From the great myths and legends to enchanting fairy tales, parables, fables and folk tales, stories can have a great healing and educative power. They come from our subconscious and imagination, deep inside us. They have much to teach us about ourselves, therefore, and the world we create around us. Horst Kornberger, a writer, artist and Steiner-Waldorf teacher, first explores the power of particular stories such as Odysseus, Parsifal, Oedipus, Bible stories and fairy tales. He then explains how to apply that power to help a child develop, or to heal and transform a child with difficulties. Finally he discusses the art and practicalities of creating new stories to help children with particular needs, and shows storytelling to be a universal gift that we can use to benefit those around us. This is a fascinating and inspiring book for teachers, parents and carers of children, as well as creative writers and students of literature.

Bees make honey; we all know that. But what happens between the bee buzzing around our garden, and the sticky knife in the jar, is a mystery to most of us. How many bee-hours does it take to make just one jar of honey? What do the honeybees' waggling dances really mean? Why do bees swarm? What is a 'house bee'? From exploring their life cycle and development, to revealing their societies and behaviour, expert biodynamic beekeeper Michael Weiler answers these questions and many more. Combining poetic observations with scientific detail, The Secrets of Bees uncovers the incredible world of these remarkable insects.

In a world all too familiar with environmental disasters, Horst Kornberger argues that the bee crisis is a more significant problem than deforestation, pollution and global warming put together, as it points to the causes behind all these. Global Hive is a rallying cry for a new understanding of world ecology. More than a study of bees, this book offers both an entirely new way of thinking about the bee crisis and its causes, and a way to use the crisis to explore wider social and ecological issues. Kornberger challenges the dominant scientific worldview that reduces everything to minute detail and fails to see the larger holistic picture. He argues that we urgently need to start thinking about ecology in a different way -- by developing a new science which draws on empathy and imagination -- if we want to mend our relationship with the natural world. From this perspective, the worldwide threat of the bee crisis becomes a starting point for global change. Global Hive is a thought-provoking treatise on what colony collapse teaches us about our society, our choices and how we can build a more sustainable world.

The Writer's Passage is a journey through time in which writers engage with all the vital stages in the history of world literature. In this course of thirty-five lessons, millennia of human experience is turned by way of the alchemy of story into fuel for new creative writing. The journey begins in the childhood of language - in nursery rhyme, fable and fairy tale and then turns to the powerful myths of creation. Myths bestow a powerful charge - simply to hear them can be salutary. To engage with them through creative writing intensifies the experience exponentially, bringing them fully alive with opportunities for creative growth. After that, the course travels through historic time, following the trade routes of culture from ancient India to the twenty-first century. Through depth encounters with the work of Sappho and Socrates, Shakespeare and Ginsberg, students enter the lives of the poets and join in their projects. The shift of perspective demanded by the exercises in this book is in itself deeply liberating. The scope of the soul is enlarged merely by trying on the soul-skin of a different time, culture and personality - to serenely reformulate the eightfold path of the Buddha or passionately hurl oneself into the battle fury of the Viking; to tangle with the verbal eroticism of Sappho or the righteous passion of the prophets. To become the pure Parzival of the medieval epics and then the devil in Goethe's Faust is an unmatched gymnastic for the creative soul. In this approach, rarely does the student of creative writing have difficulty producing work. On the contrary, many find that any existing blocks dissolve. To engage with this journey is an act of integration, an artistic initiation into the vitality of literature and the manifold ways of being human. In this way the work also serves as a course in personal development, undertaken through the medium of writing.