The Barn At The End Of The World

The Apprenticeship Of A Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd

BY MARY ROSE O'REILLEY
"Deciding that her spirituality needed to be grounded in the real world, Mary Rose O'Reilley, a Quaker with a Catholic past and a Buddhist future, embarked on a year of tending sheep, whom she called her 'two hundred spiritual teachers.' In this poetic, irreverent spiritual autobiography, O'Reilly takes the reader into a working barn, where she learns to 'flip' sheep, inoculate them, and help them lamb (among other, earthier things)." -Paul Lacey.

Milkweed Editions 2001 344 PP. Paper

$15.95 (in stock)

The Garden At Night

Burnout And Breakdown In The Teaching Life

BY MARY ROSE O'REILLEY
It's no wonder that burnout plagues the teaching profession. Teachers are on the front lines every day, meeting the needs of too many students at once. Meanwhile, they must also address an increasingly complex assortment of third-party expectations and deal with the politics of their schools and their departments. Whether you're a beginning teacher trying to sustain your idealism, or an experienced professional courting burnout, take a deep breath and read Mary Rose O'Reilley's The Garden at Night. O'Reilley draws on numerous experiences from the classroom and collegial life and identifies strategies that tap your own courage and strength.

Jossey-Bass 2006 80 PP. Paper

$20.00 (in stock)

Half Wild

Poems

BY MARY ROSE O'REILLEY
This winner of the 2005 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets is a spiritual biography wound backwards, spiraling into the world rather than out of it. Here sacred inquiry is grounded in a passion for the natural world, resolving questions through lyric, erotic, and sensual responses from the Quaker author of Barn at the End of the World.

Louisiana State University Press 2006 62 PP. Paper

$16.95 (in stock)

The Love Of Impermanent Things - Paperback

BY MARY ROSE O'REILLEY
At midlife, Mary Rose O'Reilley reflects on her past and her hard-won sense of self. She tries to see the world through the eyes of the deer that stop outside her window and look in at her. As a wildlife rehabilitator, she feels a closer connection to this natural world as experienced by animals. As an apprentice potter, she sees in a Japanese tea bowl the ultimate balance of action and contemplation. As a Quaker, she can both sit still and sing. And as a writer, O'Reilley can speak clearly to readers at midlife who are expected to know it all, but don't.

Milkweed Editions 2008 320 PP. Paper

$16.00 (in stock)

Radical Presence

Teaching As Contemplative Practice

BY MARY ROSE O'REILLEY, FOREWORD BY PARKER PALMER
This book is about our lives as well as our work, suggesting that the "secrets" of good teaching are the same as the secrets of good living: seeing one's self without blinking, offering hospitality to the alien other, having compassion for suffering, speaking truth to power, being present and being real. These are secrets hidden in plain sight. But it takes the clear sight and courage of someone like Friend O'Reilly to call secrets of this sort to our attention.

Heinemann 1998 50 PP. Paper

$18.75 (in stock)