About this item
Discover the stories and meanings behind 20 types of beads, and learn how to instill your own beads with significance, protection, and promise as you string them. Strings of beads are universal to all peoples and beliefs. They're given many names - mala, rosary, misbahah, komboloi, prayer beads - but no matter the culture or context, they're a tangible symbol of connection. Beads can tell a story, celebrate someone or something we love, or help us work through a difficulty. They can be made from a huge variety of materials, but it's not so much what beads you string but why and how you string them that is important. In Mindful Beads, Alice Peck reveals the meanings behind 20 different types of beads, from traditional Tibetan malas to healing crystals, and Greek worry beads to Christian rosaries. For each one, she strings her own bracelet, mala, rosary, or necklace, giving it a significance personal to her, and then explains how you can do so for your own beads, suggesting ways to meditate with and become connected to them. Some beads are handmade and step-by-step artworks are provided to explain how to make them, while a resources section offers advice on sourcing store-bought beads.
About the Author
Alice Peck's Be More Tree: A Journey of Wisdom, Symbols, Healing, and Renewal published by Ryland, Peters, and Small (CICO) in 2016. As Alice reflected on the maple tree in her backyard, she began to notice and then study its intricacies and changes. This became her regular meditation and inspiration. In Be More Tree, Alice shares what she has learned from that maple tree, and from the trees all around us. Every tree tells a complete and ongoing story from its powerful taproots to the birds that alight on its fragile high branches. Trees reflect our lives through their perseverance and seasonal rhythms always changing yet consistent. They evolve along a much more protracted timetable than humans. Like us, trees feel and react to their environment, and communicate with us in subtle but distinct ways.
Alice is also the author and editor of two anthologies published by SkyLight Paths. The Detroit Free Press called Next to Godliness: Finding the Sacred in Housekeeping "a cultural landmark exploring our changing attitudes about home" and named it one of their top books of the year. Bread, Body, Spirit: Finding the Sacred in Food has been the subject of many articles and radio programs.
If you are a careful reader of acknowledgment pages and "special thanks" credits, you'll find that Alice Peck has more than twenty years of experience working with authors, and has guided dozens of novelists and nonfiction writers at every stage - concept, proposal, first draft, publisher's revisions, or final draft. Her writers have been published at houses ranging from Atria to Random House, MIT to Sounds True, as well as numerous independent and small presses.
Before shifting her focus to publishing, Alice worked as a creative executive in film and television, acquiring books and helping writers develop them into scripts. She also story-produced and wrote documentary and reality series for networks including AMC, MTV, and Bravo. As David Brown's director of development, Alice acquired and developed the Academy Award-nominated A Few Good Men by Aaron Sorkin for film and stage.
She now lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn with her husband, son, many mammals, of course, the maple tree.
