independent retailers, manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and publishers of visionary products—selects winners from the best new items in the New Age industry. For the twelfth consecutive year, COVR’s Visionary Awards were presented at the International New Age Trade Show banquet on June 27th, 2009, in Denver, Colorado.

The Visionary Awards were administered by Susie Hare, executive director of KJ Expositions in Denver, Colorado. They were judged by retailers and seasoned professionals who evaluated each product based upon content, presentation, and their own knowledge of the industry.

Some of his subjects include:

• The fame-seeking Robert Peary, who went in search of the North Pole and instead found the “ghost rocks of Greenland.”
• Daniel Moreau Barringer, a mining engineer, lawyer, businessman and “blowhard” who popularized the idea that craters could be created by meteorites.
• Biology professor Harvey Nininger, a rabid meteorite collector and adventurer who opened the first meteorite museum and pushed the science world into recognizing the study of meteorites.

Woven together with these tales of personal obsession and entanglement are fascinating details about how meteors have deepened our understanding of the planet and how we have come to understand them through the ages—from Aristotle’s belief that shooting stars were “streaks of light created by earthly vapors” to the ancient Chinese conviction that they were the “stool of the thunder gods.”

Just as shooting stars have captivated individuals and cultures over the centuries, The Fallen Sky—part science, part history and part memoir—is a rich, eye-opening exploration of meteorites and the passions of those who hunt them.

About the Author
The author of Hope is the Thing with Feathers, Christopher Cokinos is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the Glasgow Prize for an emerging writer in nonfiction, and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. His nonfiction, reviews, and poems have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Orion, Science, and Poetry. He is a professor of English at Utah State University.

ORDER THE BOOK:
Amazon.com
Barnes&Noble.com
Borders.com
IndieBound.com

The Tao of Forgiveness: The Healing Power of Forgiving Others and Yourself
William Martin

In this fascinating, compassionate, and insightful book, the author brings the principles of the Tao Te Ching to the practice of forgiveness. Following the tradition of the Tao, each section begins with a teaching story and is followed by a discussion of how the story can be interpreted from the point of view of two mindsets: the conditioned mind (sub-personalities of the ego identity) and the Tao Mind (the pure, undisturbed consciousness). Each section also contains Questions for the Tao Mind, a Tao Mind Exercise, and a Tao Mind Meditation.

The stories are food for thought. The open-ended questions are designed to help readers see how the practice of forgiveness is working–or not working–in their lives. The exercises are intended to help readers overcome anger, shame, and guilt.

The Tao of Forgiveness can teach a lot about the Tao and about letting go. The author suggests that people read the Tao Te Ching as a companion to his book?a good display idea as well. –Nina Votolato, www.MergingHearts.org, Canton, Ohio

Just in time for Halloween, Holy Ghosts: Or How a (Not So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night details Jansen’s quest to explain the phenomena in his home and put an end to the haunting. An honest and gripping account of this journey, the book chronicles his personal struggle to reconcile his Catholic faith with mounting evidence that his home was indeed occupied by spirits. As his investigation escalated, the ghosts forced Jansen to confront astonishing coincidences with local tragedies, painful memories from his childhood, and (with the help of Mary Ann Winkowski, the real-life inspiration for The Ghost Whisperer) the true identities of the spirits.

No ordinary ghost story, Holy Ghosts examines the relationship between religion and the paranormal, while considering perspectives on the afterlife from a variety of traditions.

Holy Ghosts: Or How a (Not So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night
Tarcher / Penguin hardcover, $22.95, September 16th

READ the introduction to Holy Ghosts.

ORDER THE BOOK:

Friday July 23, 2010 7:00 PM
Barnes & Noble
Tribeca: 97 Warren Street, New York, NY 10007
212-587-5389

Read Publisher’s Weekly’s review of the book.

Watch our Tarcher Talks episode with author Adam Elenbaas and his editor, Mitch Horowitz.

07-20-10: Adam Elenbaas is Caught by ‘Fishers of Men’

Adam Elenbaas starts pretty much at Nowhere in his memoir ‘Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest’ (Tarcher / Penguin ; July 22, 2010 ; $24.95). It’s a complicated, twisty little memoir that manages to pack a wallop as Elenbaas explores his own life, which itself is an exploration. This sort of fractal vision is important to ‘Fishers of Men.’ You start your life, after all, inside. Then as you grow up, you go further inward.

From the get-go, there’s a raw feeling to this story of fathers, sons and belief. Not just in the scenario (Adam hovering outside the bathroom door as his father pukes his way through withdrawal from regular drugs in preparation for an ayahuasca ceremony), but in the language as well. Elenbaas writes prose that is snipped, clipped and compressed. But there’s an ache behind all of this convoluted revelation, one that we can all readily identify with.

The story is complicated and so is the exposition. Adam is the son of a Methodist minister. It may be a “like father, like son” scenario, but that only means that everyone is troubled. Adam certainly does not begin by following in his father’s path. Instead, he ends up in a search for sensation; sex, drugs, it does not matter because you cannot fill a void with a void. The first stage of his youth ends badly, but there’s a glimmer of hope that leads him to the world of the ayahuasca vision quest.

Elenbaas knows how to pull apart his timeline and put it back together in an order than makes for compelling reading. He’s a passionate write and even his religious beliefs come through as raw and authentic. He’s an unsparing chronicler of his own and others’ faults. But this only serves to make his revelations more powerful to the reader. As a writer, he knows that he has to create characters, plot, to do more than reveal. He has to find a story in his life and a way to tell that story. He manages to do so and the balancing act of avoiding pathos and self-pity.

‘Fishers of Men’ is also a fascinating journey into the heart of belief, that hard-wired attraction to the otherworldly. Raised as a Christian and inclined to believe thus, Elenbaas finds himself thrust into a very different vision of the otherworld. Readers explore and experience the ayahuasca vision quest with the writer. The synthesis that Elenbaas achieves is gritty and powerful, since he rounds us back and grounds us in characters.

Elenbaas is one of the folks behind Reality Sandwich, along with Daniel Pinchbeck. Reality Sandwich bills itself as “a web magazine for this time of intense transformation,” and this book keeps with those themes, but plays them out in a somewhat grittier fashion. Yes, there is a touch of evangelism about this work, but it’s subsumed in the more immediate story of personal transformation. ‘Fishers of Men’ is about the revelation of character, not a revelation of belief.

What’s interesting here is not just the ayahuasca vision, or the synthesis that Elenbaas achieves. What’s really gripping here, is that with a character-driven story, the author manages to offer an informed vision of vision. It’s that fractal effect. And one needs must remember Flannery O’Connor’s follow-through.

“If you’ve got a good car, then you do not need to be redeemed.”

The Art of Being
What you think of me

A student went to his master teacher and asked to know the key to true inner peace and freedom from emotional suffering.

The master said to him, “Go to the cemetery and curse the person that lay in each grave. Tell them that they are stupid and their mother is ugly too. After you have done that, go back again the next day and bless and praise each person in every grave, telling them how wonderful they are. . . . Tell them that the world worships them to this day . . . even go so far as to light incense and candles for each one, calling them saints. When you have done this, come back to me.”

The student dutifully did as instructed. Upon his return, his master asked him, “Well, what did they have to say about your opinions?”

Astounded, the student replied, “How could they respond to me at all? They were all dead and could not hear a word I said, negative or positive.”

The master said, “When you, too, do not hear what others have to say about you, negative or positive, you will know true inner peace and freedom from suffering.”

Isn’t it interesting to watch our ego get in the way when we buy in and attach to what other people think and say about us? Why do you suppose that is?

At some level, we still have not accepted the fact that we really are okay just the way we are, so we develop a need (addiction) for other people’s criticism or praise to prove to ourselves that how we feel about ourselves is correct.

The law of attraction will always guarantee an ample supply of these individuals to assist us in demonstrating how we feel about ourselves. We find symbiotic relationships and encounters that help our ego feed on the worthlessness we feel.

The fact is that other people’s opinions are never really about you; they are about themselves.

We always serve as divine mirrors for one another. My friend, Dr. Terri Cole Whitaker, summarized it all beautifully in the title of her book “What You Think of Me Is None of My Business.”

When you are mindful of your true divine nature, other people’s opinions (nice or nasty) are meaningless because you know who you really are and have no need to be defined by people who are constantly seeking targets to project their own sense of pain and lack.

This doesn’t mean that you have to ignore compliments and constructive input from others; just be sure it does not become food for the ego.

Living in full awareness of God’s presence will automatically make you immune to opinions targeted at the ego self. Make a decision not to take anything personally . . . and then notice the inner peace that comes with that release.

As a mindfulness practice, if you find that others want to offer their opinion of you today, positive or negative, smile and say, “Thanks for sharing.”

If it is negative, let it become as water off a duck’s back. If it is positive, silently give credit where credit is due by saying to yourself, “It is not me, but God within that does the work.”

This article is excerpted from “The Art of Being: 101 Ways to Practice Purpose in Your Life,”  Dennis Merritt Jones is a local spiritual mentor, keynote speaker and author.  Contact him at www.DennisMerrittJones.com