The Tao and the Bard: A Conversation - Hardcover

This charming, bracing reminiscence of life on a remote Hebridean island captures a vanishing world filled with memorable stories and characters. It ranges from birth to death, with accounts of celebrations and tragedies, elemental struggles and essential relationships, and unique customs and traditions in a culture few of us have encountered. Mary J. MacLeod makes you care, moves you, amuses you, shocks you, teaches you: This is a surprising, satisfying memoir. --Floyd Skloot, author of In the Shadow of Memory and The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer s Life Julia MacLeod has written a book which encapsulates Hebridean life during some decades past . . . with a sensitivity that reflects her nursing career. --Lady Claire Macdonald of Macdonald, from her foreword Julia MacLeod shares unique and enchanting experiences as a nurse in rural Scotland. Her stories will ring true with every nurse--or anyone--who has ever cared for a family or a community, whether in Scotland or America. Call the Nurse is a delightful read. --LeAnn Thieman, author of Chicken Soup for the Nurse's Soul

The Tao Te Ching or Book of the Way of Virtue is a touchstone of Eastern philosophy and mysticism. It has been called the wisest book ever written, and its author, Lao Tzu, is known as the Great Archivist. Shakespeare, the Bard, was the West's greatest writer and even invented human nature, according to some. The Tao and the Bard is the delightful conversation between these two unlikely spokesmen, who take part in a free exchange of views in its pages. Here, in his own words, Lao Tzu offers the eightyone verses that comprise the Tao, and, responding to each verse, the Bard answers with quotations from his plays and poems. In sometimes surprising ways, Shakespeare's words speak to Lao Tzu's, as the two trade observations on good and evil, love and virtue, wise fools and foolish wisdom, and being and the "nothing from which all things are born." Here is a new take on an old dialogue between East and West, with the reader invited to take part-whether to parse the meanings closely or sit back and enjoy the entertainment.Lao Tzu: Is the world unkind?Nature burns up life like a straw dog.Shakespeare: Allow not nature more than nature needs,Man's life is as cheap as beasts . . . (King Lear)Lao Tzu: Tao is elusive.Looking you never see,Listening you never hear,grasping you never hold.Shakespeare: The eye sees not itselfBut by reflection, by someother things. (Julius Caesar)