SIMPLE • EFFECTIVE • TRANSFORMATIVE

As I’ve discovered in this journey of reading two books a month I’m drawn to real people sharing stories of their lives. Cutting Back; An Apprenticeship in the Gardens of Kyoto fits the bill! Leslie Buck, born and raised in the United States, fulfilled a dream of hers to become an apprentice gardener in Japan. What I didn’t realize when I started reading was that some people specialize in pruning trees. Yes, they may do other garden chores but that is not the mainstay of thei

Mozambique - just the sound of that word feels exotic. But that's not the country's current status. Years and years of civil war have taken its toll, both on the landscape but more importantly, the people. Recovery has been slow for the country but for the survivors left maimed and missing limbs life is a daily torture. The authors of Florencia: An Accidental Story, Douglas Bowman and John Mullen, come from different backgrounds. John is an entrepreneur who made and lost mill

This story, The History of Bees, is actually three stories, in three different eras, linked through the bee. We start in the future, ‘District 242, Shirong, Sichuan, 2098’, with Tao. Though a wife and a mother her main occupation is doing the flower pollination of the worker bee. It is painstaking and monotonous work. And if it's not done properly she will not get paid and her family will not eat. But there are no longer any Bees to do the work so there wouldn't be any food a